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. […]
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 […]
If your university enrolls a lot of undergraduates, April can be the cruelest month. Typically, May 1 is the deadline most institutions use as their candidate’s reply date, when students offered admission must let the college know if they plan to accept the offer to enroll or not. The percentage of students who accept your […]
In January, 2017, in the middle of a rare snowstorm in Memphis, I presented to the students and parents at three private high schools. Part of my talk focused on the paradox of complexity in college admission: Everyone says we hate it, but the institutions that introduce more of it tend to be rewarded with […]
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 […]
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 […]
Nothing is so discussed–and perhaps so misunderstood–as college discount rates. And my opinion about the meaning of discount rates is changing, to boot. You probably know that discount rates are calculated by dividing unfunded institutional aid by gross tuition revenue. So if you charge $100M in gross tuition and offer $40M in aid, your discount […]
Enrollment VP 