Case Study: Omega College
Omega College is a private liberal arts college located in a small town in the Midwest. The closest large city is about fifty miles away. There is a community college in the next town about twenty miles away. Most faculty and staff live in the town or in small towns nearby.
Originally a Protestant-affiliated institution, Omega is now a completely independent institution and receives no funding from the church. It was founded in the late 1800s to meet a pressing need for teachers in the state. Until recently enrollment at Omega has been relatively stable, with average enrollment of 850 full-time undergraduates, some limited programs for part-time students, and a very limited master's degree program in education focusing on certification issues in the state. Undergraduates come to Omega from nearby states, although there is a smattering of students from other areas of the country. There is a very small international student enrollment and most international students study at Omega for a semester and then return home.
Omega has a robust information site on U-Can (the University and College Accountability Network). The cost of tuition is $25,000 for the academic year and room and board is an additional $7800 for two semesters. About 70% of the full-time students who attend Omega receive some type of financial aid (state, federal, and/or institutional).
In each of the last four years the freshman enrollment has missed the target by about twenty students. To offset that enrollment drop, the admissions staff developed an outreach program to the nearby community college to encourage transfer students, but most of the community college transfer students go to the regional campus of the state university to complete their bachelor's degree. There is a nearby military base, but students rarely come to Omega from that source. The average enrollment over the last four years has dropped to 800 full-time students. This is of concern for many reasons, not the least of which is the financial health of the institution.
Omega has a very limited endowment (most of which is earmarked for student financial aid, some academic departmental support, and three endowed professorships) and thus is very dependent on undergraduate tuition to meet the day-to-day operating expenses of the institution. Graduate tuition for the part-time teacher certification program is a financial plus for the institution.
An annual fund program is essential to the fiscal health of the institution and relies on the generosity of board members, alumni, and friends of the institution to help fund the annual operating budget. The decline in enrollment has caused the institution to reduce nonessential budget expenditures, and faculty and staff have not received a raise for the past two years. Obviously, Omega College is just holding on and a new approach to financing the ongoing expenses of the institution is needed.
The institutional administration and faculty and the governing board are currently focused on development of a strategic plan for the institution that deals with both the financial and enrollment questions. The strategic planning committee is charged with the following responsibilities:

    1.The development of a five-year financial plan for the institution.
    2.The development of an academic plan that increases the options and opportunities for students to come to Omega College at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
    3.The development of an aggressive institutional advancement plan. As the committee does its work the college administration must work to stabilize enrollment and keep the doors of the institution open.

What other actions might you recommend that the institution consider for the short term?

According to the Insider’s Guide to Academic Writing: A Brief Rhetoric. Second Edition, the book lists five criteria that are necessary when drafting a research question, what are they?

Public health class:

Do you agree with the IOM's report (2002) that recommends adopting a population health approach that considers the multiple determinants of health within an ecological framework? Why/why not. (200 words)

The Company:

Telemarketing Incorporated (TI) is a service company with their primary business base in the Rocky Mountain region. TI is a service organization in the business of collecting and selling information for contracted clients.

Production Information:

TI made 5,221,782 calls in 2004 to households all over the Rocky Mountain region from their main telemarketing facility in Colorado Springs. There were a total of 330 working days in 2004, which TI conducted telemarketing calls. In 2004 TI completed, on average, over 15,800 calls a day.

TI’s main facility was designed to achieve a capacity level of between 17000-18000 calls a day (from 7:00 a.m. to 12:00 midnight). However, company analysis has shown that the best operation level (BOL) for TI is 17,600 calls a day. At the BOL level TI is able to achieve its lowest unit cost per call given several variables associated with the information collected and calling costs as contracted with clients.

TI has a company policy, which states, “Any one-month period where total calls exceed 500,000 the excess is considered service cushion or capacity cushion.” (Look at capacity cushion in this line of work along the line of a product-focused company that produces bottles, cars, computers or some other tangible product in excess of demand.) The company is compensated for these “cushion” periods at a rate of $10 per call over 500,000, with a cap of 11,500 over the 500,000.

The following is a monthly breakdown of TI’s service call rates for all of 2004. This information was obtained in its raw form and some normalizing of the data is required.

Table Information:

You’ll need to normalize Table 1 below before completing the fourteen (14) questions that follow.

Table 1 – TI’s 2004 Monthly/Daily Production Data (Requiring Normalization)

Month               Production Numbers   Number of Working Days During Month

January       15000 units/day       27 working days

February       15900 units/day       26 working days

March       419720 units/month            28 working days

April           16790 units/day       27 working days

May           504900 units/month   27 working days

June           17600 units/day       28 working days

July           391972 units/month   28 working days

August       12897units/day       29 working days

September       11569 units/day       27 working days

October       463681 units/month   29 working days

November       17689 units/day       27 working days

December       19000 units/day       27 working days

Total                                    330

Notes:

• When completing this problem a symmetrical curve for both economies and diseconomies of scale is assumed.

• Calculate capacity utilization rates as compared to the ideal BOL level.

Answer the Following Questions Based on the

Information Provided

Normalize data

Possible Points – There is a total of 20 possible.

1. Based on 2004 information what is TI’s annual design capacity production range (quantity)

2. What was its annual capacity utilization rate for 2004 as compared to the company’s BOL?

3. What would the company’s annual calls completed output be if it produced at its BOL for all of 2004 year?

4. Which are the second, third and fifth most underutilized months with regard to capacity utilization?

5. What is the capacity underutilization percentage for these three months (reference: Question 4)?

6. What three months did TI complete calls at the lowest per unit cost?

7. What three months did TI complete calls at the highest per unit cost?

8.     a) Was/were there any month/s were service or capacity    cushion applied?

       b) If so, what was/were the month/s?

       c) What was the cushion in calls (quantity) and capacity cushion percentage for the month or months in question?

9. Based on the completion of Question 8 and other information provided what was TI’s total “cushion” compensation for 2004 ( please show in total dollars)?

10. What month/s fall under the term - economies of scale, excluding    the BOL month/s should there be any?   

11.    a) Comparing the underutilized capacity of February with    September, which of these two months better utilized the capacity excluding the  

b) Which of these two months most likely had a higher per call rate cost for the company?

12.    a) Were there any months where the company achieved a BOL?   

b) What month/s?

       c) Respond to this statement “The BOL is not sustainable    because……………”

13. What was the cost of January’s underutilization performance (think along the lines of the BOL) if each unit not produced cost the company $15? (Think along the lines of what was produced and what could have been produced.)

14. If you were the operations manager and the growth profile forecast for 2005 reflected a 10% growth in the number of calls made over 2004, an 8% growth in 2006 over 2005 and a 7% growth in 2007 over 2006 what business strategies would you be considering for the company? Note: Do not exceed 1.5-pages in your discussion of this question. Single or 1½ spacing is fine. Do not double space your work on this final question.)

In its present state, IDEA 2004 has undergone several revisions since introduced as PL 92-142. As a group, discuss these revisions and their current impact on the educational system servicing SPED students now.

An economy's production possibility boundary is given by the mathematical expression 20 = 4 A + B, where A is the quantity of good "a" and B is the quantity of good "b". [Hint: To help you answer this question, use the formula Y = mX + b and have good "a" quantities correspond to X-axis values and good "b" quantities correspond to Y-axis values.]

Part 1: If all the resources in the economy are allocated to producing good "a", what is the maximum level of production for this good ____________

Part 2: What is the maximum level of production for good "b" ____________

Part 3: What is the opportunity cost per unit of increasing the production of good “b” ____________

Part 4: Can the combination of 10 units of good A and 4 units of good B be produced in this economy (yes=1, no=2) ____________

Part 5: Can the combination of 22 units of good A and 18 units of good B be produced in this economy (yes=1, no=2) ____________

1. Which of the following is FALSE about Wallace's line?

   	A.	It marks the boundary between the Oriental biota and a transitional zone that is a mixture of Oriental and Australian biota.
   	B.	It marks a deep sea trench that existed during the lowest stands of sea level.
   	C.	It is named after "The Father of Biogeography".
   	D.	It is named after the person who suggested that reinforcement could complete speciation.
   	E.	Choose this answer if you think that all of the above are true.

QUESTION 2

1. Which of the following is FALSE about the Cambrian Explosion?

   	A.	Fossils of this time period are found in Canada and China that date to ~540 Mya.
   	B.	It is extremely well preserved because fine grained sediments buried soft bodies organisms in a deep anoxic, sulfur-free layer.
   	C.	All fossils could be placed in modern animal phyla.
   	D.	It contains representatives of most modern animal phyla including chordates.
   	E.	Some fossil taxa were common but most were quite rare.

QUESTION 3

1. Gymnosperms are missing which one of the following 5 major innovations in the evolution of plants?

   	A.	multicellularity
   	B.	spores
   	C.	vessels
   	D.	seeds
   	E.	flowers

1 points   

QUESTION 4

1. Which of the following is TRUE about fish?

   	A.	Lungfish and coelocanths branched so close to each other and the tetrapods that it is difficult to tell which split first.
   	B.	Lungfish existed in the fossil record but are extinct today.
   	C.	Coelocanths existed in the fossil record but are extinct today.
   	D.	Fossil lungfish and fossil coelocanths are found in the early Cambrian.
   	E.	Bony fish are the sister group to Coelocanths + Lungfish but not Tetrapods.

QUESTION 5

1. Which of the following statements about turtles is FALSE?

   	A.	Their evolutionary relationships have been controversial.
   	B.	Early fossils were found in the Triassic w/ incompletely formed shells.
   	C.	Ribs and backbone are fused to the upper shell.
   	D.	Nuclear genomic and mtDNA data place them as the sister group to crocodiles + birds.
   	E.	Morphology places them as the sister group to crocodiles.