You know you’ve heard the death knell for sometime: Colleges are closing at an alarming rate, and it’s only going to get worse. But are they? And will it? To the second part, I recall the words of Mark Twain, who once said, “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I […]
Look at this quick view of Fall, 2022 discount rates (x-axis) and average net revenue (y-axis). The approximately 1,000 bubbles, each representing a single institution, are colored by Carnegie type (a roll up into large categories), and are sized by draw rate. Some quick definitions: I noticed that Georgetown University in DC and Georgetown College […]
Of all the things we’re asked to worry about, now people are concerned about men. Like my post earlier (the one with the headline in Russian that people were afraid to read, apparently), you should realize that the narrative about male enrollment is true, but maybe not so dire as you think. It should come […]
I recently had the chance to congratulate a colleague who announced her retirement on LinkedIn. “Well done,” I typed. “You made it out the other side unscathed.” It was, of course, a bit hyperbolic, a knowing nod from me to someone who also worked in enrollment management at a large public university. In our jobs, […]
I can read your mind. You probably take last year’s tuition, look at how much your expenses will increase, and raise tuition by that amount. Problem solved, right? Then why doesn’t it work? It doesn’t work because the tuition colleges set carries almost no resemblance to what students actually pay. Of course, state and federal […]
The current sense of enrollment managers is that the present is hard, and the future is going to be even harder. In light of that, it’s natural to look in different directions to bolster enrollment, and it’s generally not long before someone points out that “it’s cheaper to retain a student than it is to […]
Perhaps you’ve seen the story of what might be the largest wave ever surfed (the news media are calling it the largest wave ever, but of course that’s not true.) It got me thinking about all the waves we’re dealing with in higher education: Shrinking enrollments, structural budget deficits at even some of the highly-resourced […]
Much of the hype in media and watercooler talk centers on institutional prestige, often using the selectivity of university in first-year admission as a proxy. Should you try to make your institution more selective to increase its prestige? If you think the answer is “yes” you might want to reconsider. From 2001 to 2023, first-year […]
Enrollment VP 