As we turn a calendar page on another year, I’m pleased to announce the launch of EnrollmentVP, a new service to college and university presidents, provosts, boards of trustees, and anyone connected to or concerned about enrollment. This is the companion site, where I’ll be posting about what I see and how I can help. […]
If you follow the news in Higher Education, you are hearing a lot about Demographic Cliffs and Discount Rates and other business angles on what we do. But, as always, you need to be careful about whom you listen to and what you believe. I saw a great example just this morning in the Chronicle […]
It seems a whole segment of higher education social commentary revolves around college closings, and while much of the information is accurate, it is–frankly–not very insightful. There have been stories in recent years about the shocking number of closures happening across the country. These have ranged from the ridiculous (12,000 in the past 20 years) […]
I recently followed up with a client, and we had a good conversation about the work I did and how it helped the college refocus some of their efforts. It was a fairly quick and straightforward consultation, and it wasn’t intended to transform the institution. (I’ve never heard of a consultative relationship that actually transformed […]
We’ve heard a lot about college affordability, and the topic frequently generates discussion about tuition cuts or tuition resets. This discussion is often focused exclusively on private colleges, not without good reason: Using 2023 data (the most recent available in IPEDS) we can see what sticker price actually means for new students (hint: not much.) […]
My last post asked you if you know why your competition is changing, if you are at a private college. One of the things I’ve noticed in visualizing IPEDS and Clearinghouse data is the increased competition private colleges are facing from public institutions, often (but not always) in their own state. So I looked at […]
If you work at a private college, you already know things in hyper-competitive market for students are. But have you wondered why? Here is a chart I did for a client private institution, showing where their admitted, non-enrolling first-year applicants enrolled. The orange part of the bar shows public institutions, and the blue bar shows […]
I’ve written before about what it means to be “data driven” in Enrollment Management. Since I posted this about ten months ago, people have asked me to clarify: If knowing stats is not data driven, what does it mean? To me it means seeking, finding, and learning from the patterns and trends you see in […]
If we were starting the college admissions process today, no one would design it the way it is. There is a lot wrong with the process of obtaining something that many of us believe to be a public good, and while I’ve written thousands of words about the other problems, the worst part is almost […]
Admissions and recruitment (two different functions often combined into one office) are hard: Much harder than people on the outside can understand. That, of course, doesn’t stop everyone from having an opinion about how you should do your job. Trustees, faculty, staff, and even students have lots of opinions. To be sure, some of them […]
If you follow admissions, you’ve heard by now about the Tulane University decision to “put a reluctant pause” on Early Decision admission offers to students from schools where some students had violated the terms of ED in the past. The article identifies only one, Colorado Academy, but suggests there are at least a few more. […]
Enrollment VP 