Costing Scenarios

Honours loses money. Apparently no way it can’t since a) it is premised on individual supervision (aka expensive) just like postgraduate research, yet b) is funded at an undergraduate rate. So the juggling act becomes how to structure, deliver, make happen what is really important to honours without going too far into the red. No one really can tell you how much too much is, so it is a funny sort of dance since you don’t really know the steps.

However, the heart of honours is the laboratory and our methods subject. So to cost different models these are the sorts of things that will be run through the financial analyst’s spreadsheet; what happens if we:

• remove the communication subject?
• reduce the labs from 4 to 3 but retain the same enrolment numbers?
• increase our international enrolment by n?
• change the supervision model so that it is group supervision?
• what happens if supervision is ‘rolled’ into the lab?
• only having supervision for one semester?
• how much would it cost if no labs?

Also, if we called labs a studio or similar does that make a difference to how the university thinks about its costing?

Ideally several scenarios should be able to be sent ‘up’ for discussion and consideration, however I think the decision making systems in place might not cope with treating this as an informed conversation and would prefer a single model that they can say yay or nay to (after all they do know the steps to this dance so the working group choreographing several dances just, well), in which case we may have to pick and plump for our preferred option and leave it at that.