The data sources, math, and assumptions behind the Campus Opportunity Calculator's staff capacity estimate.
Degree audits, graduation checks, transfer evaluations, and routine administrative tasks are essential to serving students. But the time required to complete them can add up to thousands of hours across an institution.
The Campus Opportunity Calculator estimates how much staff time these activities consume each year and how much capacity more efficient processes could make available.
Start by choosing the team you want to examine: advising, the registrar's office, or both.
For advising, we estimate staffing levels using degree-seeking undergraduate enrollment from IPEDS and average caseloads reported by Tyton Partners in Driving Toward a Degree 2026:
We then estimate recurring advising work with these starting assumptions:
These assumptions reflect the tasks Tyton found advisors do most often: 81% do course planning daily, 77% do administrative work daily, and 72% interpret degree audits daily.
For registrar teams, we estimate the annual volume of curriculum and degree audit setup, graduation checks, exception requests, and transfer credit evaluations, scaled to your degree-seeking undergraduate enrollment.
We also use estimated hourly employment costs, including benefits, of about $29 for advisors and $35 for registrar staff, drawn from Stellic's business case model.
These figures provide a starting point. You can replace them with your institution's actual staffing levels, task volumes, and completion times. Clearing an edited field restores its default.
Undergraduate enrollment comes from the 2024–25 provisional IPEDS release (IPEDS data files).
For each activity, the calculator multiplies the number of times it occurs annually by the average time required to complete it.
For example, the starting assumptions include:
We add the results across the selected teams to estimate total annual hours.
The calculator then expresses that time in two additional ways:
Value of staff time: Annual hours × estimated hourly employment cost.
Full-time equivalent capacity (FTE): Annual hours ÷ 1,840, representing 40 hours per week across 46 working weeks.
For our sample school (the national median for public four-year institutions, with about 7,160 undergraduates and 21 advisors), combining advising and registrar activities produces approximately 7,042 to 11,737 hours annually, representing $209,000 to $349,000 in staff time. That's roughly the work of five full-time staff.
The calculator shows a range of ±25% because the time required for individual tasks varies across institutions.
The dollar figure represents the employment cost associated with that time. It should not be interpreted as an estimate of budget savings.
The calculator also estimates how much time institutions could recover by simplifying recurring work through Stellic.
For each activity, we compare its estimated current completion time against a more efficient workflow. The model assumes:
These estimates draw on a combination of published Stellic partner results and internal workflow assumptions. The graduation check estimate, for example, reflects the median result across published Stellic success stories. They are intended to illustrate potential efficiency gains, and actual results depend on each institution's processes and adoption.
At Duquesne University, Associate Registrar Dorothy Rigby described the change in graduation clearance this way: "What used to take me three days now takes 30 minutes, or is just done by itself" (Stellic, Duquesne University success story). That experience illustrates how substantial process improvements can be, although it doesn't establish the exact savings another institution should expect.
You can explore three scenarios:
The result is expressed in hours recovered and their equivalent full-time staff capacity. At the sample school, the Middle scenario returns about 3,300 to 5,500 hours a year, or roughly two to three full-time staff.
These figures describe time that could be redirected toward other responsibilities. They don't imply that institutions should reduce staffing by the corresponding number of positions. Tyton Partners recommends putting saved advising time back into student relationships rather than larger caseloads, and with appointments averaging about 30 minutes, every hour returned matters.
The calculation measures time spent on recurring tasks. It doesn't quantify staff burnout, turnover, proactive outreach that never happens, or longer-term work delayed by administrative demands.
For more on those costs and where schools can step in, read What Manual Work Costs Your Advising and Registrar Teams.
Better workflows can give advising and registrar teams more capacity for meaningful student conversations, complex cases, and work that supports students throughout their academic journeys.
This calculation is separate from the calculator's tuition estimates. Attrition and transfer enrollment concern different student populations, while staff capacity is measured in hours. The results aren't designed to be added together.
Calculate your staff capacity opportunity →
Open See the full math to examine individual activities and assumptions, or download a summary to share with your team.
