The Principal Investigator

Steve Shulman has degrees from Brandeis (BA ’68) and Columbia (MBA ’72) with postgraduate studies at MIT's Sloan School. Steve is a serial entrepreneur whose 50-year career includes stints in industry, higher education, software development for colleges and universities, and consulting for the industry. 

Steve began his career in higher education as Assistant to the President at his alma mater, Brandeis, but left to start an unrelated manufacturing firm, which he sold to Taylor Corporation of Mankato, Minnesota, in 1998. 

Today, Steve is the principal of Abenaki Analytics LLC, a boutique software and consulting firm that is the successor to B3i Analytics LLC .  B3i was built around a patented SaaS solution for research universities (US 8,271,372), which Steve began to develop while serving as Director of Financial Planning for Dartmouth Medical School. Steve sold his intellectual property and B3i consulting practice to Huron Consulting Group in August 2020. Long-term B3i clients included Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, NYU, Maryland, Kansas, and Florida.  

Articles about financially troubled schools in the region led Steve to look into the finances of 10 private mid-sized colleges and universities in Greater Boston in some depth.  That initial study indicated that a significant portion of the 10 schools sampled were vulnerable financially to even modest declines in enrollment because of their weak working capital positions.  In short, if enrollments decline by the amounts predicted,  they wouldn't generate enough cash from operations to cover normal operating expenses for very long without coming up with cash from non-operating sources and/or significantly reducing faculty and staff.   The initial results were certainly troubling.  But the sample was clearly too small to draw any conclusions about the financial exposure of the general population.  The 2024 New England Survey followed.  

Researchers and others with expertise are invited to review the raw data, analytics, and results of The 2024 New England Survey.  Endorsement and assistance in getting the word out would certainly be welcome and of great service to our industry!

Steve may be contacted at:                stevenmshulman@gmail.com