Enrollment is boring. Yes, this profession I’ve chosen is boring, and it’s likely my family would tell you it suits me just fine. It’s also complicated. Ditto.

But you have to pay attention to it, and you have to be bored by it. You have to do so, engaging more than Elevator Guy. You have dozens if not hundreds of Elevator Guys on campus. The Elevator Guy is that person who gets on the elevator with me, and, hoping to make small talk, asks, “So, how’s enrollment look?”

Big mistake.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Freshman applications? Graduate enrollment? Pell students? Overall headcount? New? Continuing? For your college? Or are you asking about retention? Or maybe you really want to know about revenue?” By the time I’m finished with my follow-up questions, Elevator Guy has glazed over. He’s bored. He didn’t really want to engage in a discussion about enrollment. He wanted an answer.

We all do.

Take a look at this dashboard, showing university enrollment from 2011 to 2023 as a good example. You can see the answers to your enrollment questions depend a lot of what you’re asking.

Long term, enrollment is down. Except graduate enrollment, which is up, and has been up by half-a-million students over this period. Undergraduate is down by 633,000 students. Unless you mean just in the last year, which it’s up by about a half-million.

All of this is important, and yet mostly irrelevant to you. If you’re at a private, Carnegie Class Masters Colleges and Universities: Larger Programs institution in the Southeast, here’s what your comparator numbers look like.

Try to explain this context to Elevator Guy on the trip to the 5th floor. Or your trustees, who may get more “insight” from the Wall Street Journal than they get from you. If you need some help with context, let me know.