Wherever problems lurk, there’s a slew of possible solutions for sale. So the ever-daunting challenge of enrolling the right mix of students was bound to spawn a big business, one that helps colleges fill their beds and polish their reputations. Over the last few decades, dozens of companies peddling enrollment-management advice and services have built a multibillion-dollar industry, which is now attracting players from other sectors.
Last week the Advisory Board Company, a research, technology, and consulting firm, made a cannonball splash: The global corporation announced its plan to buy Royall & Company, a Virginia-based business specializing in student recruitment, for $850-million. (That’s more than the estimated value of the Texas Rangers, which, at $825-million, Forbes magazines ranks seventh-highest among Major League Baseball teams.) The whopping purchase price suggests the scale of the enrollment-services market, which the Advisory Board Company estimates at about $9-billion—and growing rapidly.
That says a lot about the plight of today’s colleges. Mounting financial pressures, demographic shifts, and—let’s not forget—the relentless pursuit of prestige have fueled the demand for enrollment know-how. In this age of big data, there’s plenty of sophisticated stuff (software, analytics, and strategies) for colleges to buy.
Chasing tomorrow’s applicants, many institutions have decided, is too important a task to go alone. Like it or not, the 21st-century admissions office is powered by third-party engines.
“We are seeing greater use of outside consultants,” says Susan Fitzgerald, senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service. “This is a very volatile market, and colleges are looking for any help and guidance in terms of navigating, for any competitive advantage they can get.”
‘A Great Data Asset’
That’s good for businesses like Royall & Company. Although your provost might not know its name, any admissions official surely does. A quarter-century ago, the company brought creative direct-mail strategies to its first college clients. Since then, hundreds of colleges have hired Royall & Company to expand their pool of prospective students, attract more applications, improve their yield (the percentage of accepted applicants who enroll), and increase net-tuition revenue.
The firm is perhaps best known for popularizing so-called fast-track applications; the prepopulated forms, which students can complete quickly, are lauded by some enrollment leaders and cursed by others.
Along the way, Royall & Company has culled lessons from continuing analyses of applicants’ behavior. Which email subject lines resonate with prospective applicants? When is the best time to reach out to high-school sophomores? “Our insights are always informed by the changing needs and demonstrated preferences of students and families,” John Nester, Royall’s president and chief executive officer, writes in an email. In short, his company mines data constantly for valuable clues.
That vast trove of information appealed to the Advisory Board Company, which has long worked in the health-care industry, consulting with nearly 4,000 hospitals and health systems. Seven years ago, the firm added colleges to its portfolio, starting the Education Advisory Board, a division that provides specialized research and best-practices findings to more than 600 member colleges. Although the company declines to reveal its rates, two senior admissions officials say their colleges each pay $24,500 for a three-year membership in the enrollment program, which focuses on student success and retention.
With the acquisition of Royall & Company, the Education Advisory Board will gain access to a vast college-applicant database. It would have taken a decade or more to build a comparable one, says Scott M. Fassbach, chief research officer at the Education Advisory Board: “If you want to understand how students choose colleges, it’s a huge data set, a great data asset.”
Combining the two companies, Mr. Fassbach says, will merge two information streams—Royall’s student-recruitment data, the Advisory Board’s student-success research—covering the enrollment life cycle, from application to graduation. What might all that mean for Royall & Company’s 350 clients?
“We think there’s a huge opportunity to help them think of this more seamlessly,” Mr. Fassbach says. “It’s more than just hitting a number this year. We see a ton of opportunity to make their jobs and lives easier.”
A Booming Market
That’s what outsourcing is supposed to do, after all. As the scope and complexity of enrollment work have grown, hiring outside experts is often a necessity, says David A. Hawkins, executive director of educational content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Few, if any, colleges have staffs that can keep up with each innovation in an increasingly specialized field, not to mention the budget to do it all in-house. “Thirty years ago, these were very homey, mom-and-pop operations,” Mr. Hawkins says of admissions offices. “Now, as the audience has expanded, as the recruitment cycle has grown to fill out the calendar year, and as colleges have scaled up recruitment regionally or nationally, the market for student information has exploded.”
That booming market has sparked concerns among some enrollment officials. When a college turns over some or all of its recruitment and marketing strategies to a private company, the question becomes, as Mr. Hawkins says, “What are we left with here?” Who’s ultimately in control of the messages a college sends, the tactics it embraces, can become hazy.
There’s nothing wrong with hiring an expert to tap a new market or deliver recruitment letters to mailboxes, says Jerome A. (Jerry) Lucido, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice. “There’s a set of skills, a set of metrics, a set of tools for understanding student decision-making that these entrepreneurs are developing,” he says, “and the market is finding value in what they do.”
But sometimes, things can go askew. Some admissions leaders are leery of the pitches consulting firms and marketing companies make to campus leadership, Mr. Lucido says, “because they tend to make it seem like the solution to enrollment is to have a bunch of tricks, rebranding or repackaging as opposed to actually becoming better. That can interfere with the natural process of an institution trying to improve.”
Ms. Fitzgerald, at Moody’s, has seen colleges embrace off-the-shelf strategies that do not fit them. It is not uncommon for colleges to end up with a mismatch, hiring one firm to drum up more applications and another company to advise them on financial aid. “Those strategies have to be very closely aligned,” she says, “and sometimes they’re not.”
In the end, the best data and the sharpest marketing strategies might not work unless a college’s leaders also use their own good judgment—and no vendor can sell you that.
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.
