Beyond the Black Box: Thinking Differently About Auxiliary Programs

Ian Symmonds will be exploring this topic — and pushing the portfolio idea further — as a keynote speaker at SPARC (the Summer Programs and Auxiliary Revenue Collaborative) on October 5th in Scottsdale, AZ.

Most schools treat their summer and auxiliary programs like a separate business that happens to share a campus.

It makes sense on paper. Auxiliary revenue is often the most profitable line on the budget — clean margins, high demand, low institutional risk. So schools let it run on its own track: different staff, different marketing, different sense of who it’s for. Profitable, and almost entirely disconnected from the school’s actual strategy.

That disconnect is the black box. And it’s becoming a much more expensive one to leave closed.

Demographic pressure is squeezing traditional enrollment in ways that aren’t reversing anytime soon — fewer families in the traditional pipeline, more competition for the ones who remain. Meanwhile, most schools are sitting on a program that already reaches a much broader population than their enrolled student body ever will: a “student,” for a week or a summer, who isn’t on the traditional admissions track at all. Treated as a side business, that population stays exactly that — a side business. Treated as a strategic lever, it becomes something else entirely: a second, wider front door into the institution’s actual footprint.

Higher education has understood this for longer than K-12 has. Colleges and universities have spent two decades thinking in portfolio terms — a range of program types, delivery formats, and populations served, deliberately managed as one strategic whole rather than a core business plus some side ventures. Independent schools mostly haven’t made that shift yet. The auxiliary program still lives in its own silo, reporting its own numbers, answering to its own logic.

The schools that separate themselves over the next decade won’t be the ones with the biggest summer program. They’ll be the ones that stop asking “how much revenue did auxiliary programs generate this year” and start asking a harder, more useful question: who did we actually reach this year, across every program we run — and what would it mean to think of all of them as one strategic portfolio instead of a school with a side business attached?

That’s a different kind of planning conversation. It’s also, increasingly, the only kind that keeps pace with how much the traditional enrollment picture has already changed.