Proper institutional planning requires accurate enrollment forecasts. This is especially true in the community college context given open enrollment policies and reliance on public funds. Despite the importance of this task, enrollment forecasts are relatively disconnected from theoretical advances in the study of retention and enrollment. In this…

At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the United States is entering a period of unprecedented demographic shifts affecting higher education. Not only are many states already seeing fewer high-school graduates, with more facing this trend as the decade progresses, but in all but a few regions overall population growth will level and…

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, commentators in broadly accessible media have offered a surfeit of predictions about the future of higher education. Due to the absence of accountability mechanisms, however, the accuracy of these claims has been heretofore unknown. Research shows that op-eds and other forms of public scholarship influence public…

As the competition for student enrollment has increased over the past several years, the pressure on the enrollment manager has increased proportionally. Managing enrollment expectations for institutional stakeholders requires effective communication, leadership, and the sharing of data with effective context. This article provides guidance on how…

As part of school district planning and projecting future enrollments, demographers need to factor the impact of new housing developments by using student yields. While resources are available that provide statewide student yields, they may not best reflect the demographic attributes of a school district's attendance area. In this case study of a…

Institutional staff such as enrollment managers, business officers, and institutional researchers are often asked to predict enrollments. Developing any predictive model can be intimidating, particularly when there is no textbook to follow. This paper provides a practical framework for generating enrollment projection options and for evaluating…

This study developed statistical models to forecast international undergraduate student enrollment at a Midwest university. The authors constructed a Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average model with input variables to estimate future enrollment. This model reflected enrollment patterns by semester through highlighting seasonality.…

As widespread restrictions to in-person instruction continue to impact higher education, community colleges in particular are seeing significant enrollment declines. Implications to budgeting, the success of students, and the uncertainty of current and future recessions are challenging enrollment managers across the United States. This article…

Projecting higher education enrollments requires a thorough understanding of the phenomena that impact student enrollment. Popular theories that have been used to project enrollment include human capital theory and consumer choice theory; more than a dozen other theories have also been cited in the literature. This article situates selected…

The decline in childbirths in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008-9 will reverberate into the 2020s and 2030s. This will lead to fewer high school graduates, and fewer students with the family background and finances to propel them into traditional college enrollment. Early college programs have been a success story in American education,…

Graduate schools and offices play a critical role in elevating the quality and impact of individual graduate programs. With a hybrid model of graduate administration,institutions' and graduate programs' enrollment needs are identified. Developing a graduate enrollment management plan is challenging, especially with limited prior institutional…

Both an art and a science, enrollment projections have become a major component to effective college and university fiscal planning. With stagnant or declining state budget support for public higher education along with an increasing emphasis on revenue generation, never before has predicting the size of an entering class become more imperative.…

This study investigates the predictive influences of achievement motivational variables that may sustain students' engagement in physics and influence their future enrolment plans in the subject. Unlike most studies attempting to address the decline of physics enrolments through capturing students' intention to enrol in physics before ever…

Theory suggests that teacher encouragement can aid students' educational progress, but there are not yet quantitative inferential studies that assess its longer-term impact. With data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), I use propensity-score matching to investigate whether encouragement influences the likelihood of…

Using the 2000/01 Baccalaureate & Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:00/01), this paper employs multilevel modeling to test a conceptual model of graduate school choice that draws significantly from human capital theory while incorporating the salient concepts of cultural and social capital. The model posits that the graduate school choice…