How higher ed leaders are diagnosing—and fixing—administrative gaps

In today’s financially strained and operationally complex higher education environment, senior leaders are increasingly pressed to deliver more with less. Yet many institutions lack the tools and benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of their administrative functions—making it difficult to prioritize improvement efforts or demonstrate progress.

To help chief business officers and other executive leaders pinpoint strengths and gaps in their current administrative structures, EAB recently debuted its Administrative Effectiveness Index (AEI) service to Strategic Advisory Services partners. The results from the index have helped administrative leadership teams create a shared understanding of performance and chart clear next steps with EAB.

Since its debut, 12 institutions have completed the AEI assessment as part of our pilot cohort. This blog shares early insights on what colleges and universities are learning about their administrative gaps and how they’re translating AEI results into action.

Finding 1: Operations and data—everyone’s weak spot

EAB’s Administrative Effectiveness Index asks campus stakeholders to assess 19 critical business activities and determine whether their institution meets best-practice criteria for each. For instance: Does your institution empower managers to enable flexible work based on unit- and function-specific rules? If enough survey respondents across campus report ‘yes’, this raises the maturity score of the Enable Flexible Work Arrangements capability.

Explore all 19 business capabilities we assess, organized across four categories:

Among early AEI participants, the Operations and Data category ranked last in maturity. In fact, all four activities in this category landed in the bottom five maturity scores—and three of the four activities had no institutions reporting high maturity. This signals a common challenge with streamlining operations and managing data across campus.

Five lowest-maturity activities

n = 12 institutions

In debrief conversations, leaders attributed these low maturity scores to a variety of forces, including:

• Decentralized administrative structures that hinder standardization
• Staff feeling spread thin and lacking capacity to take on process improvement efforts; notably, one institution’s CFO called out that administrative staff resisted any work they felt was not “student-centric”
• Continued challenges in creating and enforcing enterprise-wide data management and governance standards

Finding 2: Finance and flexible work stand out as wins

Across our pilot AEI cohort, two activities had maturity scores distinctly and consistently higher compared with other categories: Prioritize and Manage Capital Renewal Projects and Enable Flexible Work Arrangements. For both, seven of the 12 institutions scored their maturity above 4.0, and only one institution ranked below a 3.0.

When considering the four broader categories, Financial Management was the most mature. Across the three Financial Management activities, no more than three institutions scored low maturity for any given activity.

However, the individual activities with the highest maturity span several categories, showing less consistency. The five most mature functions fall across Facilities, Talent, and Financial Management.

Five highest-maturity activities

n = 12 institutions

The Talent Management category reflects mixed results; high-scoring activities, such as Enable Flexible Work Arrangements, are counterbalanced with lower-scoring activities, such as Develop an Employee Value Proposition and Better Manage HR Capacity. These results confirmed what many leadership teams had suspected and even prompted productive follow-up actions. For instance, one institution decided to explore its payroll software vendor’s Total Rewards feature so they could more easily translate non-monetary benefits into financial impact.

Finding 3: No consensus among leaders on what matters most to strategy

The AEI doesn’t just measure how mature your practices are—it also asks campus stakeholders to evaluate how critical those practices are to institutional strategy with the survey prompt: “To what extent is your institution’s current approach to X a barrier to executing your institution’s strategy in the next 12 to 18 months?” The goal of this question is that survey takers channel their understanding of institutional priorities—not just their own roles.

After the AEI survey is completed, an institution will receive an executive summary that elevates the three most critical administrative activities, as determined by our Criticality Prioritization Index (CPI). This score combines the maturity score with a more heavily weighted importance score. The example below shows three prioritized activities from one participating institution:

Top three activities at sample institution

What’s immediately noticeable is that the maturity levels of the three priority activities are low—but so are the importance scores. This tension has played out in the results for many of the 12 AEI pilot participants. While the average maturity score across institutions comes in at 3.3 (out of 5), the average importance score is 1.8.

EAB found high variance in the importance scores—both across and within institutions. For instance, at one public institution, participants could not agree on the importance of various activities. Half the activities evaluated received responses across the full importance range, with some respondents ranking those activities as very important, and others ranking them as not important at all. This highlights a key challenge: stakeholders often lack shared understanding of what truly matters for advancing institutional strategy, which can muddy decision-making and stall momentum.

Finding 4: The disconnect between perception and reality

Every AEI report debrief has a moment when a senior leader asks: “But we’re already doing this—why doesn’t the maturity score reflect that?” Every institution found at least one instance of unacknowledged effort, whether it was the president’s office implementing shared KPIs across administrative functions or the CIO’s work to improve data governance practices and policies.

Notably, EAB crafted the Administrative Effectiveness Index to evaluate both maturity and perception. In some cases, a low score reveals a performance issue. In other cases, it’s a perception issue. This is most acute when an institution’s results suggest that advanced-level practices are already taking place, but foundational ones are not. When this occurs, EAB works with senior leaders to determine which of three approaches to take when rolling the results out to a broader group:

• Redirect the conversation. Reiterate what work has already been done and what’s in progress to avoid unproductive conversations.
• Address the perception gap: Explore why efforts aren’t widely recognized and how communication might improve.
• Discuss opportunities for improvement: If lower-maturity tasks are still incomplete, invite leaders to weigh in on appropriate next steps.

Finding 5: The universal answer—fix broken processes

Ultimately, AEI is not just about assessment—it’s about enabling strategic action. When institutions receive their AEI report, EAB recommends at least two debrief conversations: a first with the executive sponsor and a second with their leadership team. The second meeting typically drives the most progress, particularly for EAB’s ability to develop a customized service pathway aimed at improving the most critical business capabilities.

Given the trends in low-maturity activities noted above, EAB often directs partners to similar next steps. For instance, a number of participating institutions have enrolled in the Enterprise Data Management Collaborative to mature data governance efforts. But the most common outcome is a renewed commitment to streamlined, centralized administrative services. This is motivated by a desire to reduce every staff member’s administrative burden and be as nimble as possible in the face of financial constraints.

And as much research as EAB has done on shared services and administrative transformation, partners must first create the capacity for change through process improvement. Use EAB’s resources to make the case for process improvement efforts (and the need for a dedicated process improvement team to drive progress).