SUMMARY OF THE STUDY This qualitative study examines how educational managers in a large public institution of higher education use cost information when making decisions about the design, delivery, and improvement of health professions 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 https://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. It is structured into two sections: Current Practices and Future Preferences, each consisting of themes, subthemes, and open codes used in the reflexive thematic analysis. Codes are conceptual labels, not raw data, and are intended to support transparency of the analytic process.

COREQ Checklist.pdf: he Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ) is a 32-item reporting checklist for interviews and focus groups. It indicates where key study information is reported within the manuscript and supplemental files.