Program Price Calculator
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What is it?
The Program Price Calculator tool in Connect provides campus stores and institutions with an estimate of what running an Equitable Access (EA) program will look like for your students at your campus.
Data Integration: The tool takes our best-in-class data integrations into account, pulling comprehensive adoption and enrollment data from the Retail Management System (RMS) and the Student Information System (SIS). This integration provides insights and a starting point for campus stores to inquire about running an EA program.
We start with adoption data from the RMS (from Compete). We then join that with Connect Inclusive Access (IA) data and Manage catalog data to determine the best digital matches and pricing for calculations.
Financial Risk Assessment: Additionally, this tool provides various financial risk assessment options that you can manipulate to get a glimpse into what running a digital-first EA program would look like.
This tool should be used for estimation purposes only and is the starting point for a further conversation with our sales team on quoting an accurate price. You can inquire directly with your Account Executive, or use the “Start the Conversation” button in the Calculator to get in touch with the team for further information.
Program Price and Risk Assessment
Comprehensive adoption and enrollment data is used to add up all the explicit course material costs for each student in a term/semester (catalog), and then we divide the total course materials cost across all students at the campus less an assumed opt-out rate. We require full enrollments from a campus to provide an accurate estimate.
Configuration Options
Projected Opt-Out Rate
- As the opt-out rate changes, the student counts and course material costs change. In conjunction with one of the two opt-out toggles, we opt in or out individual students based on the catalog selected to help determine specific and accurate pricing estimates.
Real-World Distribution (opt-out toggle)
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This option uses real-world student opt-out behaviors from Cornell and UC Davis based on various price ranges and buckets to help model a more specific price calculation.
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Not all low-cost students opt out, and not all high-cost students stay opted in! We take the patterns we’ve seen at real live Verba EA customers and apply them to your school’s data.
Lowest Cost Students First (opt-out toggle)
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This option uses a worst-case scenario option that removes the “healthiest” students from the program calculators first. This option specifically takes the students with low-cost course materials out of the program first as the opt-out rate increases simulating the most conservative way to estimate and price a program. The pricing for students will always go up and the margin goes down as opt-out rates increase.
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If you want to be conservative, this models a “worst-case scenario” for your program. If students with low-cost materials all opt-out (based on your opt-out rate) this will provide you with the most risk-adverse option for pricing your program.
Desired Program Margin
- This option adjusts the margin based on the projected content cost. Adjusting the slider will change the Projected Program Price, Projected Revenue, and Projected Margin.
Includes Non-Required Materials
By default, only required materials will be used in base calculations. Checking the “Include non-required materials” checkbox will add all optional and recommended content to the program price calculations. This toggle will also impact the Content Type Breakdown and Title Level Detail sections of the Program Price Calculator as well. Because we use adoption data from the campus RMS, if for some reason required/optional materials are handled differently (e.g. every material is recommended) then the pricing quotes may look off.
Content Type Breakdown
Our average EA program is 80% digital, so we can likely reduce the price with a deeper look at a catalog!
Based on the configuration options set, the Content Type Breakdown provides summary level info around the current content breakdown for a given institution’s catalog. This considers our pricing cascade to help determine digital-first pricing.
Pricing Cascade
VerbaOne is a digital-first EA offering. As such, the pricing makes assumptions using the following Price Cascade:
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Any price from Connect (net price)
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If there are other digital matches not used in Connect, we use pricing from Manage:
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Custom Price
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IA Price
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Digital List Price
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If there are no digital matches, we fallback to pricing from the RMS
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New Print Cost * 75% (to remove store margin)
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Used Print Cost (only if there is no New price available)
You can see what types of content are included in the current program price assessment. Student Price Share is a new concept. It is meant to help show the impact of each type of content to the overall student price.
e.g. If the student price in the summary section above is $151.19, Physical accounts for 49.10 of the 151.139.
Title Level Detail
Based on the configuration options set, provides the comprehensive adoption and pricing information used under the hood to ultimately calculate the Projected Program Price. This can be exported by using Email Data to Me and is also sortable and paginated within Connect.