Too often, people assume Enrollment Management is just a fancy name for admissions, or that it’s just recruitment on steroids, or that it’s a sign of never-ending administrative bloat. With regard to the first and last observations, well, let’s save those for another post.

But with regard to recruitment, it’s among the first, and perhaps the most essential, component of enrollment management, because without enrolling students, there is nothing to manage. The big question people ask is always, “How much do recruitment efforts matter?” And the big, dirty-little-secret of admissions is that the answer is “No one knows.”

Not knowing, however, should never stop you from having an opinion (just go to LinkedIn if you don’t believe me.) My rule of thumb in explaining it has always been this: A third of your students are coming to your institution no matter what you do. A third of them will come as long as you don’t screw things up or make it too hard for them to enroll. And that last third is where we make our money.

The last third is the group you have to find (because they don’t find you). It’s the group you need to persuade. It’s the group you need to knock down barriers for, whether it be financial, distance, competition, lack of awareness, or general uncertainty. That’s what recruitment is designed to do (and, it might be added, this is where it diverges from marketing, which is intended to help make those first two groups as large as possible.)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting each of these segments represents equal, mathematical thirds of your class. Your results will vary, and the importance of your recruitment efforts in that instance will, too. If your institution is not a brand name whose panache will draw students like a magnet, and if your institution is one of the seemingly 95% of institutions that is going into a very tough budget year, you need to think about the investments you’ve made or are making in recruitment efforts; and you especially need to understand what reductions will mean.

Students won’t just show up. Your revenue projections probably need to be revised if you’re going to cut that investment. I have seen too many times the financial death spiral institutions put themselves into. It goes something like this:

• Revenue is tight
• Recruitment budgets are cut
• Enrollment goes down more than expected
• The problem compounds
• The college realizes enrollment growth will generate revenue
• Big investments, costlier than routine maintenance would have cost, get made

Or, if you want the meme version, it’s like this:

But no matter how you communicate it, it’s a core duty of the enrollment management person to make sure people at your institution understand the tradeoffs and the consequences that all decisions–not just budget decisions–play in determining your enrollment outcomes.