ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with "fiscal fitness", and analyzes the colleges' and corporations' financial profile and performance. Learning to read budgets and financial operating statements is useful for making sense out of higher education's fiscal fitness. Responsibility centered management (RCM) has been characterized as a public college model that allows universities to work more like a private or independent college or university. When RCM is transplanted into a university it carries with it a detailed tracking system of income and expenditures. Student financial aid is a large part of a college or university budget and is central to how an institution positions itself in terms of enrollment, revenues, and expenditures. From time to time academic officers meet to decide how much of the institutional funds should be dedicated to student financial aid. The aim for the college is to estimate what it needs in terms of tuition revenues paid by students to meet projected educational expenses.
