---
title: When Everything Is a Priority, What Should Higher Education Fund?
description: How can higher education institutions prioritize limited resources? Explore how strategic budgeting connects institutional priorities, evidence and funding decisions.
---

[Blog | Higher Education | Institutional Effectiveness | SPOL](https://blog.spol.com)

# [When Everything Is a Priority, What Should Higher Education Fund?](https://blog.spol.com/when-everything-is-a-priority-what-should-higher-education-fund)

 Written by [Tanisha J Sacks](https://blog.spol.com/author/tanisha-j-sacks) | Oct 12, 2026, 9:23:05 AM

There is no shortage of worthwhile things for a college or university to invest in.

Student success initiatives, new academic programs, technology, faculty development, infrastructure and changing compliance requirements can all make legitimate claims on institutional resources. Some respond directly to priorities established in the strategic plan. Others address needs that are less visible in strategy but no less important to the institution's ability to operate effectively.

The difficulty, particularly in a constrained financial environment, is that recognizing the value of an investment is not the same as being able to fund it.

This places budgeting in an interesting position. It is a financial process, certainly, but it is also one of the places where an institution's priorities encounter practical limits. Decisions about resources determine which ambitions receive the capacity to move forward, which wait, and which may need to be reconsidered altogether.

In higher education, strategic budgeting involves connecting resource decisions to institutional priorities, the evidence informing those decisions and the outcomes institutions hope to achieve. That connection provides an important starting point, although the harder work often begins when several competing requests can all demonstrate their contribution to the same priorities.

## **Strategic alignment only tells us part of the story**

There are good reasons to expect budget requests to demonstrate their relationship to institutional strategy. Without that context, requests can easily be considered individually, with limited visibility into how they contribute to the institution's wider direction.

The connection is rarely as straightforward as it first appears, however.

Consider an institution with student success as a major strategic priority. Additional academic advising could support that goal. So could investment in instructional technology, tutoring, faculty development or student wellbeing. The fact that each request aligns with strategy is useful information, but leaders are still left comparing different interventions, different levels of investment and different expectations about what those investments might achieve.

Alongside them will be requests that do not fit quite so neatly into strategic language. Buildings still need maintaining. Systems reach the end of their useful life. Regulatory obligations change. There will be circumstances in which the strongest case for expenditure is simply that the institution cannot responsibly avoid it.

Strategic alignment therefore provides context for resource decisions rather than a formula for making them.

Current research suggests that some institutions are having to make these choices with significant gaps in the information available to them. [Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research's 2026 survey of 213 college and university chief business officers](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/07/16/survey-whats-keeping-cbos-night) found that only 13% said their institution understands per-student costs by program or activity very well. In the same survey, 70% of CBOs believed their institution had too many academic programs for current enrollment.

There is something revealing in the combination of those findings. Many institutions appear to recognize a need to reconsider existing commitments while relatively few business officers report a very strong understanding of costs at the program or activity level. That does not tell us what any individual institution should fund or discontinue, but it does illustrate how difficult prioritization becomes when the choices are consequential and the picture informing them is incomplete.

## **Evidence can make judgment better informed**

Resource requests inevitably carry assumptions about what will happen if an institution chooses to fund them.

A department may be responding to changing enrollment, an assessment finding, a capacity problem or an objective established through strategic planning. In each case, the request rests on some understanding of the need and an expectation that additional resources will improve the institution's ability to respond. The strength of that case will depend partly on what decision-makers can see.

Enrollment patterns, assessment results, utilization data, previous planning activity and financial information can all add useful context. None is likely to point towards an obvious answer, and there may be convincing evidence behind several competing requests.

That ambiguity is worth acknowledging. Higher education budgeting still requires judgment, particularly where outcomes are difficult to isolate or take years to develop. An investment intended to improve retention, for example, exists alongside numerous academic, financial and personal factors influencing whether students persist. Demanding a simple causal relationship between expenditure and outcome would tell institutions less, rather than more, about the value of the investment.

Evidence is useful because it allows a more informed conversation about need, expected outcomes and competing claims on resources.

Those conversations are taking place while many leaders already feel the limits of institutional capacity. In [Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research's 2026 survey of chief academic officers](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/09/23/provosts-survey-2026-responsiveness-amid-constraint), only 47% of provosts said they had adequate resources to implement initiatives.

It is easy to interpret a finding like that simply as evidence of financial constraint. It also says something about prioritization. Institutions can identify more valuable work than they have the capacity to undertake. Budgeting is where some of those ambitions have to be considered against one another.

## **The information needed for budgeting often exists somewhere else**

One of the complications is that much of the evidence surrounding a resource decision is generated outside the budgeting process itself.

Strategic planning establishes priorities and the objectives intended to advance them. Assessment produces evidence about outcomes and can identify areas where improvement is needed. Accreditation activity can surface commitments requiring institutional attention. Departments have their own operational information, while institutional research and finance teams hold different parts of the picture again.

A budget request may be the point at which several of those threads meet.

An assessment finding could result in an improvement plan that requires additional resources. A departmental objective might depend on technology or additional capacity. Progress against an institutional priority may reveal that the original approach is not producing the expected result and that resources would be better used differently.

These relationships exist regardless of whether the institution's systems make them easy to see.

Colleges and universities are not generally short of information. Adding another dataset or requiring another field on a budget form will not necessarily improve a decision if the relevant evidence remains distributed across processes that rarely interact.

[NACUBO's work around planning, budgeting and analytics](https://www.nacubo.org/Events/2026/2026-Planning-Budgeting-and-Analytics-Forum) reflects the importance of bringing financial and institutional information together to support decisions about priorities, effectiveness and sustainability. Its 2026 Planning, Budgeting and Analytics Forum, explores how institutions can connect planning, finance and data to strengthen resource allocation and decision-making.

Bringing these sources together gives decision-makers access to relevant information within the context of institutional priorities.

Budget requests can then be considered within a wider history of institutional activity, evidence and decisions, providing context that might otherwise be difficult to reconstruct during the allocation process.

## **A resource decision has a life beyond approval**

There is also a tendency for attention to concentrate on the decision itself: the request is considered, resources are allocated and the budget cycle moves on.

Yet the reasoning behind an allocation may become more useful with time.

If an institution invested because enrollment was changing, did that pattern continue? If assessment identified a weakness that required additional resources, what happened afterwards? If an initiative was funded because it was expected to contribute to an institutional priority, what has the institution learned since?

Some answers will remain uncertain. That is unavoidable. Not every investment produces an outcome that can be neatly measured, and institutions should be wary of inventing precision simply because a decision involved money.

Even so, preserving the relationship between the original decision and subsequent evidence creates the possibility of learning from it. What an institution discovers through implementation can inform future planning and, eventually, future allocation.

In practice, the boundaries between planning, assessment and budgeting are much less distinct than their administrative processes sometimes suggest. One generates priorities, another contributes evidence about progress and outcomes, and another determines where resources can support the work. Information should be able to move in more than one direction between them.

## **Seeing budgeting as part of a connected institutional process**

Maintaining these connections across planning, assessment and budgeting requires institutions to consider how information moves between processes, and whether the systems supporting them preserve that context.

[SPOL Budgeting](https://blog.spol.com/connecting-budgets-to-strategy-making-resource-decisions-with-greater-purpose) gives institutions a structured environment for resource requests, justification, review and approval, with those decisions connected to institutional priorities. Its role becomes more interesting when those connections extend beyond the budgeting process itself.

Across the [SPOL platform](https://blog.spol.com/five-modules-one-connected-platform-understanding-the-spol-portfolio), **Planning** provides visibility into institutional priorities and the objectives being pursued across departments. **Assessment** contributes evidence about outcomes and improvement. **Accreditation** brings institutional evidence, requirements and accountability into the wider picture, while **Credentialing** provides visibility into learning and achievement that can inform institutional priorities and related resource needs. **Budgeting** sits among those processes, providing a way to connect resource requests and decisions with the work taking place across the institution.

There will still be difficult choices. A connected system cannot tell an institution whether supporting one program matters more than investing in another, or whether a long-term strategic initiative should take precedence over a more immediate operational need. Those decisions involve institutional circumstances and values that software cannot resolve.

What greater connection can provide is a better view of the decision being made: where a request came from, which priorities it supports, what evidence surrounds it and, over time, what happened after resources were committed.

For colleges and universities working within tighter constraints, that context matters. Strategic budgeting requires institutions to make resource decisions with a clearer understanding of how they relate to the institution's wider work.

The budget records where resources have been committed. The more valuable institutional question is whether the reasoning, evidence and learning surrounding those decisions remain visible when the next difficult choice has to be made.

## **See How SPOL Can Help**

Whether your institution is focused on Planning, Budgeting, Assessment, Credentialing, Accreditation, or a combination of several areas, SPOL can help bring greater structure and visibility to the work already underway.

[**Get Started**](https://spol.com/contact-us/)

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