Academic Administration: Planning, Budgeting, and Decision Making with Multiple Objectives.

A systematic approach to the management of higher education institutions is described. The methodology combines administration by objectives (ABO), a management technique that helps academic administrators structure decisions in a systematic manner, with goal programming (GP), a decision-science tool that is ideally suited to the analysis of decisions involving multiple conflicting goals. After an overview of planning and budgeting in higher education, many modeling approaches aimed at effective resource allocation in higher education are reviewed. Five specific examples are presented of the application of goal programming to actual problems in university decision making. An extensive application of goal programming to the analysis of resource allocations in a large midwestern state university is also examined. In addition to a discussion of decision-support systems, some of the challenges academic administrators will face during the next decade are outlined. The techniques would be of value to academic administrators at all levels, institutional research officers, planning commissions and governing boards, and legislative fiscal analysts. The text is appropriate for use in a college course on educational administration or public finance. (SW)