How Universities Decide Which Online Programs to Build and Fund

When a university department wonders whether it should launch or expand an online program, the answer rarely comes from intuition. At the University of Minnesota, that question lands with Fritz Andover, director of online program support services, whose office works across all five campuses to evaluate market opportunity, model enrollment scenarios, and help units secure the funding to move forward. In a recent conversation on the Signalson Higher Education podcast, Andover laid out how that process actually works, from the first conversation with a department chair to the financial modeling that determines whether a program is viable.

Andover came to the role through an unusual path. He began as a history PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis, shifted into educational technology, spent nearly a decade working directly with faculty at Macalester College, earned a doctorate in higher education policy and administration at Minnesota, and then took a stint at a small online program management firm before returning to the university system. That mix of faculty-side experience, institutional research, and OPM market work shaped how he approaches program decisions today.

How programs surface for evaluation

The office is small, three full-time staff plus a supervisor who splits time with a research appointment, so they rely heavily on being visible across the institution. Andover described an annual circuit of campus visits, which he calls the roadshow, where the team meets with deans, department chairs, and chancellors to hear what programs are being considered. "We try to get around," he said. "We go to each campus. We'll talk to each of the deans at a campus or department heads or the chancellor there, and a lot of things will surface." Some units come in at the start of a program concept; others bring the team in after planning is already underway. Either way, the office's services are cost-pool supported, meaning they are provided at no direct charge to the department.

Once a program is referred or flagged, Andover begins with external market research: who else offers something similar, what the competitive landscape looks like, and what occupations a credential realistically prepares people for. He is deliberate about casting a wide net on the career side, noting that few paths are as linear as people assume. The goal is to arrive at a defensible enrollment projection, and then deliberately discount it. "My goal is to, as defensively as possible, figure out what could an enrollment look like for this program at the university, a number," he said. "And then I discount it because I don't wanna be too rosy pictured."

Building the financial case

From that enrollment number, Andover works backward with marketing partners to estimate acquisition costs, then works inward with the department to map personnel, technology, and operational expenses. He models costs over a ten-year horizon, deliberately amplifying expense assumptions to stress-test the scenario. The exercise is designed to make sure nothing is hidden: tuition levels, program costs, wage escalation, and marketing spend all get examined together before a funding decision is made.

Because departments rarely have capital reserves to absorb a ramp-up period, the office structures support as a two-year loan-style investment. The intent is to carry the program through the period before enrollment revenue can offset marketing and launch costs, and then have the program repay the investment over roughly five years once it reaches a sustainable level. Andover described it as a booster-rocket model: the office helps a program reach escape velocity, then steps back. A recent example illustrated how fluid these decisions can be. One master's program the office had been supporting dropped its tuition by 35 percent to stay competitive. The team reviewed the underlying financials to confirm the model still held before the cut was made.

The broader mandate of Andover's office extends beyond purely online launches. The term "distributed" in the office name is intentional: part of the work involves knitting together teaching capacity across Minnesota's campuses so that a student can complete portions of a program from different locations, online or in person, without hitting administrative friction. That vision of a connected, multi-campus experience runs alongside the program development work and reflects how large public university systems are trying to use their scale in ways that smaller institutions simply cannot.