How Does IIT Compare?

by Roberta Lembke, Director of IIT

Every year, IIT participates in an annual data-gathering survey (managed first by CLAC and now EDUCAUSE) concerning core IIT benchmarks of budgeting, staffing, and services.  The resulting data provides insight into how our resources stack up against our peers.  This data, combined with other quantitative and qualitative data, helps us assess our current situation as well as plan for the future.

Budgets

The 2004-05 data shows that St. Olaf ranks in the bottom quartile in terms of budgeting, be it the IT budget per student, IT budget per staff, or IT budget per institutionally-owned computer, when compared to 17 of the 20 institutions that St. Olaf designated as our peer group.  We were not, however, the lowest in this quartile.  On average, these 17 institutions had $1,501 budgeted per student enrolled.  St. Olaf has $935 per student.  The low among this group was $683 and the high was $2400.  In light of the total IT budget per faculty member, the average budget is $14,698 per faculty member employed; St. Olaf’s budget per faculty member amounts to $8,472.  The high in this category was an amazing $20,949. 

Staffing

IIT’s staffing ratio is also leaner than our peers.  Among the 17 direct peer campuses, St. Olaf has the highest number of faculty supported per IT staff member with a ratio of 16.8 faculty per total IIT staff member (these data do not count staff traditionally assigned to A/V positions).  The average among the group was a 9.1 faculty to IIT staff member ratio.  The low was 4.8 faculty to every one staff member!  One institution reported that they have 45 staff members who work in IT!  St. Olaf reported our 20 FTE.

Conclusion

So, what does this data mean?  It means that we have far fewer resources than our peers.  However, I don’t believe that these ratios can be used to judge the quality of the services provided nor can these data accurately reflect on how we have chosen to use the resources we have.  IIT has to make hard choices on how every dollar we get is spent to ensure that it does the greatest good for the entire community.  Sometimes it means that innovative projects are overshadowed by other, perhaps more mundane, needs such as a replacement for a broken computer; or that response time to a problem is slower than what someone might like.  Overall, however, St. Olaf continues to have a healthy and creative technology environment due to the strong staff of IIT and the resourcefulness of the faculty and staff.