Challenge    I am employed in a private higher education institution and like many private universities there  is increasing competition amongst local universities for student admissions. Even prior to COVID- 19, many universities in this region have seen flat or even decreasing student admissions over  the past few years. This has led to average class sizes decreasing with many classes in several  disciplines having only a few students in them. While the natural inclination would be to reduce  tuition prices to attract more students, there has been a reluctance to do this since the general  view is that total revenue would decrease as a result. Consequently, average student tuition has  remained a key financial metric for the organization. The challenge therefore, has been how to  fill available seats in classes and at the same time increase overall revenue.    Selection    For this challenge, I chose the visualization tool to explore the various possibilities to generate  solutions to the challenge facing our organization. Visualization enabled me to communicate  possible solutions to our problems by imagining analogous situations in other industries that  might be useful in solving our problem.    Application    The challenge involved getting management to look at our challenge to fill seats and generate  marginal revenue and most importantly, to move away from focusing on the average student  tuition fee metric. To do this, I asked them to visualize the airline industry as being analogous to  the problems we face in higher education. In this sense, we can think of classroom seats as being  analogous to the seats on a plane. Similar also is the perishability of the products. In the airline  industry seats cannot be sold once the airline takes off, similarly in the university, classroom seats  will remain empty once the semester has started.    Insight    By applying the analogy of the airline industry to our problem it became apparent that we need  to reconsider our approach to revenue management and work out ways we can adopt yield  management processes that airlines use in order to fill seats and maximize revenue. Rather than  fixed tuition fees with arbitrary scholarships, we need to work out ways to obtain differential  tuition fees and ensue every seat is filled. One problem is that unlike passengers on a plane who  would not discover the price paid by the passenger sitting next to them, in a classroom that might  happen. This could lead to problems if all students ask for the same reduced tuition fee. One way  to avoid that would be for the tuition fee reductions to be offered by an entity external to the  university.    Approach

I think that next time I would apply the same tool to apply across other challenges that we face  as a higher education institution. Communicating ideas to other in the organization, especially  other higher up in the organization can be frustratingly difficult. Using visualizations to assist  others in being able to see the problem from your angle can be benefitted by that.

