LEAP Award

The 2025 LEAP Award Winner Is: 

Lehigh University

About 

Located in Pennsylvania's beautiful Lehigh Valley, Lehigh University is one of the nation's most distinguished private research universities. Ranked in the top 50 in U.S. News & World report, Lehigh University supports five colleges and serves around 5,800 undergraduate students and 1,800 graduate students, with a 10:1 student-to-faculty ratio. Lehigh University was recently designated an R1 research university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, making them one of only 187 institutions classified as R1 nationwide. The university has offered world-class academic opportunities to its students for more than 150 years.  

Area of Focus 

Five years ago, university leaders saw an even more pressing need to become more proactive. At the time, Lehigh was using spreadsheets to build their budget and model different strategies. This process was becoming more and more cumbersome, vulnerable to human error, and time-consuming. To maintain their ambitious growth goals, the institution needed two things: an agile, data-driven approach to planning, and a robust financial modeling solution to enable leaders to test, refine, and realize the impacts of their strategies.

Lehigh’s leaders partnered with Strata to implement the Axiom™ Strategic Financial Planning—or SFP—solution. Projecting the financial implications of shifts in student retention, tuition, and aid, university leaders can now make more informed decisions by modeling various scenarios. For example, realizing that undergraduate tuition and room and board constituted up to 70 percent of their revenue, leaders used outside benchmarking and analysis to identify their graduate-level program as an area of opportunity.

Our Partnership 

Lehigh’s work to establish best practices in using the Axiom tool for planning and decision-making have stretched far beyond their own benefit. Over the course of their partnership with Strata, Lehigh has played a key role in driving improvements and shaping the future of Axiom for all its users. The Lehigh team worked with Strata in the development of the Axiom SFP tool, to find critical enhancements and refine the requirements needed to strengthen the solution.

The team’s feedback also directly influenced Strata’s Budgeting & Forecasting tool, guiding the creation of value-add enhancements that ensure today’s solution meets real-world institutional needs. Lehigh has volunteered to serve as a beta tester this summer for the Ethos partnership to connect Axiom to Ellucian ERP, allowing Strata to test import and export of data from Banner—an essential step in expanding system integration capabilities. The university’s work in these areas has proven invaluable, not only to Strata, but to all colleges and universities who use Axiom tools to help advance their missions.

Finally, this institution has been committed to sharing knowledge and best practices far and wide, speaking at Strata customer town halls and taking other opportunities to demonstrate how they’ve leveraged Axiom products for financial planning and decision-making. Their efforts to actively connect with other institutions—brainstorming and sharing strategies to maximize the value of Strata tools—has had widespread, positive impacts across the higher education space.

Congratulations, Lehigh University!