After a robust engagement process involving nearly 500 participants across the George Washington University’s students, faculty, staff, and leadership, GW released the Foundational Excellence Initiative (FEI) Report, which prioritizes opportunities to contain costs, generate new revenue and improve operational effectiveness.
The FEI grew out of a need to improve administrative operations, described as removing the sand in the gears, to best support GW’s strategic framework and its focus on strengthening the interdisciplinary research ecosystem and improving student success outcomes. In addition, the FEI aims to help GW navigate a convergence of headwinds—such as enrollment declines, inflation-driven operating costs and the financial challenges related to the Medical Faculty Associates—that have, in part, created a structural deficit in the university’s budget.
Over the past several months, the FEI Steering Committee, composed of GW faculty and staff, has informed and guided an opportunity development process. Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff Scott Mory recently answered questions about the report’s main takeaways. He co-chaired the initiative alongside Milken Institute School of Public Health Professor J. Zoë Beckerman.
Q: What types of opportunities surfaced through the FEI?
A: Throughout our work, several consistent priorities emerged, including overly complicated administrative processes; fragmented systems and data sources; duplicative tools and platforms; reliance on informal workarounds and personal networks; and a desire for greater clarity around decision-making and institutional priorities.
The FEI process yielded 90 initial ideas and hypotheses in two categories: improving GW’s financial position (i.e., reducing costs or generating new revenue) and making the university operate more effectively (i.e., improving processes, systems and tools). After extensive discussion and validation with subject matter experts and functional owners, the steering committee ultimately forwarded 15 opportunities for near-term consideration. Following additional validation, the GW leadership team coalesced around three opportunities to advance for further planning and implementation at this time, based on the university’s current needs and priorities. Together, these priorities pair near-term financial and operational benefits with improvements to the GW community's everyday experience.
Q: What are those specific near-term opportunities?
A: The first is procurement and strategic sourcing, which includes modernizing purchasing procedures, harnessing GW’s collective buying power to reduce costs, and simplifying expense payment and reimbursement processes.
The second is streamlining the hiring process. By redesigning the university-wide hiring process, we hope to eliminate onerous steps and make hiring easier to navigate and track, freeing up resources and time.
And the third is strengthening student health services through third-party billing. GW plans to explore third-party billing for health insurance for services provided by the Student Health Center. This could be a significant revenue source that GW could reinvest to expand the quality and range of student health services. We would implement this opportunity with important privacy safeguards in place from the outset—particularly for sensitive services, including reproductive and gender-affirming care and behavioral and mental health services—and expanded capacity for billing, training and provider staffing.
Q: Are these the only opportunities being implemented?
A: Thanks to the steering committee’s hard work, we now have a robust and deeply informed set of options available to us as needed that go beyond the opportunities listed above. As priorities, resources, institutional needs and external factors evolve, we can return to this work to assess next steps. It is important to note that any additional opportunities would be carefully reviewed, revalidated, communicated to the community, and advanced with careful attention to institutional trade-offs and needs.
Q: Why isn't the university releasing the full list of opportunities identified through the FEI?
A: Sharing all of the preliminary ideas that were generated without first putting them through the same level of analysis, consultation and consideration as the final three might create unnecessary uncertainty about ideas that may never be pursued. We did not want to circulate early thinking, which, by its nature, was wide-ranging and broad in scope.
For now, our focus is on advancing the opportunities that have been prioritized. As the university's needs and circumstances evolve, we may revisit other ideas identified through the FEI process. Any additional opportunities would be carefully evaluated, with engagement from those most closely affected and appropriate communication with the broader university community before decisions are made.
Q: Does GW anticipate additional layoffs?
A: Throughout the Foundational Excellence Initiative, the steering committee worked deliberately to identify opportunities that could strengthen the university’s financial position and operations without relying on broad workforce reductions. Accordingly, the report includes no recommendation or plan for university-wide layoffs.
That does not mean staffing changes or reorganizations may not occur on a more local level within individual schools or units based on their own operational or financial needs, nor can GW entirely rule out similar actions if circumstances change significantly in the future. Those decisions will always depend on the university's needs and conditions at a given time, and leadership will carefully monitor and communicate them as they evolve.
Q: Is the university considering changes to employee benefits?
A: Although changes to some benefits were considered early in the process, the report does not recommend any specific changes to employee benefits at this time.
Ensuring that GW remains a great place to work and a competitive employer was a central consideration throughout the committee’s work. Maintaining a strong benefits package is an important part of attracting and retaining talented faculty and staff, and that commitment is one reason benefit reductions were not advanced among the initiative’s initial recommendations.
Q. Will greater university-wide standardization limit flexibility for schools and units?
A: The goal is not to eliminate choice or autonomy for schools and units. Greater consistency in certain areas can actually help GW reduce unnecessary complexity, lower costs and make processes easier to navigate, while still preserving flexibility where different or specialized needs exist.
Procurement is a good example. Today, individual schools, departments and divisions have considerable flexibility to select vendors or options for similar goods and services. A more strategic approach could narrow those choices to a smaller set of high-quality, competitively negotiated options that meet most needs, while maintaining appropriate flexibility for specialized academic, research or operational requirements.
As these recommendations are implemented, GW will work with the faculty and staff closest to the work to determine where greater consistency makes sense and where flexibility is essential. The goal is not a one-size-fits-all model but a more coordinated approach that makes it easier for schools and units to accomplish their work.
Q: How will the university provide the financial resources and staff capacity needed to implement these initiatives?
A: We acknowledge that many faculty and staff members are already managing significant workloads, and successful implementation cannot simply mean adding new responsibilities on top of existing ones.
That is why university leadership is carefully considering how to prioritize, sequence and resource the recommendations emerging from FEI and other university-wide efforts. Rather than attempting to implement every recommendation at once, we are developing a focused and coordinated approach, taking into account the financial resources, staffing capacity and other support needed to move initiatives forward.
Importantly, several of the priorities being considered are themselves intended to create greater capacity across the university—by simplifying processes, reducing administrative burden and making better use of technology and other tools. Other initiatives are intended to generate new revenue or savings that can be reinvested in GW's people and strategic priorities. Taken together, the goal is not simply to add more work but to create the capacity and resources needed to better support our students, faculty, staff and mission.
Q: How will these changes affect the day-to-day experience of students, faculty and staff?
A: For most members of the GW community, these changes are not expected to dramatically alter their day-to-day experience. Instead, the goal is to improve the processes and services people already rely on, such as making hiring and procurement easier, reducing unnecessary administrative steps and strengthening student services. Where changes do directly affect how people work or access services, the university will engage those most closely involved as implementation moves forward.
Q: What happens next?
A: University leadership is now considering the FEI recommendations alongside those from the strategic framework working groups, the AI@GW mapping exercise and other university-wide efforts. Together, this work will shape Raising Higher: OneGW in Action, the university’s action plan identifying the priorities and coordinated steps we will take to advance the strategic framework over the next several years. The university will share this plan with the community in the coming weeks.
As these opportunities move into implementation, the university will continue to engage faculty, staff, students and leaders and to thoughtfully and deliberately make meaningful change.