Determining best practices for graduate enrollment requires continuous dedication by graduate enrollment personnel to identify innovative and relevant recruitment strategies to attract potential graduate applicants. The dynamic landscape of higher education creates further complexity as these best practices must also align with institutional…

The college enrollment landscape has changed vastly in the last couple of decades. As such, regional public universities (RPUs) have had to become increasingly strategic in how they recruit new students to attend their institutions. For example, total college enrollment has declined from 2010 to 2017, and this population continues to become more…

Over 35 years of retention theory and literature have acknowledged the importance of institutional and student profiles in accounting for cross-sectional differences in retention and completion rates between types of colleges and universities. The first "P" within a 4 Ps framework of student retention--"profile"--recognizes that an institution's…

Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, comprises three primary units that each serve a distinct population: the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) is a residential college for roughly 2,800 traditional-age undergraduates; the College of Adult and Professional Studies and Graduate School (CAPS/GS) serves roughly 2,200 adult learners at both the…

Loyalist College is one of twenty-four provincially funded Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology in Ontario. Located in Belleville, Loyalist enjoys one of the smaller student populations in the college system with a full-time student enrollment of approximately three thousand students, compared with the five metro Toronto colleges whose…

What is institutional research (IR)? One of the most widely definition of the institutional research is by Joe Saupe, who emphasized institutional research as a set of activities that support institutional planning, policy formation, and decision making. Institutional researchers and IR functions are embedded in the offices of strategic planning,…

This chapter describes how Dickinson College, guided by a strategic plan, addressed its net tuition revenue problem through effective decision support, marketing and branding approaches, and pricing and financial aid strategies. The college's strategic plan guides allocation of resources toward fulfilling the college's purpose of providing an…

Describes how enrollment management in higher education integrates seven primary functional areas: institutional research and planning, marketing, admissions, registrar, financial aid, student orientation, and retention and advising. Addresses trends and careers in enrollment management. Also describes the author's personal career path in…

Historically, the primary role of financial aid was to increase educational opportunities for those with inadequate resources, yet more recently institutional aid is increasingly becoming based on criteria unrelated to financial need. Various political forces have reinforced the institutional tendency to redirect dollars from the mission of…

This article presents a family of organizational performance measures that enable decision makers at institutions of higher education to weigh the returns on investment in Total Quality Management. The enrollment management process is used to illustrate the use of six performance measures. The importance of a thorough knowledge of organizational…

Discusses the use of benchmarking in managing enrollment. Using a case study, illustrates how benchmarking can help administrators develop strategies for planning and implementing admissions and pricing practices. (EV)

Describes how the State University of New York, using large databases and regression techniques, has developed several coordinated, comprehensive efforts to evaluate and project current and future enrollments. One requires decomposition of the student population into mutually exclusive subgroups. The other, superior, approach uses logistic…

Three retention and enrollment management experts share their most effective innovations and best practices that have achieved cost-effective results. Tables provide data on dropout rates, graduation rates, and results of a student satisfaction rating survey of four-year colleges and universities. (DB)

Provides basic information that a college or university chief financial officer (CFO) must know about enrollment management in order to understand how to work effectively with admissions and financial aid professionals to maximize tuition revenue and enroll the optimal class. Specific suggestions for CFO involvement are outlined. (Author/MSE)

A common set of economic pressures has led the various sectors of higher education to adopt entrepreneurial models of financing and service.