Strategic Enrollment Management: Building Institutional Vitality

Strategic enrollment management. This three-word phrase is increasingly used as colleges and universities search for effective responses to today’s enrollment and financial challenges. Strategic enrollment management, or SEM, was originally conceived as institutions struggled to cope with declining demographics. More recently it has gained prominence in response to increased institutional accountability and constrained resources. Implementation of SEM is an effective means of responding to these challenges.

The core concepts can be understood within the contexts of several overarching goals of SEM.

Increasing academic quality and student success
SEM ultimately succeeds or fails based on the strength of its links to academics and student success. Whatever its broader purposes, every institution’s mission is based on the academic enterprise. Similarly, achieving enrollment goals depends on an institution’s ability to promote effectively students’ academic success. The ability to deliver programs and build relationships that enhance student access, transition, retention and individual goal attainment will determine whether the institution is able to recruit and retain the right number, type and mix of students.

Achieving optimum enrollment
Many institutions operate on the simple premise that they want more students than they have now. Many such institutions would have difficulty stating how many students would be “enough.” The concept of optimum enrollment takes into account desired student demographics, academic program demand and capacity, mission-based target groups and many other variables. The outcome is not one enrollment goal, but many.

Delivering top-quality service
The mantra of customer service has been spoken for years in all sectors of society, from the corporate sector to higher education. Over the past 20 years, virtually every college and university has implemented a quality initiative of some sort, with varying results. Effective enrollment management requires that an institution take its commitment to top-quality service to a higher level, assessing and responding to student needs in innovative ways.

Optimizing financial opportunities
From the beginning, enrollment management has been hardwired to an institution’s financial well-being. In its early stages, enrollment management was essentially defined as increasing enrollment to regain financial stability for tuition-driven private institutions. By the mid-1990s, when financially challenged institutions had either increased their enrollments or otherwise adjusted to their new economic realities, the focus of enrollment management was expanded to embrace improving efficiency. This trend toward efficiency has gained momentum as public institutions increasingly find themselves in the same tuition-driven circumstances as their private counterparts, while at the same time experiencing significant budget limitations. Indeed, efficiency in the enrollment enterprise has gone from being secondary to enrollment numbers to being of virtually equal importance on many campuses. The goal is not only to increase tuition dollars but also, at the same time, to reduce institutional costs in order to improve net revenue.

Building campus collaboration
SEM depends on the creation of strong and effective working relationships with virtually every department on campus. Recruitment and retention of students hinge on a series of individual encounters, which define the quality of the student experience. These encounters can range from trying to find a parking spot on campus to having an advising appointment with a professor to encountering a receptionist. Communicating enrollment goals and assisting all members of the campus community with understanding their role in achieving those goals requires regular communication and feedback loops.

In the current context, strategic enrollment management is as much about managing educational processes and resources as it is about managing enrollments. In addition to traditional recruitment and retention strategies, enrollment managers have expanded their tool kits to include efficiency and effectiveness strategies such as geodemographic research, student outcomes assessment, student aid leveraging and institutional financial modeling. These tools and many others are woven together into comprehensive, long-term enrollment programs that seek not only to enroll the right number and mix of students but also to improve educational attainment, put institutions on firmer financial footing and enable effective planning.

Written by Bob Bontrager, Director of AACRAO Consulting and the AACRAO SEM Conference.

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Posted on June 27, 2007