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…

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.…

In an effort to develop a low-cost and user-friendly forecasting model to minimize forecasting error, we have applied average and exponentially weighted return ratios to project undergraduate student enrollment. We tested the proposed forecasting models with different sets of historical enrollment data, such as university-, school-, and…

Providing support for institutional planning is central to the function of institutional research. Necessary for the planning process are accurate enrollment projections. The purpose of the present study was to develop a short-term enrollment model simple enough to be understood by those who rely on it, yet sufficiently complex to serve varying…

The academic program life cycle (APLC) concept states each program's life flows through several stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. A mixed-influence diffusion growth model is fitted to annual enrollment data on academic programs to analyze the factors determining progress of academic programs through their life cycles. The…

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…

The hard choices that must be made to balance budgets at higher education institutions can be painful and have dramatic consequences that may linger for years. If enrollment projections and therefore tuition income/budgeting projections for future years are inaccurate, then the result may be unnecessary or insufficient budget reductions, both of…

The generation currently in secondary schools has never known the world without the Internet, has spent thousands of hours each year interacting with video games and social media, and has high expectations for the degree of control and choices they will have regarding employment, entertainment, and the education they receive. The employers of our…

Higher education in Australia is undergoing a comprehensive reform with particular focus on higher levels of attainment by increasing access to university study for Australians from all backgrounds. To support the government's ambition of around 217,000 additional graduates by 2025, it has committed to removing caps and funding student places on…

The paper uses the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data system (IPEDS) data to simulate the 2020 American Graduation Initiative (AGI) goal introduced by President Obama in the summer of 2009. We estimate community college graduation rates and completion numbers under different scenarios that include the following sets of variables: (a) internal…

Presents a model to assist in long-range forecasting of enrollments in institutions of higher education. (WD)

Describes an enrollment projection approach that can easily show the complete dynamics of institutional enrollment change and can involve upper management in the development and understanding of important assumptions underlying the projection activity. (Author/MLF)