William F. Massy

Dr. Massy develops new concepts and models for Gray Associates, advises on existing models and client applications, writes a blog series, and participates in webinars and other presentations. He is an emeritus professor and former vice provost and vice president/CFO of Stanford University, and has been a consultant to higher education for more than 40 years.

Bill specializes in decision support models for academic and financial officers and faculty in colleges and universities. HIs work includes academic resourcing and productivity, strategic finance, quality assurance and improvement for teaching and research, and the modeling of public and private institutions as systems and not-for-profit enterprises.

He earned tenure as a professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business where he also served as director of the doctoral program and associate dean. He then moved to the central administration as Vice Provost and Dean of Research, acting provost, and vice president for business and finance—during which time he developed and pioneered financial planning and management tools that have become standard in the field. After his administrative work, Dr. Massy became a professor in the Stanford School of Education, where he founded the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research and directed the project on educational quality and productivity at the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Postsecondary Improvement (NCPI).

Bill also served for twelve years on the Hong Kong government’s oversight committee for higher education and fifteen years as a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education. His work on academic productivity earned him a slot on the U.S. National Research Council’s panel on productivity measurement in higher education, where he co-authored the report.

His book with David Hopkins, Planning Models for Colleges and Universities, received the Operations Research Society of America’s Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for 1981, and in 1995 he received the Society for College and University Planning’s annual career award for outstanding contributions to college and university planning. He authored Resource Allocation in Higher Education (with collaborators, Michigan, 1996), and Honoring the Trust: Quality and Cost Containment in Higher Education (Anker/Jossey Bass 2003), His Reengineering the University: How to Be Mission Centered, Market Smart, and Margin Conscious (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), shows how, working together, administrators and faculty can improve education, research, and affordability by keeping a close eye on both academic values and program and departmental margins. His latest book, Resource Management for Colleges and Universities (Johns Hopkins, 2020) elaborates on the academic resourcing models introduced in Reengineering—which he is building on in his work with Gray Associates.

Dr. Massy holds a Ph.D. in economics and MS in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS from Yale University.