The pandemic's impact on enrollment is best documented by timely reports issued by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Their reporting as of December 2020 showed that overall enrollment in fall 2020 declined by about 2.5%, although it was down more among undergraduates, about 3.6%. While students from all racial/ethnic groups had…

When March 2020 brought with it not only the initial signs of spring, it also brought the reality of the global pandemic to be known as COVID-19. This global pandemic impacted society in many facets. People lost loved ones to the illness, others are still dealing with "long-COVID" affects, and many people lost their jobs due to the…

Higher education institutions world-wide were impacted by the unprecedented novel coronavirus (COVID-19) beginning in early 2020. COVID-19 caused a disruption in services to students and resulted in pivots of teaching, learning, and student support. Community colleges differ from four-year counterparts through varying student demographics, funding…

The looming demographic crisis has been talked about for nearly a decade, has had higher education enrollment managers to strategically think ahead and urge their institutions' stakeholders that the model must change, that they must adapt, and that not all colleges and universities could be winners in the hypercompetitive environment they were…

Under President Biden in fiscal year 2023, the United States absorbed more than 3 million illegal aliens--the highest number in its history. Since public schools must enroll minors regardless of immigration status, unchecked illegal migration over the past three years has possibly cost the public education system billions of dollars. Large…

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), there were 3,982 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States in the 2019-2020 school year. Of these, 1,625 were public institutions and another 1,660 were private, nonprofit institutions (four-year and two-year schools). The private, nonprofit sector plays an…

As the country and college campuses shut down in the Spring of 2020 in response to COVID-19, institutions needed to quickly pivot their plans into a digital environment to yield their accepted class. Through the Wisr platform, institutions communicated directly with their admitted students and their families through discussion board functionality…

This article highlights the challenges, triumphs, and setbacks experienced by a mid-sized, public institution in Eastern Canada that is now more than two years into the SEM process. It shares how a team built a sense of urgency in an institution with historically-low retention rates and developed a variety of strategies and structures to improve…

In "Lifting the Veil on the Enrollment Management Industry," Stephen J. Burd brings together higher education journalists, researchers, and industry insiders to examine how this industry has evolved to shape US college admissions since its inception in the 1980s. Noting the inequities that have been caused or perpetuated by enrollment…

The Center City campus of Thomas Jefferson University (Jefferson) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an academic medical center that enrolls 3,700 students all seeking degrees in a health science-related discipline; the Center City campus includes six colleges and an Institute for Emerging Health Professions. The Office of Admissions is tasked with…

Higher education institutions have the societal role and responsibility of providing guidance to their members and the surrounding community. Institutions endeavored, and are still striving, to illustrate multi-faceted practices that can be integrated into the founding principles of an educational institution. And that can pave its way through the…

A strategy for allocating merit-based awards and need-based aid is critical to a university. Such a strategy, however, must address multiple, sometimes competing objectives. We introduce an approach that couples a gradient boosting classifier for predicting outcomes from an allocation strategy with a local search optimization algorithm, which…

Susan Gottheil is Vice Provost (Students) at the University of Manitoba, where she is involved in strategic enrollment management planning and working with colleagues across campus to enhance the student experience. Here she writes that periodically she engages in critical reflection on the state of her profession as a student affairs professional…

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…

Maine replaced its existing high school statewide assessment with the SAT® and administered the exam to almost all public high school juniors. A primary goal of this policy change was to increase 4-year college enrollment by public school students in Maine. This brief report provides an overview of the data, research methodology employed, as well…