For VPs and Provosts
Cabinet-ready answers grounded in your data
Vice Presidents and Provosts use Clema to get sourced answers grounded in institutional data and federal sources, improve ROI from existing data investments, and defend decisions with the figure and the source.
How Clema helps
Cabinet-speed answers, on figures you can defend.
Cabinet-ready, sourced answers
Ask for the trend, the comparison, or the cohort breakdown and get the figure with its source and method. Decisions move on figures you can defend at the table.
Better ROI from existing data
Your warehouse and BI tools hold the answers; Clema makes them askable. Get more value from the data infrastructure you already invested in.
Program viability in plain English
Pull enrollment, cost, and peer-comparison figures in one conversation, with the federal source shown. See per-program margin, tuition revenue minus the cost to deliver it, rolled up across years, instead of a gut call on which majors to expand, restructure, or retire.
A day in the provost's inbox
8:40am. The dean of business emails asking to add two sections of a high-demand elective, citing margin numbers that don't match what IR sent finance six weeks ago for the same program. You can't sign off on new faculty lines until someone tells you which number is right. Both offices that could reconcile it are mid-semester slammed.
10:15am. Prepping the board's academic affairs committee slide on four-year graduation rate trends by college, the IR-built version and the version in the CFO's dashboard disagree past the second decimal. Nobody on the call can say, on the spot, which cohort definition each one used.
1:30pm. The dean of nursing and the dean of arts and sciences have each asked for the same headcount-by-major trend this week, framed to support their college's case for the next budget cycle. You need one source-cited version of the truth before the hearing, not two decks that quietly disagree.
4:00pm. The program review committee needs five years of faculty workload, credit-hour production, and job-placement data assembled into a narrative the accreditor's site team can interrogate line by line. Right now that means three offices exporting spreadsheets and someone stitching it together by hand.
None of this happens because your IR office lacks good tools. Our research across 50+ IR/IE interviews in 19 states found that "the issue is not the absence of tools; it's the absence of integration."
73.5% of ad-hoc requests arrive vague enough to need two to five rounds of clarification before anyone can answer them. The typical turnaround on a data request is three to fourteen days, worst exactly when you need it fastest: budget season and board week.
The old way vs. the Clema way
Same questions, a very different wait, and no more quietly disagreeing decks.
Situation
Old way
Clema way
A dean disputes IR's program numbers
Email IR, IR pulls from the SIS, finance, and IPEDS separately, and you wait for 2 to 5 rounds of clarification on what "cost" and "enrollment" even mean in each system.
Ask directly and get one sourced answer that shows the SIS, finance, and IPEDS figures side by side, with the definition behind each one.
Two versions of the same number reach the cabinet
The dean's deck and the CFO's dashboard disagree past the second decimal, and nobody can say on the spot which cohort definition each one used.
Clema shows why two numbers differ, different denominator, different cost allocation, so you can settle it before the meeting instead of during it.
Accreditation site-visit data pull
Three offices export spreadsheets and someone stitches five years of workload, credit-hour, and placement data together by hand the week before the visit.
Ask for the same five-year view directly and get a sourced answer the site team can trace back to the system of record.
A follow-up question in the same meeting
Send a second email, wait again. Our research found 73.5% of ad-hoc requests need 2 to 5 rounds of back-and-forth before they're answered.
Ask the follow-up in the same conversation and get an answer immediately, no new request, no new queue.
Forecasting enrollment and program viability
"The questions on a cabinet agenda are different in scope and different in shape: how many students will enroll next fall, which programs are quietly losing money, which of our peers are likely to consolidate or close." Our guide walks through the forecasting, yield-prediction, and program-margin models behind those answers.
Read the guideWhat the research says about the pressure you're under
Five independent sources point at the same story: thinner resources, a shrinking pipeline, and a reporting load that keeps growing.
86% of provosts say they like their job, but only 29% consistently have the resources they need to implement initiatives. Conducted with Hanover Research (478 provosts, June and July 2025), the survey also found 56% said federal funding to their institution had decreased.
54% of provosts say STEM and professional programs are being prioritized over general-education fields at their institution. That shift has downstream effects on course scheduling, faculty assignments, and resource allocation.
U.S. high school graduates peak at 3.8 to 3.9 million in 2025, then decline about 13% by 2041. The decline hits 38 states unevenly: the West down roughly 20%, the Northeast roughly 17%, the Midwest roughly 16%, while the South is the only region projected to grow. If a trustee reads that before your next board meeting, "I'll follow up by email" is not the answer you want to give in the room.
Institutions spent nearly one million hours completing IPEDS's 12 surveys from 2016 to 2019. CUPA-HR data suggest four-year public universities spend roughly $10,300 a year just on those IPEDS surveys, on top of state, accreditor, and third-party reporting.
Indiana now requires public colleges to review degree programs against a three-year rolling completions floor: at least 15 graduates for bachelor's degrees, 10 for associate degrees. Six of Indiana's public colleges and universities voluntarily agreed to cut or restructure hundreds of programs in response, on a timeline measured in months, not years. If your state moves next, that data lives in the registrar's system, the finance system, and IR's spreadsheets today, none of which were built to be cross-referenced quickly.
Program knowledge should not leave with the analyst who built it
85% of institutions depend on a single person for institutional knowledge. 55% sit in what our study calls the "Large Gap" tier, where program definitions and methodology are one resignation from gone.
When a program-review or viability call rests on one analyst's spreadsheet, Clema keeps the definitions and the calculation method inside the system rather than inside someone's head. The analysis survives staff turnover along with your programs.
A provost's conversation
A realistic exchange: reconciling a dean's numbers, and being honest about what a model can and can't tell you.
Show me our five lowest-enrollment bachelor's programs and their cost per completer over the last three years.
Here are your five lowest-enrollment bachelor's programs by fall headcount, with completions and cost per completer for the last three academic years, pulled from your SIS enrollment records, your finance system's program-level cost allocations, and cross-checked against your IPEDS Completions submissions. Two programs show completions in the single digits each year, so cost per completer swings a lot on small numbers; I've flagged those as low-n and volatile rather than a stable trend. Want the same view as a rolling three-year average instead, closer to how a state completions-floor policy would evaluate them?
Example figures for this walkthrough · 3-year average
| Program | Fall 2023 headcount | Completers (3-yr avg) | Cost per completer (3-yr avg) |
|---|---|---|---|
| German Studies | 14 | 3 (low-n) | $41,800 |
| Classics | 19 | 4 (low-n) | $33,200 |
| Religious Studies | 22 | 7 | $24,300 |
| Philosophy | 28 | 9 | $19,100 |
| Studio Art | 31 | 11 | $16,750 |
How does that compare to the numbers the Arts & Sciences dean sent me last month?
The dean's figures and mine differ on two definitional points: the dean used headcount in the denominator, while I'm using IPEDS-style completers, degrees actually conferred, and the dean's cost figure appears to exclude allocated indirect costs that your finance system's activity-based model includes. Once I normalize both to the same definition, the two versions land within about 4% of each other. This isn't a data-quality problem, it's apples to oranges. I can show both versions side by side with source and method labeled, so you and the dean are arguing about the decision, not the numbers.
If we consolidated the two lowest-enrollment programs into one interdisciplinary major, what would that likely do to retention?
I can give you a directional estimate using the retention model, validated at roughly 86.6% accuracy on unseen student-term data, but a program consolidation is a structural change the model wasn't trained to simulate directly, so treat this as an informed estimate, not a forecast. Based on how students in adjacent low-enrollment majors have historically persisted through similar realignments, expect a modest short-term dip in year-one retention for currently declared majors as advising resets, fading by year two with proactive advising. I don't have your faculty workload data connected yet, so I can't size the staffing impact; that would need to come from HR or your workload system first.
Where Clema fits with your dashboards and BI tools
Clema sits over your SIS, data warehouse, and existing BI tools, Tableau, Power BI, whatever your analysts already use, rather than replacing them. Nobody is asking you to rip out infrastructure you just finished paying for.
Clema
Conversational layer. Ask in plain English, get a sourced answer.
Your systems
Federal datasets, built in
64.7%
of IR offices deal with self-service dashboard issues even after building them
~50%
of self-service dashboards sit unused at the "Structured" maturity level common at most institutions
"Some people are just not comfortable using dashboards... they just want the affirmation of me providing the data because they trust IR."
Deans and trustees don't want a new dashboard login. They want an answer, and Clema gives it to them in the same conversational form they'd get from your IR office, minus the queue. Your analysts keep building and owning the dashboards that need deep exploration, and every answer still traces back to the same sourced data your BI tools already pull from.
What Clema gives your division
Sourced
Every figure carries its origin and method
Defensible
Cabinet answers with audit trail
Better ROI
More value from existing data
VP and Provost FAQs
What does Clema give a VP or Provost?
Cabinet-ready answers grounded in your institutional data and federal sources. Ask for enrollment trends, program viability, or faculty metrics in plain English and get the figure, the source, and the method immediately, instead of waiting on the next IR queue slot.
How do we know Clema's answers are accurate and not a hallucinated number?
Every answer is sourced back to the underlying system of record, your SIS, warehouse, IPEDS, College Scorecard, and shows its method, not just a figure. Where Clema uses a predictive model, that model is independently validated: the term-to-term retention model was evaluated on 276,519 unseen student-term records at roughly 86.6% accuracy and 91 to 92% recall, and the graduation-within-150%-time model was evaluated on 36,000 unseen students at roughly 0.911 AUC. Every answer carries an audit trail back to its source so you or your IR director can check it.
Will Clema replace our IR office or the dashboards we've already invested in?
No. Clema sits on top of your SIS, warehouse, and existing BI tools rather than replacing them. Our research across 50+ IR interviews found the real problem usually isn't a missing tool, it's fragmented integration: 82.4% of IR offices report data fragmentation across systems, and 64.7% report self-service dashboard issues even when dashboards exist. Clema gives non-technical stakeholders, deans, trustees, budget officers, a conversational way to get answers grounded in the same data your dashboards already use, and frees your IR team from re-answering the same ad-hoc requests.
Is Clema secure enough for a cabinet-level deployment?
Yes. Clema is SOC 2 Type II certified and FERPA-ready by design: read-only credentials, SAML 2.0 SSO, TLS 1.3 encryption, and a full audit trail on every figure that reaches the cabinet table. Your CISO can review the compliance pack directly.
Our data lives in five different systems, SIS, warehouse, LMS, finance, and a state reporting portal. Can Clema actually connect to all of that?
Clema is built as an integration layer, not a single-source tool. It connects to your SIS, data warehouse, BI platforms, and public federal datasets (IPEDS, College Scorecard, Pell, EADA, PSEO, Cohort Default Rate) so a question can be answered against the right source without anyone manually stitching spreadsheets together. This directly targets the infrastructure fragmentation 94.1% of IR offices report dealing with today.
How long before my deans and I can actually start asking questions?
Implementation is scoped around connecting your core data sources first, typically the SIS and warehouse, not a multi-year data-warehouse rebuild. Most institutions are live in two to four weeks. Timelines depend on your existing infrastructure; talk to us for a scoped estimate. The goal is to shorten the 3 to 14 day typical turnaround our research found for ad-hoc requests down to minutes for the questions Clema can answer directly.
What does this cost, and how do we justify it against a hiring freeze?
Clema is priced to compete with the cost of adding IR headcount, not to add a new six-figure line item. Our research found IR teams spend 40 to 60% of their capacity on ad-hoc requests, and reclaiming that time is worth 220 to 330 hours a year for a small team, 634 to 950 hours for a mid-sized team, and 2,133 to 3,200 hours for a large team. For a provost facing a hiring freeze despite growing demand for data, that reclaimed capacity is the business case: the equivalent of adding IR staff without adding headcount.
Who can see what, and how do you handle FERPA and role-based access?
Access follows the permissions your institution already defines for its underlying systems. Clema doesn't grant broader visibility than a user already has in the SIS or warehouse. Every query and answer is logged with an audit trail, which also gives IR leadership visibility into what's being asked and by whom, addressing the 23.5% of requests our research found bypass official intake channels and the 14.7% that get no visibility today into how data was used.
Sourced answers for your next cabinet meeting
Book a demo with cabinet-level scenarios, or start free for your division.