Learning Center

“When enrollment is up, praise marketing. When enrollment is down, blame admissions.” 

If you’ve heard this quip on your higher ed campus, chances are there is a strained relationship between those two offices. At most colleges and universities, the admissions office and marketing department are separate, having two distinct functions. 

The main goal of the marketing office is to generate awareness and interest for the institution’s brand. The focus of the admissions office is to engage with prospective students and cultivate those relationships throughout the recruitment and enrollment process. 

Some institutions have worked to correct this problem of division, either establishing a recruitment marketing function within the enrollment management division, or having the vice president oversee both enrollment and marketing. However, even with this setup, there can still be friction between the two offices. 

In order to hit new student enrollment goals, though, your higher ed institution needs both departments functioning optimally and working together. 

You’re working hard to lift enrollment numbers. You’ve identified the problems in your admissions process, and you’re ready to work with a partner who can help you. 

You’ve built excitement around a solution but are shot down when you seek purchase approval: “That’s too expensive! Can’t we do this in-house?” 

Maybe you’ve heard this before from leadership. 

How can you convince your leadership that change is necessary?

You can hope that you are able to do enough without investing in additional resources. 

But, hope is not an enrollment strategy.

Being down in enrollment causes panic for any admissions executive. During this stressful time, any number of thoughts run through your head. You’ve either heard it said or thought to yourself: “If we had more leads at the top of the funnel, we would have hit our goals.” Sure, because more in equals more out, right? 

With summer around the corner, it's a great time to get your admissions and marketing offices on track before fall. With so little time to address weaknesses, how do you make progress and still impact your next big recruitment period?  Reviewing and aligning admissions and marketing practices is key given the continued decline in enrollment according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center recent findings. 

Imagine how awesome you'll feel this time next year when your institution's enrollment and retention numbers are where you want them to be. Getting to that place does take some work, but with a clear strategy and concerted effort, you can be optimistic that your institution is taking the best possible steps to reach your enrollment goals.

Would you like to work smarter, not harder, when it comes to enrollment management? Predictive modeling, a regression analysis, can help you do just that.

In this post, we'll give you an overview of predictive modeling and some strategic applications in contemporary marketing, recruitment, and retention.

"He who fails to plan is planning to fail," Winston Churchill famously said. While he was speaking about war plans in World War II, his words of wisdom hold true for contemporary enrollment management. 

Having a strategic enrollment management plan for your institution means you’re more likely to succeed in establishing priorities, combatting uncertainty, and achieving your student enrollment goals. We know, though, it’s not always easy to create a plan from scratch. 

This article walks you through creating the plan step-by-step, and you can download a free strategic enrollment management plan template to customize. 

Use the information in this article and the free template to create and communicate guiding principles and priorities for the next two to five years.