Cooperative Purchasing for Colleges: How Group Buying Platforms Reduce Costs

In the past year, higher education procurement has gotten even more difficult. Deloitte’s 2025 Higher Education Trends report put it this way: “The increasing frequency of budget gaps is acting as a forcing function, compelling higher education institutions to move into the uncomfortable territory of entering into agreements to share resources to find scale.“

That “uncomfortable territory” has become a necessity. Regardless of size, academic institutions are finding they simply don’t have the scale to drive volume pricing. While purchasing platforms are key to efficiency, cooperative purchasing is often the pathway to bottom-line savings.

The Evolution of Cooperative Purchasing in Higher Education

Technology is changing procurement, and the future is digital: 83% of chief procurement officers say digitizing the procurement process is a key priority, creating an end-to-end solution that streamlines the entire purchasing cycle. A digitized purchasing platform enables collaboration and analytics, providing visibility into spend patterns, supplier metrics, and contract compliance. In short, you get the data you need in a centralized platform to find cost efficiencies.

This includes working with cooperative purchasing agreements. By partnering with a sourcing cooperative like E&I Cooperative Services, you can reduce the workload for RFPs, standardize pricing, and save money. This allows you to spend less time sourcing and buying and more time doing the analysis that leads to better results.

Group Buying Platforms Create Scale and Savings

The benefits extend beyond bulk discounts. Cooperative purchasing platforms help institutions:

• Automate procurement workflows and approvals
• Consolidate spend data to identify savings opportunities
• Ensure compliance across suppliers and transparent audit trails
• Access competitively sourced contracts that meet regulatory requirements

Today, you need to justify every dollar you spend, so these efficiencies translate directly into gains. You can often find hard costs savings in the 10–15% range with cooperative purchasing while also realizing indirect cost savings through faster cycle times and reduced administrative effort compared to traditional procurement methods.

Building Institutional Buy-In for Cooperative Purchasing

For some institutions, however, adopting a cooperative purchasing platform takes work. Much of the purchasing activity in many academic institutions still happens outside the procurement department. This can create inefficiencies, tail spend, and non-contract spend that miss opportunities to reduce costs.

eProcurement purchasing platforms that include punch-out catalogs to contract suppliers can help cut down on maverick spending and leverage cooperative agreements for greater savings. They allow buyers to leverage negotiated pricing without starting from scratch, while still selecting suppliers that best fit their departmental needs.

To drive this approach, you will need to get buy-in across finance, academic, and administrative departments and centralize purchasing where possible. For procurement teams, this means you’ll need to educate buyers and adopt a change management strategy to overcome any initial resistance.

The Benefits of Cooperative Agreements for Colleges and Universities

Cooperative purchasing agreements allow you to maintain your autonomy while leveraging demand across other institutions. Rather than each college or university conducting RFPs and sourcing suppliers, you can opt in to competitively solicited contracts that aggregate demand for greater savings. When you partner with E&I Cooperative Services, the only member-owned, nonprofit sourcing cooperative that focuses exclusively on the education sector, you also get cooperative agreements that are structured specifically for the unique needs of higher education.

This shared framework provides several practical advantages:

• Time and administrative savings: Cooperative agreements eliminate the need for repetitive RFPs, reducing the procurement cycle from months to days.
• Cost reductions: When multiple institutions buy through a single contract, the combined volume drives lower pricing and more favorable terms.
• Compliance and risk mitigation: Because cooperative agreements are competitively solicited and meet public-sector purchasing standards, they ensure adherence to procurement regulations and audit requirements.
• Access to prequalified suppliers: Cooperative agreements connect institutions with suppliers who are already vetted for quality, financial stability, and other institutional qualifications.
• Flexibility within structure: While cooperative contracts create consistency and cost control, they also allow you to select products and services that align with your unique needs and budgets.

Cooperative purchasing provides the balanced model you need to hit your cost targets: you get the scalability and efficiency of collective buying power with accountability and flexibility to choose your own goods and services.

CPOs prioritize digitizing procurement, yet many institutions still rely on manual processes. See how E&I’s purchasing platform combines cooperative agreements with digital workflows.