NEJC18005 Consulting-New Program Development

Lincoln County, Colorado is seeking consulting services through procurement NEJC18005 for new program development, with a proposal due date of January 2, 2018. The solicitation targets the procurement of an integrated Program Evaluation System (PES) and associated workshop services designed to enable higher education institutions to evaluate their academic program portfolios comprehensively. The primary deliverables include access to a proprietary system capable of simultaneously scoring over 1,400 IPEDS programs across multiple locations and markets, with results presented via single-page Program Scorecards that incorporate custom market definitions, student demand data, competition analysis, and employment metrics. Additionally, the vendor must facilitate Program Portfolio Evaluation Workshops that guide institutional stakeholders through structured decision-making processes to determine which programs to start, stop, sustain, or grow. Key qualifications required include demonstrated expertise in higher education program evaluation, access to proprietary data sources including actual student inquiry data (55 million quarterly inquiries), Google search trend data across 200 programs and 3,000 U.S. counties, and IPEDS completions data, with the ability to incorporate client-specific institutional data such as enrollment and instructional costs. The evaluation system must feature customizable scoring rubrics allowing institutions to weight over 40 market criteria across four categories according to institutional priorities and to create multiple rubrics for different program levels or organizational divisions. The vendor should demonstrate a successful track record with a minimum of 30 completed workshops that have generated measurable outcomes including capital project funding identification and organizational consensus building.

The solicitation document indicates Gray Associates, Inc. has submitted sole source status documentation in support of this opportunity, suggesting this procurement may be designated as a sole source acquisition. The documentation emphasizes Gray Associates' proprietary capabilities and unique data elements that are claimed to be unavailable from competing vendors, including portfolio-level evaluation and multi-location scoring capabilities that provide internally consistent rankings across an institution's entire program portfolio. No specific budget range or award value is disclosed in the available documentation, nor are there clear designations regarding disadvantaged enterprise set-asides or restrictions on responding organizations. The contract requires integration with the vendor's existing proprietary technology infrastructure, as the selected vendor must deliver the integrated PES system and facilitate workshops utilizing their established methodologies and data sources.