The Enrollment Manager as Bogeyman

Kelvin Ma for The Chronicle

Every story needs a villain. And in many higher-education narratives, the enrollment manager wears black.

Those who oversee the recruitment and retention of students are “ruining American higher education,” a scholar once said. They’re “screwing the poor kids,” an economist opined. The field is often described as the domain of cynical cutthroats, manipulative marketers, and worse.

“We’re the evil ones,” says Michael S. Kabbaz, vice president for enrollment management and student success at Miami University, in Ohio. “There’s this idea that we don’t care about education, that we would sell our soul to meet the institution’s goals.”

In short, enrollment managers have long had an image problem. That’s partly because their jobs remain widely misunderstood, even on college campuses. Sure, they share in the blame for what ails the nation’s inequitable admissions process. But their jobs are more complex — and challenging — than some of the prevailing critiques suggest.

Last week, New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, hosted a discussion that posed a binary question: “Colleges in the Age of Enrollment Management: Engines of Opportunity or Perpetuators of Inequality?” The most reasonable answer is “both.”

Let’s take a closer look. Enrollment management, which emerged more than 30 years ago, is the data-driven pursuit of institutional goals, weaving together recruitment, marketing, admissions, financial-aid, and student-success strategies. Steeped in market research and statistical modeling, enrollment leaders help colleges anticipate and influence numerous outcomes. And, yes, they fret about the bottom line, because that’s what leaders at all but the wealthiest institutions must do.

Think of enrollment management as the systematic pursuit of resources — revenue, specific kinds of students — that are often scarce. Although the competition for those resources might seem like a new thing, it’s really not, says Don Hossler, who spoke at New America’s event. He dismissed the notion that there ever was “this time when colleges and universities existed only for the public good, and that they never competed.” Many colleges have long devised enrollment strategies to ensure their survival and vie with competitors; now their tactics are just more sophisticated.

Mr. Hossler, a senior scholar at the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice, is an especially helpful guide to the profession’s many nuances. He previously worked in the field, and for many years he has studied it with a researcher’s critical eye. No apologist for the industry, he believes some enrollment-management practices accentuate inequality.

Still, the analytical tools in any enrollment office, he believes, are “value neutral.” They can be used to woo more students with high test scores — or those whose parents did not attend college. “The tools themselves are not evil,” he said. “It’s how they get used, and towards what purpose.”

The challenge is juggling multiple enrollment goals. No college has just one; it pursues many all at once. Those goals are “almost always in conflict with one another … and are often mutually incompatible,” Mr. Hossler and David H. Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University, wrote in a 2013 article.

A college’s push to improve its graduation rate, they explain, can complicate its goal of enhancing racial and socioeconomic diversity. Low-income and underrepresented minority students, for many reasons, are at greater risk than their peers of dropping out. So campus leaders might see “powerful disincentives” to enroll more of them, especially at a time when graduation rates are receiving greater scrutiny, Mr. Hossler and Mr. Kalsbeek wrote.

Although the authors acknowledged that colleges can do much to help such students succeed, those support programs tend to require substantial investments. Those expenditures can hinder a college’s pursuit of yet another goal that also requires time and money.

“The simultaneous pursuit of all these goals requires a difficult balancing act not only of resources but competing outcomes,” Mr. Hossler and Mr. Kalsbeek wrote. “It requires the management of multiple trade-offs.”

Complications and Contingencies

In a realm of trade-offs, no enrollment-management tactic is more controversial than the tuition discount. These days, many colleges see the strategic use of so-called merit aid as an essential recruitment tool, a means of attracting students who can pay all or most of the freight. Even so, the presidents of some small colleges have described the widespread practice as unsustainable and unethical, especially in an era when so many families have great financial need.

Loathe it or not, the merit-aid game is more complicated than it might seem. Peer into any college’s books, and you’ll find all kinds of cross-subsidies that keep the place running. Merit scholarships are just one example. Like store coupons, they are incentives that help increase the tuition revenue that so many institutions depend on.

Without enough revenue from high-paying students who get those discounts, some college officials insist, they wouldn’t have enough money to spend on other priorities, such as financing needier students. That’s true at many private colleges as well as at growing numbers of public ones.

“Thirty years ago, the admissions office here didn’t need to do the things we are doing today,” says Mr. Kabbaz, of Miami. The university now receives less than 10 percent of its operating budget from state appropriations, down from about 75 percent in the 1970s. “You can’t,” Mr. Kabbaz says, “overstate the impact of that.”

These days 45 percent of Miami’s students come from outside Ohio, and the university uses discounts to attract them. The success of that strategy, Mr. Kabbaz says, generates revenue that helps the university serve in-state students. This year Miami devoted an additional $1.6 million to better support the neediest members of the incoming fall class, which will include 425 Pell-eligible students, 125 more than last year, out of a total of 3,700.

Progress, Mr. Kabbaz says: “Do I think it’s enough? Absolutely not. I would love to double the number of Pell students. But the reality is you have to pay the light bill to operate the mission.”

Surely no college’s recruitment and aid strategies are beyond reproach. But it’s worth imagining what, in an era of tight budgets and abundant college choices, an alternative to enrollment management might look like. What would happen if Miami stopped wooing top students in California, Illinois, and Georgia? Would a hands-off approach to recruitment somehow result in a more equitable outcome, a more diverse mix of students on campuses throughout the land? Would any institution benefit from ignoring data, setting the vaguest of goals, and thinking half-heartedly about a strategy to meet them?

It’s also worth remembering that though enrollment managers are prominent players with great sway on many campuses, they have bosses, too. They take orders from presidents, answer to trustees, and explain themselves to faculty members. All of those people have great expectations, for more and better applicants, more super-duper young scholars who can fill all the traditional majors and that brand-new one, too.

“Enrollment managers are often blamed for pursuing goals that are set by presidents and boards,” writes Michael Bastedo, director of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, in a thoughtful examination of the profession. Presidents, he suggests, can publicly proclaim altruistic goals while directing enrollment offices to pursue selfish ones, creating a peculiar dynamic. “Enrollment managers become the faceless, pragmatic technocrats of the institution,” he writes, “while everyone else gets to pretend that all enrollment goals can be pursued simultaneously.”

Many enrollment officials, though, bring more than spreadsheets and technical skills to the table. On the contrary, some say they’re often the ones who try to keep campus leaders in line with the college’s stated mission, particularly enhancing or preserving a commitment to diversity. Often that means educating others on the campus about why, for instance, ACT and SAT scores are imperfect measures of potential. Or how a specific enrollment strategy fits into the bigger picture. Or what cash-strapped families are up against.

To that end, Wendy Beckemeyer, vice president for enrollment at Robert Morris University, in Pennsylvania, recently created the “College Affordability Academy.” It’s a homegrown course designed to help admissions and financial-aid counselors better understand the forces shaping consumers’ decisions. The eight-part course, with assigned readings and takeaways, has given members of several other departments at Robert Morris a better understanding of the nitty-gritty of paying for college, as well as the economic realities beyond the university’s walls.

“If you’re only thinking about your institution’s needs, you’re going to find yourself working with smaller and smaller audiences each year,” Ms. Beckemeyer says. “You can’t do this work in a vacuum.”

Nevertheless, some prevalent enrollment-management tactics often do seem born of a disregard for their ill effects on students and families. Financial-aid gapping, for instance. Admitting a huge chunk of the class via early decision. Wait-listing great hordes of applicants. Pursuing more and more applications that drive up selectivity numbers.

Yes, many institutions are fighting for their survival. But many are striving for status, too. Confusing the two is a common disease, which can blind campus leaders when prioritizing enrollment objectives. How far, really, should a college go just to inflate its prestige-balloon a little bit more?

Still, when tempted to declare that enrollment management is inherently good or evil, one should first consider the thorny nature of the job itself, as well as the limits of many institutions’ resources. After that, go ahead and question the profession’s excesses. And by all means, feel free to criticize its practitioners, too. They’re used to it.

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.