Article: Coping With Special Demands of Student-Information Systems
I recently attended an advisory-board meeting for a national higher-education organization. Before we started, a leading scholar who focuses on issues of access and equity leaned across the table and said quietly: “Enrollment managers are ruining American higher education. They are undoing our commitment to justice and need-based financial aid.”
Later I attended the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ annual conference on enrollment management. In just 12 years, that meeting has grown from fewer than 200 people to more than 600. Indeed, conference planners are struggling to find a larger venue because the field of enrollment management is growing so fast.
It’s not just that, in two decades, enrollment management has gone from a strategy practiced at a small number of private colleges to standard procedure at most public and private institutions. It is also at the center of some of the most contested issues in higher education today. Yet few educators understand it.
Enrollment management provides both an organizational structure and processes to improve the recruitment and retention of students. There are numerous sources to which one can turn. They include the Enrollment Management Review, a quarterly newsletter published by the College Board, and the Strategic Enrollment Management Monthly (known as SEM), published by the association of registrars and admissions officers. The group has also started publishing a series of books and monographs on the subject. The College Board, too, publishes relevant books and products to help enrollment managers. I know of only one graduate program in enrollment management, a master’s program at the University of Miami, but many institutions offer courses.
Several converging trends explain the emergence of enrollment management and point to some of the organizational challenges and thorny issues that it raises for administrators, faculties, boards of trustees, and public-policy makers. In some respects the emergence of enrollment management is simply one small indicator of the ascendancy of capitalism and the extent to which the market metaphor has taken hold throughout the United States and the rest of the world. Increasingly, observers of trends in higher education are using terms like “marketization” and “commodification” to describe trends in public and institutional policy that are influencing colleges.
Some critics of American higher education tend to view the past with rose-colored glasses and see such trends as new and unwelcome developments. However, the search for more resources has always been part of American higher education. Consider the toll revenue that Harvard University once received from ferries crossing the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass., or the farm goods that college presidents once accepted in lieu of tuition payments, or the lottery proceeds that were once dedicated to private universities. Back in 1982, John Thelin’s Higher Education and Its Useful Past discussed the role that tuition-and-enrollment schemes have played in financing individual institutions. Thelin noted that recruiting for survival, rather than for selectivity, has often been the norm. The struggle for income and students is not something new.
The recent evolution of the concept of enrollment management, however, can be traced to events and social trends of the past 60 years. We are in an era when tuition dollars, long a key source of revenue for private institutions, are becoming ever more important as a source of income for most public institutions as well. In addition, more than ever before, college rankings have raised the level of competition for top students, which can be translated into another valuable commodity: prestige. Faculty members, parents, trustees, and public-policy makers want to know, “Why isn’t my university more highly ranked?” Economists who study higher education have shown that institutions that derive significant portions of their revenue from tuition or that seek to raise their prestige are likely to devote attention and resources to attracting what they see as the right mix of students. At the same time, institutions are also stepping up efforts to serve -- and recruit -- more low-income and diverse students.
The GI Bill and the recommendations in 1947 of the Truman Commission, which called for expanding community colleges, led to the rapid expansion of capacity among two- and four-year colleges in the years following World War II. Then a decline in the number of traditional high-school students took place in the late 1970s and much of the 1980s. The convergence of those developments caused heavy competition for college students and accelerated the use of business-oriented marketing techniques. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, tuition-discounting techniques using financial aid strategically for recruitment purposes emerged among less-selective private colleges, a strategy that has slowly spread among public and private institutions. And college rankings became big business, creating the illusion of simple and tangible measures of quality and increasing the pressure on many colleges to enroll larger numbers of high-ability students. Next came the economic turmoil that started in the 1990s and continues today, with its slow but constant decline in state funds for public higher education, and colleges’ increased reliance on tuition and fees.
Together those trends, along with the ascendancy of the market model in governmental and not-for-profit organizations, set the stage for the evolution of enrollment management.
From Prospective Students to Satisfied Alumni
Enrollment management is designed to influence how many and which students enroll. Shaped by strategic planning and supported by institutional research, enrollment management deals with how students choose a college, how they make the transition to higher education, what leads them to stay or drop out, and what influences how well they do while enrolled. It affects recruitment and financial aid, student-support services, as well as curriculum development and other academic areas, all of which affect who enrolls and how well they do. It includes using research to position an institution in the student marketplace; examining what factors influence student persistence; developing appropriate marketing, pricing, and financial-aid strategies; matching student demand with curricular offerings that are consistent with an institutional mission; and paying attention to academic, social, and institutional factors that can affect student success and graduation. Enrollment managers hope to exert an influence on prospective students from the point of first contact until the students earn a degree and become satisfied alumni.
In terms of organization on many campuses, the offices that are most often put together in enrollment-management efforts include admissions, financial aid, registration and records, orientation, and retention-related services and programs. Others can include marketing and communications, publications, and institutional research. Increasingly, new electronic student-information systems are playing a part, too.
However, there is no single best way to organize a set of offices. The most common organizational approach has become to create an enrollment-management division with a senior enrollment officer appointed to lead it. Indeed, much as the senior development officer became common at American colleges in the 1950s and ‘60s, the senior enrollment officer is becoming prevalent today. The enrollment-management division provides a centralized approach in which a vice president or associate vice president is assigned the responsibilities for most or all of the administrative areas that influence enrollment. The various advantages of such a structure include: making enrollment-management strategies easier to put into effect; giving a single senior-level administrator full responsibility for the recruitment and retention of students; and designating one person to carry enrollment- related concerns directly to the president and the governing board.
Still, the centralized model is not always a panacea. Unless a campus is in the midst of an enrollment crisis, it is difficult to create new administrative divisions. They are expensive, particularly if you have to hire new senior people with new skills. Furthermore, professional and support staffs at most organizations often do not deal well with rapid organizational change, which can polarize a new organization and reduce its effectiveness. Less formal coordination can also work.
Are Some Practices Enemies of Equity?
Enrollment management would thus seem benign. It helps colleges enroll more students and serve them better. So why do some scholars and critics see it as the enemy of equity and access? What are the difficult issues that it raises?
Perhaps no current enrollment-management practice is more controversial than tuition discounting. Many presidents of small private colleges believe that their institutions would not survive without the ability to use campus-based financial aid as a tool to attract the mix of students they want. However, campus-based aid is often used for other purposes as well. When it is seen as a way not only to ease the burden of tuition for students but also to attract tuition dollars, it necessarily means focusing on relatively affluent students. In addition, strategies that emphasize promises of tuition discounts to high-ability students also end up giving merit awards primarily to those from affluent families, because there is a strong positive correlation between socioeconomic class and academic performance. On most campuses, however, there is a finite amount of campus-based financial aid available.
In an era when the majority of colleges cannot come close to meeting student demand for need-based financial aid, every dollar that goes to enroll students who do not really require aid diminishes access and equity for those who have moderate and high levels of financial need.
Historically, public institutions have not relied much on merit-based aid, but several recent studies reveal that they have begun to put proportionately more of their campus-based financial-aid dollars into merit awards. In the private sector, many institutions are attempting to decrease their discount rate. Indeed, many private institutions now have discount rates of 30 to 40 percent, which means that of every dollar they raise in tuition, 30 to 40 cents is returned in the form of financial aid.
At most private colleges, however, reducing the discount rate has meant reducing need-based aid. What’s more, the high costs of tuition discounting have caused many institutions to defer maintenance of their facilities, depress faculty salaries, or invest less of their resources in student services. It would be unfair to trivialize or oversimplify the issue. Unless an institution has a large endowment for financial aid, colleges that are unable to enroll enough students who can afford to pay all or most of their costs may eventually risk their ability to offer financial assistance to any students. The real challenge is to find the right balance.
Another issue of balance is how much to put into recruiting. After all, providing merit aid and discounting tuition make it hard for institutions of higher education to invest enough money in their core business: educating students.
The appropriate role of standardized entrance examinations is also a thorny issue on many campuses. In an era when rankings are so important, most colleges want to enroll as many top students as possible, and many of the publications that carry out rankings see the average ACT or SAT test scores of an entering class as an important indicator of quality. As a result, colleges are increasingly offering large scholarship packages to top students. But when colleges focus too much attention on attracting the best and the brightest, they limit access to low-income and minority students, who tend not to score as well on standardized tests.
Moreover, when a college offers a student with outstanding SAT scores and high-school grades a financial-aid package that exceeds $20,000 a year, is it the “academic excellence and strength of the institution” that is attracting the student, or the size of the scholarship? Prospective students might reasonably ask, “If a college has to pay me this much to enroll, how good can it really be?”
Often, faculty members can be part of the problem. Although they may espouse egalitarian values of equity and justice, they also want to attract the best possible students, because the characteristics of enrolled students are perceived to be a reflection of the quality of the faculty. Lest I be too harsh, there is no doubt that better students enhance the quality of the classroom experience. The ACT and the College Board, which sponsor the standardized tests, are not the culprits. Collectively, colleges need the tests to help compare the skills of students because not all high schools offer the same quality in their curricula, or have the same quality of classroom facilities or of teachers. If there is a problem, it is with how colleges -- how faculty members and administrators -- use the test results.
A Need for Policies and Incentives
All of that is why attracting and retaining students -- what we call enrollment management -- has become big business at many colleges and universities. As governments in Europe and Asia have been moving to market models and have started to charge tuition, aspects of the enrollment-management concept are taking hold in those countries, too. It is not easy to regulate markets. Almost every year, a state or federal policy maker will propose capping tuition rates or making institutions that raise tuition too much ineligible for federal or state financial-aid programs. Too often, observers suggest simple solutions to complex issues: Simply holding tuition costs constant when the number of students enrolling in public institutions is increasing and state appropriations are declining is not likely to provide a permanent fix for rising tuitions.
Perhaps the focus of public policy makers and critics of enrollment-management strategies should be on incentive structures to alter institutional behavior rather than trying to stop the use of such strategies. Institutional enrollment-management practices must constantly change because federal and state financial-aid policies constantly change; demographic trends in every state change; new systems evolve. What do those changes do? When states reduce financial aid for students, will institutions be able to enroll the same number of students? When a governor or the chairman of a board of trustees challenges a public institution to increase quality, will that provide an incentive to go after top students at the expense of low-income or first-generation students?
Attempts to halt or slow the use of information and innovation are seldom successful. Efforts to channel innovations are more likely to succeed. There are plenty of proposals: For example, President Bush and, recently, House Republicans have proposed allocating funds in programs like college work-study to campuses based on the percentage of low- and moderate-income students they enroll rather than on a formula, established in the 1970s, which critics say gives a disproportionate share of the money to wealthy institutions that may not enroll many low-income students. Or, I would suggest, another approach is to tie some portion of the money available for Pell Grants at individual institutions to the percentage of campus financial aid allocated according to need.
My point is not to debate such strategies here, but to call for a broad conversation about them. From the 1930s through the 1950s, both the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the College Board helped broker common admissions practices that benefited both students and institutions -- and that kept some of the competitive forces in the enrollment industry in check. At the moment, neither organizations of admissions professionals nor their member institutions seem able to craft common recruitment practices that might, as in the past, provide norms that would be good for students and good for institutions.
On topics from early admissions and early action to discounting practices, colleges would benefit from reaching some consensus. Might that limit the ability of some institutions to alter their profile? Yes, but our current unbridled competitive environment is ratcheting up the costs for all institutions and for all students and their families. In the final analysis, the wealthiest institutions have been able to maintain their competitive advantage because they can, if needed, use their financial assets and status to employ enrollment-management techniques most effectively. More important, many competitive efforts do harm disadvantaged students, who do not have access to private college-admissions counseling and who do not understand how college admissions and financial aid work.
Still, it is unlikely that higher education can put the market and enrollment-management models back into the genie’s bottle. Enrollment management is simply a tool. Organizations need such tools in order to administer their affairs. How the tools are used, and the impact they have, is ultimately up to the governing boards and senior administrators of colleges, as well as public policy makers. Such broad discussions of how new management strategies and tactics are influencing students, their families, and our institutions of higher education are not occurring. Isn’t it time that we examine the impact of our policies?
Donald R. Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies and vice chancellor for enrollment services at Indiana University at Bloomington, is editor of Strategic Management Review.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 34, Page B3