Study 4: Practices, Preferences and Contextual Differences in Educational Managers’ Use of Cost Information in Program and Faculty Level Decisions in Higher Education

Amid increasing resource scarcity, the study explores current practices, future preferences, and contextual factors that shape managers’ engagement with cost information. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with educational managers across six faculties at Maastricht University, and transcripts were thematically analyzed using established guidance for qualitative research in medical education.

The findings highlight that while cost information is viewed as essential for maintaining educational quality, its practical use is constrained by hierarchical structures, conceptual uncertainty, capacity limitations, and varying preferences for cost granularity. Managers emphasized the importance of collaboration, transparency, and clearly defined roles as conditions for more effective cost-informed decision making. ORCID ID orcid.org/0000-0002-4976-5202 DESCRIPTION OF THE DATA FILES Interview_Guide.pdf: The semi-structured interview guide outlines the core questions, prompts and domains used during interviews with educational managers, offering context for how themes were elicited Qualitative_Codebook.pdf: The codebook provides the analytic framework developed during iterative team discussion and reflects how meaning units were organized into thematic categories.