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) […]
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.) […]
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. […]
You’ve almost certainly heard people who say that their job is mostly “putting out fires all day.” Unless you’re a firefighter (the kind that puts out literal fires), a police officer, or an Emergency Room Physician, it’s not optimal to always be focusing on the “tyranny of the urgent.” But knowing it’s becoming the way […]
The more I read about this admissions and enrollment cycle, the farther back my mind goes: Sometimes it wanders all the way back to my first college fair program in Eagle Grove, Iowa, and the first student I ever talked to (I remember his unusual first name, so I went to Classmates, but that particular […]
Enrollment VP 