Firstly, we advise our clients to begin by understanding their constituents or their students.
What are their needs? What do they hope to gain by enrolling in your institution's programs? What are the outcomes that they desire? Where the gap exists is in the value proposition that they believe they offer to their students and versus those that the students perceive that they're getting from the higher education institution.
We do a very detailed exercise for our higher education clients conducting in-depth consumer research to understand what are the attributes that are important for their students when they think about enrolling in the program versus where is the institution's brand or value proposition positioned amongst those attributes. For example, if your students are looking for an effective, high quality, quick, low cost education, those are some of the most important attributes for them. If you do not check the box on those, but are perceived as a high technology, multi program institution, it's probably not the right positioning for you. And once you are aware of your students' needs and your brand positioning for amongst the students, the next step is to ensure that your program offering or your program portfolio is fully optimized.
The way you can do that is first ensuring that the programs within your portfolio have the right number of students enrolled in them, have an effective cost of delivery in line with the revenue or tuition fee that institution gets for those particular programs, measure any other benefit that those programs bring to the institution. For example, it's alright to have lost leaders as long as they induce students to enroll in additional programs and drive growth for the institution. And once you have gone through this exercise, ensuring that any programs that are in the tail end and not really adding value to your institution are stopped or removed from the portfolio.
And once you have done that, the last step of program optimization is ensuring that if there are any new programs out there in that if there are any new programs out there in either new disciplines or within the disciplines that you already offer, that the industry needs, which is your students and employers, then you can introduce them in your portfolio. And in order to identify such programs, we undertake in an in-depth analysis of, the labor market needs, employer needs, and also what has has been demonstrated in the market to identify additional programs that should be introduced in your portfolio.
And there are a plethora of options available to institutions to diversify their revenue pool. I would like to talk about a few of them. For example, today, micro credentials and certificates have really started gaining popularity.
They are not yet a, you know, full threat to high education institutions, but they could present an opportunity to high education institutions.
Another potential revenue stream is international students. If you look at your counterparts in other markets like UK and Australia, you'll observe that they have a much higher proportion of international students in their institutions. And so this could be another avenue for driving revenue growth and enrollment growth at your institution while increasing your diversity, which helps with rankings. Another revenue source could be executive education and lifelong learning.
For example, I would like to draw your attention to the case study of Harvard Business School that gets only one out of five parts of its revenue from tuition fees, and the remaining four come from other sources such as executive education, publishing some of the case studies that they produce, and selling them to other institutions. And so there could be several other avenues of generating revenue for institutions such as yours. There are several other areas that you could focus on, but I think those three are the most important where we would suggest that you start as you look at diversifying your revenue base.
