The cost of complying with regulations is often cited as one of the drivers of the high price of college tuition. However, little published work on calculating this cost at the institutional level exists. The authors conducted in-depth research on the cost of compliance with federal, state, local and NCAA regulations at a Division I, predominantly undergraduate institution.

Administrators from the six primary units on campus identified employee effort spent on compliance activities, as well as costs related to software, training, fees and external consultations to maintain or report on these activities. This article lays out the methodology used; identifies the parameters, limits and definitions employed; and provides historical context on previous work in this area. It identifies costs by category and by unit and briefly addresses the issue of regulation as a factor in higher tuition costs.

Loyola Marymount University (LMU), established in 1911 and located in Los Angeles, is a private, not- for-profit, 4-year and above university committed to providing students with a humanistic, liberal arts education in the Jesuit and Marymount tradition. The university comprises four colleges and three schools: the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, the College of Business Administration, the College of Communication and Fine Arts, the Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering, Loyola Law School, the School of Education, and the School of Film and Television. The university offers 57 major and 51 minor undergraduate degrees and programs. The Graduate Division offers 43 master’s degree programs, one education doctorate, one doctorate in juridical science, one juris doctorate and 13 credential programs. The athletics program competes in NCAA Division I. The university enrolls 6,162 undergraduates and 3,133 graduate students, and employs 550 full-time faculty members.

In 2014, the Board of Trustees and the Chief Financial Officer at LMU asked its Regulatory Compliance Committee (RCC) to discover the cost of regulatory compliance on a university- wide scale. As we began researching the question, we found little existing professional literature and no published models for universities to consider in attempting to ascertain these costs. This is true in spite of the fact that 77% of governing boards at institutions of higher education report discussing operational, legal and regulatory risks at their board meetings (AGB/UE, 2014, p. 6). Likewise, there was little common language available to define crucial terms. Over the course of 18 months, the authors worked extensively with the RCC and with leaders across campus to develop a model that would adequately capture these costs at LMU.

Although institutions of higher education frequently cite the cost of compliance as driving up the price of a college education, there is, in fact, little published work on the topic. Only three other universities have made such information publicly available: Stanford University, Vanderbilt University and Hartwick College. While our task force worked on developing a model that would help LMU identify regulatory compliance costs, the American Council on Education (ACE) published Recalibrating Regulation of Colleges and Universities: Report of the Task Force on Federal Regulation of Higher Education, an initiative of the U.S. Senate. This seminal work will inform regulatory compliance policy and debates in higher education for a long time to come, and it confirmed our sense that there is little information to go on. The report comments that “attempts to systematically quantify [regulatory compliance] costs have been few and far between” (ACE, 2015, p. 11).

Vanderbilt University hired the Boston Consulting Group to conduct a study that reported Vanderbilt spent $150 million to comply with federal regulations in 2012-2013 (Atkinson, 2015). That number, representing 11% of Vanderbilt’s total non-hospital expenditures, became a central figure in a public debate about the cost of college tuition and was cited in the ACE report, in the popular press, and in higher education forums. The Vanderbilt study also added fuel to political debates surrounding the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 2015 (Stratford, 2015). And, although Vanderbilt did not release its methods (Blumenstyk, 2015), the study’s findings have received much commentary regarding combining costs for research compliance with costs for student-oriented regulations and for not distinguishing costs applicable to all business from costs unique to higher education.

In any case, it is unlikely LMU would benefit from knowing Vanderbilt’s costs and methods. As a major research institution, Vanderbilt’s activities, and thus its compliance costs, are highly divergent from LMU’s in both kind and scale. Vanderbilt’s many funded researchers, for example, spend a large share of their time on compliance-related issues. The Federal Demonstration Partnership Faculty Burden Survey conducted in 2009 found “42% of the time spent by an average PI [principal investigator] on a federally funded research project was reported to be expended on administrative tasks related to that project rather than on research” (Rockwell). Much of that effort is related to compliance, and may well be unique to federally funded grants. Therefore, the more an institution relies on federal research dollars, the more likely they are exposed to those kinds of costs. Vanderbilt expended $572 million on research and was ranked 35th in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Higher Education Research and Development Survey in 2013, while LMU, a predominantly undergraduate institution, ranked 364th with $6.7 million in research expenditures.

Hartwick College, a private, liberal arts and sciences college in Oneonta, New York, produced a report in December 2012 that provided detailed information on an internal audit of the cost of compliance and accreditation (Zack-Decker, 2012). The document, and its extensive appendices, contains much practical information about the kind and range of regulatory compliance activities undertaken at institutions of higher education. The report also draws a useful distinction between requirements to comply and requirements to report. Considering the scope of the work conducted, we were surprised at the relatively low cost reported: $297,008 including salary, fringe benefits, direct costs and accreditation costs. This amount was approximately 0.04% of the college’s annual operating budget. Subsequent to the production of that report, Hartwick College’s president, Margaret Drugovich, said that the final number for Hartwick and other colleges is likely much higher, pointing out that “some of my colleagues estimate it to be 15 to 20, even 25% of their overall operating budget” (McNutt, 2014).

The only previously reported amount we could find was Stanford’s in 1997. Then Stanford president, Gerhard Casper, reported to the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education that Stanford spent $20 million on compliance annually and that “’7.5’ cents of every Stanford tuition dollar goes toward supporting these regulatory costs.” (Ingram, 1997). Like Vanderbilt’s figures, Stanford’s figures became part of the political debate around changes in the Higher Education Act.

Thus, at the time of this writing, the most credible, publicly available claims of the costs of regulatory compliance range from less than 1% of operating costs at a private liberal arts and sciences college to 7.5% and 11% at premiere research institutions. Unfortunately, the dearth of published reliable information on the methods used to arrive at these cost figures makes it difficult to generalize from them or to apply them to LMU. Thus, we lack a benchmark against which to set our management expectations. However, it is widely understood that pinning a dollar value on compliance costs is extremely challenging. Anne Gross, vice president for regulatory affairs at the National Association of College and University Business Officers has commented, “It’s very difficult to give a number Trying to quantify the cost of regulation is something we’ve talked about for years, but frankly we’ve never figured out how to do it” (Marcus, 2015).

The authors do not claim that we have done it either. However, we do feel that we have developed a means of helping our own university identify its compliance costs in order to better understand their sources and to begin to manage them even more effectively. In what follows, we present a detailed overview of the design and implementation of our self-study to enable others to perform (and refine) similar work at their college or university. The authors have also sought to identify resources already in place at LMU to facilitate this work. It is likely that the level of available resources will vary widely across institutions.

The RCC, charged with gathering this information, is chaired by the University Risk Manager and includes representatives from the six major divisions within the university including Business and Finance, Student Affairs, Administrative Services, Academic Affairs, Loyola Law School, and University Relations, plus a representative from Internal Audit. The RCC met monthly and, later, as the project developed, bi-monthly, to discuss the scope of the project, including which information might already be available and accessible, which information would require effort and knowledge to ascertain, and which simply would not be possible or desirable to discover.

The Committee reviewed and discussed a range of “mandatory” costs that may or may not be labeled costs of “regulatory compliance.” Early on, the committee determined that costs associated with internal policies or business practices would not be considered regulatory compliance costs. It was also determined that accreditation costs would be excluded. That was a significant constraint on the scope of the work because securing and maintaining accreditations often entails considerable costs.

The university is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Senior College and University Commission as well as 15 other program-specific accreditations ranging from the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. Maintaining these accreditations involves extensive effort in research, preparation and submission of the required reports, as well as the work to ensure our programs meet or exceed the standards in the first place. These costs were excluded from the scope of this report after much discussion, as they represent another cost category (perhaps more related to educational quality) worthy of study on its own.

Another area of mandatory costs involves effort devoted to human resource training such as harassment, sexual and interpersonal misconduct, etc. These expenses are partially captured in this study through inclusion of the cost of acquiring software to conduct the training. However, the survey used does not specifically capture the effort expended in completing the training. And though the number of personnel involved may be high, the number of hours involved is quite low —approximately 3 hours per year. The total personnel expense is unlikely to exceed two-thirds of an FTE. While this specific cost does not appear in the current study, we plan to include it in future questionnaires as we fine-tune the research.

As the committee and the authors discussed the range of activity that might be considered compliance related, we identified the following costs to be within the scope of the report:

Prior to crafting a method of gathering information, the committee recognized a need to design a lingua franca for the initiative. We created a short list of definitions for use by the committee and ultimately by the people asked to complete the questionnaire. The single most important term/definition, and the one referenced most frequently throughout the initiative, is:

Regulatory Compliance Effort: “Regulatory compliance effort” refers to the percentage of time devoted by LMU employees to read and understand applicable regulations, to design, implement, or modify compliance activities for those regulations, to monitor and oversee specific regulatory compliance efforts, to gather and confirm relevant data, and to generate and submit reports to appropriate agencies or organizations. Thus, “regulatory compliance effort” refers to both the work of keeping the university in compliance and the work of generating the reports that document compliance activities.

This definition helped all participants determine which activities should be included and which excluded from the final numbers. As a general statement, the term interpreted compliance- related effort broadly (as opposed, say, to “the cost of preparing reports” which was the standard employed by Hartwick), and that broader definition is more helpful to LMU as we look for ways to manage these costs (Carlson). In a similar vein, our study does not distinguish between regulatory compliance required of all business and regulatory compliance specific to higher education.

A range of methods to gather this information was considered. For example, the committee explored conducting an analysis of the financial statements to identify expenses related to compliance. That approach was deemed impractical due to limits in how expenses are identified and the range of position titles involved. At LMU, for example, only four job titles include the word “compliance,” and even then, always in a hybridized form such as “Director, Information Security and Compliance” or “Associate Athletics Director/Compliance.” Instead, responsibility for compliance effort is shared across existing job titles and categories. Higher education as an industry, however, seems to be moving toward greater specification of compliance titles and roles. According to the ACE Report (2015), “The American Action Forum found that the number of individuals in higher education with the title of ‘compliance officer’ has grown by 33% in the last decade” (p. 11). This is an important industry trend that warrants further investigation; however, counting titles clearly would not address our needs in determining costs at LMU.

Rather, it was decided that in order to secure the most informed and reliable information, we should turn to work previously done by the RCC to create a compliance database. During that phase of work, LMU compiled a list of 113 federal, state and local regulations that require specific information to be collected or actions to be taken. The list also linked each regulation with the parties responsible for compliance within LMU (known as “compliance owners”) as well as the due dates for reports. This information populated a dynamic, web accessible database that allows the University Risk Manager to readily access information, sort by due dates, and identify LMU employees who would have more information. Note that this approach is distinct from Hartwick’s approach, which included cost figures only for reporting activities and a list of regulations for which no reporting is required.

The mechanics of questionnaire development and administration will vary extensively from campus to campus. The university subscribes to Qualtrics to help students, faculty, staff and senior administrators gather a range of information for research, internal control reviews and process improvement purposes. Fortunately, LMU enjoys robust Survey and Evaluation Support through the Office of Assessment whose mission includes providing ”leadership and support in the University’s efforts to create a culture of evidence, learning centeredness, and continuous improvement [including] designing and implementing institution-level assessment projects. . . [emphasis added].” The associate director of Survey Research at LMU generously helped us formulate appropriate questions for the types of data we desired to receive, identify question formats and prompts that facilitated users’ understanding of the questionnaire, and create plans for organizing the data we would ultimately gather.

One section of the questionnaire allowed for a qualitative answer. We asked each respondent the following:

In December 2014, we piloted the questionnaire with a select group of employees with compliance responsibilities. Their input led us to improve the phrasing of certain questions,clarify the units to be reported (for example, hours or percent effort), and improve the functionality and navigability of the survey.

Upon creation of a final questionnaire and prior to distribution, the University Risk Manager presented the project to an LMU council consisting of all vice presidents, vice provosts, and associate vice presidents that have responsibility for compliance oversight. The University Risk Manager fielded their questions and concerns, and also made clear that council members should forward the questionnaire to their staffs’ subject area experts, including the compliance owners, for completion. This step was critical to underscoring for employees the importance the institution placed on their answers. It also likely contributed to the 100% response rate. All answers had been gathered by June 2015, at which time they were compiled into unit level reports and sent back to the members of the council for review, modification, further information or confirmation. In almost all cases, the data was verified as accurate. A few council members requested revisions or correction.

Once the data was confirmed, the Director of Financial Planning and the Vice President of Human Resources identified the listed employee positions in the Human Resources Management System (HRMS) and used their effort levels to calculate corresponding salary and fringe benefits amounts. The RCC was not privy to any salary and fringe benefits information; this data was kept confidential per LMU policy. However, the total salary and fringe benefits calculations by unit were provided to the authors and were combined with the other survey responses to determine our best estimate of the overall cost of compliance for fiscal year (FY) 2014.

Our study found that LMU expended $8.8 million on compliance or 3.5% of net tuition and fee total dollars.  A total of 292 employees spent some portion of their time on compliance issues in FY 2014. This figure represents 23% of our overall staff count of 1,246 and does not take into account effort that some have as faculty outside of their formal administrative functions. The time on compliance for these 292 employees translates to 58 financial FTEs. Salaries and fringe benefit costs comprise 75% of the total calculated cost of compliance. In December, 2015 a written report was presented to the LMU Board of Trustees including total figures as well as unit-level explanations of cost categories.

We also found that these costs were borne unevenly by the various divisions. Business and Finance carried 40% of the burden for regulatory compliance costs (a figure that includes the software costs of the major administrative systems), followed by Student Affairs with 25%; Administration, 20%; and Academic Affairs, 12%. We projected the cost of compliance to FY 2015 by applying budgeted salary increases with no estimated increases for other elements.

In addition to the impact of annual salary increases and increased benefit rates, we expect to see other cost increases related to future changes in regulatory statutes. Additional regulations usually call for additional resources to be invested to address both compliance and the effort to monitor and report on compliance. Most of our survey participants “expect the unexpected” in terms of increased costs due to unanticipated regulatory change. A change in focus by regulators can increase the cost of compliance even if there is no change to reporting costs. These expenses cannot be projected accurately. However, there are some known increases that will impact years subsequent to FY 2014 as a result of the Affordable Care Act and changes in California’s state compensation laws.

The cost of compliance with regulations is often cited as one of the drivers of the high price of tuition. Rolf Wegenke, president and chief executive officer of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and a former board member of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, says that “the fastest-growing contributor to increased administrative staff and overall operating expenses for colleges is federal, state, accrediting and other associated regulatory compliance obligations. . . .” For evidence to support this claim, he refers to the 2012 Hartwick College study (McNutt, 2014). However, if the cost of compliance at Hartwick is actually less than 1% of university expenditures, it seems unlikely to be the fastest growing contributor to staff and operating expenses.

Nevertheless, the authors do not dismiss the significance of the cost of compliance altogether; even 3.5% can have a profound impact at an independent, private college that relies primarily on tuition income. At LMU, we are keenly aware that nearly $9 million in regulatory compliance expense represents a lot of missed opportunities: opportunities to provide student scholarships, to keep tuition increases low, to enhance educational and research programs, and to otherwise fulfill the primary mission of the university. Nor does LMU, or any predominantly undergraduate university, have the power to attract hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grant money, and the facilities and administrative cost reimbursements they bring, to pay for a larger compliance staff and develop economies of scale. In any case, the ACE Report (2015) correctly points out that regulatory requirements should not be perceived as providing a “free good,” and that “the Department [of Education] should accurately analyze compliance costs and seek to minimize them” (9).

While acknowledging that it is possible that regulatory costs are not as high as administrators believe, Diane Auer Jones suggests that whatever these costs, revealing regulatory burdens on institutions of higher education can be a teachable moment. She proposes that colleges and universities “add a line to their tuition bills called the Federal Regulatory Compliance Fee, so that parents and students (and, yes, politicians) know just how much regulations cost them” (2010). Indeed, in the absence of good information on the cost of compliance from the institutions involved, neither the Department of Education nor any other government agency will be in a position to make informed decisions about the effects of their regulatory policies. While the mantra that “less regulation is better” certainly appeals to many, that notion must be tempered with the recognition that many regulations provide for the health, safety and welfare of students, faculty and staff. Such regulations foster a more equitable and just society. They also help provide an even playing field for all in higher education. In short, many of these regulations serve as partners in higher education to help us fulfill our missions.

We believe the method presented here provides our institution a reliable baseline measurement for future efforts to capture regulatory compliance costs. In particular, benchmarking the effort expended is the first step toward implementing greater efficiencies to drive down the labor costs associated with compliance. Further, analyzing this effort will help LMU refine its understanding and management of regulatory costs, improve business processes and, where feasible, automate regulatory reporting by leveraging existing systems and tools. More efficient systems may both drive down costs and yield higher levels of compliance. This self-study also positions us to incorporate annual monitoring into our business practices and to measure our progress by revisiting the regulatory compliance cost questionnaire every few years.

Further, we feel that conducting this exercise to identify the costs of compliance has in itself contributed profoundly to strengthening the culture of compliance we have been creating at LMU. Because of the broad involvement of so many across campus, the study communicates to unit leaders the importance of balancing high standards of regulatory compliance with judicious, informed cost management. We have embodied the vision perhaps best articulated by Peter F. Lake (2013) “to create a culture in which compliance is seen as everyone’s job [and] the specific tasks of compliance [are] delegated to a variety
of administrators and offices.”

The authors would like to express our gratitude to the following people without whom this work would not have been possible. Former LMU President David Burcham and the Board of Trustees Finance  Subcommittee challenged us to tackle this problem. President Timothy Law Snyder, Provost Joseph Hellige, Chief Financial Officer Thomas O. Fleming, Jr. and Dr. Abbie Robinson-Armstrong encouraged us to pursue the research wherever it led. Doug Moore, the University Risk Manager, provided leadership by chairing the RCC as well as helpful guidance on the conduct of the survey and insightful editorial comments on the final report. Maureen Cassidy, Director of Internal Audit, asked questions, anticipated issues and lent us her considerable editing skills. The Educational Advisory Board provided the RCC with preliminary external research on the costs of higher education. The members of the RCC contributed valuable input and feedback on survey design and questions. Christine Chavez, Associate Director of Survey Research at LMU, assisted us in creating and troubleshooting the questionnaire. Finally, special thanks to Dawn Burdsall whose advice and encouragement were essential to this publication.