Higher Education Consulting

Spend Management &
Cost Containment

Affordability and accessibility goals require universities to become better stewards of financial resources. AArete’s clients continue to fulfill their mission through improved spend management and cost containment in the face of headwinds. We bring proven approaches and market intelligence to create personalized, campus-wide spend management strategies detailed at the supply, commodity, and departmental levels. With a focus on cultural change management and elimination of procurement process barriers to adoptions, we ensure that cost savings are achieved, realized, and sustained.

Administrative Transformation

Academic operational functions such as Finance, Procurement, and Facilities Management are feeling pressured to meet increasing demands with decreasing budgets and headcount. Our approach to each engagement is built upon university best practices, technology optimization, analytics, and change management to create a clear understanding of expected business outcomes and measurement of achieved success. We provide real-time, data-backed recommendations, leveraging proprietary AI technology, to enable operational efficiency upon transforming tasks, responsibilities, and skill sets. 

Student, Alumni, & Donor Engagement

Disrupting established business models and inviting new ways to value and nurture student and alumni engagement has become a new standard for lifelong learning. For example, accessible advanced or non-degree education has, in some cases, quadrupled potential student enrollment. This positive change requires universities to transform relationship management across the campus.

AArete is supporting clients to reimagine individual journey maps as applicants evolve to be students, alumni, donors, and new learner candidates. Assigning value, personalized engagement techniques, messaging, and campus coordination are foundational to implementing a CRM-enabled, coordinated relationship management process.

Digital & Technology
Services

University leaders cite information security, digital transformation, technology modernization, and IT cost management among their top priorities as they adapt to delivering a uniformly high-quality education experience across multiple channels. AArete’s Digital and Technology Services brings strategic planning and implementation expertise in digital design and engagement, enterprise data management, digital process redesign, cybersecurity, and technical application proficiency to address each client’s mission-critical business challenges.

ESG, Sustainability &
Supplier Diversity 

Universities have embraced their role developing tomorrow’s socially conscious leaders by setting an example with aggressive diversity and sustainability objectives.  But to those responsible for meeting these goals, many are struggling to understand what their institution defines as diverse and sustainable, how they will meet their commitments, and how to operationally balance diversity and sustainability with affordability goals. AArete is helping clients bring clarity to the impact of these targets and build a practical approach to supplier diversity, sustainable supplier sourcing, emissions reduction, and sustainable practices. Our sustainability experts leverage our AI-powered technology platform to define annual targets, provide targeted initiative recommendations, and automate reporting against targets.