It's not enough to find out how much it costs another institution to do something. You need to study your own costs, too. Costs are not always what they seem. One group of experienced faculty believed they were spending more time teaching students at a distance than students on campus. But when the faculty themselves made a more careful estimate of how they were spending their own time, it turned out that they spent about the same amount of time.
Many folks assume that such studies are meant to help cut budgets or staff.
But more often such studies are trying to figure how best to use existing people, space and budgets, or how to provide evidence to raise money. So here's one thing I learned. The time of students is valuable, too. So studies of resource use often revolve around questions of how people spend time. Such studies focus on choices such as comparing three different ways of developing and teaching courses for learners off-campus.