Q: Is there a standard formula that LERN uses for a per hour registration fee for types of courses? For example, charging students $25 per contact hour for professional development courses and $10 per contact hour for personal enrichment. I’m trying to get at a threshold for what the market with bare per contact hour. We are using our own data to pull these numbers for our market, but it there an industry standard out there already and I missed it? Very possible.

A: LERN does not have a benchmark for a per hour registration fee. Our financial analysis is based on program performance. Our benchmarks are based on maintaining financially sensible relationship between promotion, production, and administrative costs and generating sufficient operating margin to be financially viable. Because of this market based approach, the per hour rates would have a high degree of variability across programs, and benchmarking might be both difficult and not as meaningful as looking at the numbers from the perspective of generating adequate operating margin.

What you are doing, creating internal benchmarks for your program is a smart thing to do, and is the best way to approach this type of analysis.