Bellarmine University
Strategic Pricing/Forecasting
Bellarmine University is an independent Catholic university located in a beautiful residential neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky. After several years of planned growth among full-time, first-time undergraduate students, the University experienced a steep, unexpected enrollment decline in the fall of 2002. Tuition driven, proud of its long-standing growth strategies and accomplishments, and challenged by low-cost, public competitors in its state and region, Bellarmine sought immediate assistance to examine its pricing and discount strategies in the context of critical institutional goals for class size, academic, cultural and socioeconomic profiles, residential capacity, net tuition and other revenues, and tuition discount rates.
Bellarmine selected Maguire Associates as a partner to help set an effective pricing strategy that, in part, would address the drop in enrollment. We used logistic regression analysis to uncover the market dynamics associated with past pricing strategies, and we applied predictive modeling to forecast the likely effect of a series of possible tuition and fee increases for the upcoming year on such variables as class size, quality, geographic reach, diversity, institutional grant budgets, and net total revenue. This enabled the President's staff and the Board of Trustees to make trade-offs among the various scenarios and to select a tuition increase consonant with its goals for the next incoming class.
In the fall of 2003, the University welcomed one of the largest first-time, full-time undergraduate classes in its history, representing a 27% increase over the previous year. It also raised the average ACT score by a point, and significantly increased net total revenue.
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