UniversitySIM

If we borrow the opening paragraph of the chapter "How to Run a University" from the Systems Thinking Guide, we learn that, best to try it first by managing a bag of fleas. Once you've mastered that, you can become dean or chancellor. That's the general advice of one of my friends, a successful retired dean. Sir Humprey Appleby from the British TV series "Yes, Minister" would probably disagree, but the faculty exists mainly for its students. It should also feed teachers, be financially stable, and prepare students in a way that future employers will fight to get them. 

Let's start with the hard stuff, the feedback loops. For every publicly funded faculty, there is a cap on the number of students. For private faculty, the limit is determined by the internal capabilities of the school. Teaching facilities, number of teachers, etc. The second limit is the size of the eligible population. It depends on the evolution of the population curve. Although it may seem if we are good there will always be enough students, this may not be true every year. Population trends show increases and decreases, and some years are even wiped out completely as a result of political decisions - by introducing longer compulsory schooling, establishing and abolishing multi-year grammar schools, etc. The birth rate is also influenced by a number of economic factors. It was once said that sex was the poor man's pastime. This may still be true today, but the availability of effective contraception and the gradual eradication of the concept of the family are not helping the influx of new births. If we have built capacity, some years it may not be sufficiently utilized because of the small number of potential students in the population.

The difficulty of the admissions process will further reduce the number of first year students, but on the other hand it will ensure a higher quality of students and the drop-out rate due to failure is likely to be lower. It can also be assumed that students will value their studies more after a challenging entry to the faculty... Thus, a causal loop diagram gradually emerges that describes the dynamics of an educational institution's interaction with the outside world as well as its internal behavior as we see in Figure 1.

UniversitySIM version 4.0 is a comprehensive tool for strategic planning and simulation of scenarios for the development of any educational institution. Its variability is so high that it allows not only changing parameter names but also creating internal data structures. You can completely customize it to your needs and thus create your own tool for creating and evaluating strategic scenarios by your own efforts, without the help of external consultants. UniversitySIM comes with a detailed user manual, and allow you to perform, for example, the following operations:

The annotated screens below indicate how to work with UniversitySIM 4.0. After easy installation, the supplied test data can be used to familiarize yourself with the content and operation. If you are one of the few who read the user manuals, you will quickly and efficiently learn what possibilities the software offers and avoid trial and unnecessary error.

The selected user interface screens cover only a part of the UniversitySIM strategic simulation environment that allows you to create and validate your university or school strategy on your own, without the help of advisors, consultants and sages of all kinds. 
UniversitySIM is available in a commercial version and we also supply an academic version, which is designed for teaching students on economics degree programs.