The Edge

I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, I chat with a writer and policy wonk who’s shining a light on enrollment management — an influential industry whose role in driving the cost of college often goes overlooked.

Untangling the ‘Enrollment-Management Ethos’

The campus enrollment manager holds a high-pressure job that balances an institution’s story about its reputation, rank, and mission, with a cold, hard need to get paying students on the rolls. Those pressures fuel a competitive environment that pits colleges against each other, under conditions that might feel more cutthroat than ever, with students often playing pawns in the game.

Any vice president or dean of enrollment, however, is just an employee who answers to a president and a board of trustees, who are in turn responding to pressure from the market. “They’re working kind of in an ecosystem that has made enrollment management the be-all-and-end-all way of propelling your institution to success,” says Stephen J. Burd, a senior writer and editor with the Education Policy program at New America and a former reporter at The Chronicle.

Burd is the author of a new report, out today, that examines the role of enrollment management in Baylor University’s yearslong campaign to climb the rankings.

The report, “A Case of Predatory Inclusion at Baylor University,” adds to an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal in 2021, which detailed how Baylor had steered lower-income students to Parent PLUS loans. Unlike many traditional loans, Parent PLUS loans come with a higher limit on the amount that can be borrowed, up to the full cost of attendance, regardless of income. (House and Senate Republicans want to set new caps for the loans, though they disagree on the particulars.) The embrace of those loans drove the revenue for the university but also insurmountable debt for many students.

Seeing the burdens the Parent PLUS loans were putting on families, Baylor’s leadership started changing its financial-aid practices even before The Wall Street Journal exposé came out, reducing its use of merit aid and offering more help to low-income students.

But Burd sees the story as a byproduct of Baylor’s rise from an old-fashioned, conservative Baptist university that prohibited dancing in the 1980s and 90s, to a national-brand university with a powerhouse athletics program. (That reputation was tarnished under Ken Starr, the university’s president from 2010 to 2016, in the wake of sexual-assault scandals tied to that program.)

A statement from Baylor, replying to the report, noted that “under President Linda Livingstone’s leadership, Baylor University has made affordability, value and completion institutional priorities.” The university highlighted its Baylor Benefit Scholarship, which “offers full tuition coverage for incoming students whose families have an adjusted gross income of $50,000 or less” and has a high retention rate at 94 percent. The university also pointed to a $1.5-billion fundraising campaign that established more than 870 endowed scholarships, among other financial support. In the New America report and in an interview, Burd credits the university for the changes it has made.

Burd views his work on Baylor as a continuation of the reporting he laid out in a book he edited last year, Lifting the Veil on Enrollment Management: How a Powerful Industry Is Limiting Social Mobility in American Higher Education. There, he and other contributors — including Kevin Carey of New America, Jon Marcus of the Hechinger Report, and Catherine Bond Hill of Ithaka S+R — make a case that enrollment-management firms like EAB and Ruffalo Noel Levitz have driven a high-tuition, high-discount model for their college clients and stoked the institutional obsession with rankings. If colleges had a predisposition for competition and an appetite for glitzy capital projects, enrollment-management firms provided techniques to achieve those ends.

Burd’s report is the first of three from New America that will examine the influence of enrollment-management firms on higher education today. The second paper will pull up from Baylor to assess the widespread use of the Parent PLUS loan program to drive institutional revenue and rankings goals. The third installment will offer solutions and policy recommendations.

This trend started among private colleges, Burd points out, but public colleges now use enrollment-management techniques to mitigate states’ financial disinvestment. The firms’ predictive analytics in student profiling have become so attuned, their proprietary databases of prospective students so vast, that they can precisely estimate the amount of money a family can pay, allowing institutions to use financial aid as a tool to maximize their net tuition revenue.

While that might sound great to administrators at pressured colleges, these strategies have disproportionately impacted lower-income and nonwhite students. “That idea of financial aid is so foreign to the way that I learned what financial aid was supposed to be,” says Burd in an interview. He questions how much institutions have really benefited from the high-pressure environment the strategies have helped create. Enrollment managers have to run hard to keep their jobs, students wind up leveraging their futures to fight for slots at brand-name schools, and institutions that can’t keep up with the prestige race wind up discounting their tuition at unsustainable levels. “Everybody kind of suffers in some way because of it.”

Burd has had a long career as a higher-education journalist. When I arrived at The Chronicle as an intern more than 25 years ago, he was already an established beat reporter covering Congress, the Education Department, federal student loans, and other topics on the government and politics team.

His book and new report shine a light on an industry that doesn’t get much attention in the national conversation about college costs, the admissions race, and the debt burden. That’s where we started our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Much of the blame for the cost of college and rising student debt falls on institutions in the media narrative, but you’re suggesting that these corporate enrollment-management techniques are a major factor.

This does really drive the enterprise, and it has for the last three or four decades. It’s really the combination of U.S. News & World Report and these enrollment-management firms, the whole enrollment-management ethos. The confluence of these two independent forces that came together gave the enrollment-management companies a purpose: Here are some easy metrics we can use to define success for higher ed. And all you have to do is meet these. It just made it so much simpler. If U.S. News says we’re better, everybody will believe we’re better, so let’s work on these metrics and let’s hire this company to figure out the ways.

The fierce competition is a huge problem that just changed the way that higher ed operates. I mean, there was always an interest in prestige, but I think the free-for-all, kill-the-competition mentality came in. The discounting and financial-aid leveraging really has played a role in prices that hasn’t really been fully shown. There’s a quote that I have in the book from the guy who used to be in charge of Noel Levitz, talking about how a higher price allows us to do more discounts to different types of people.

When you use U.S. News as your reference point, then the comparisons are the elite institutions, and Harvard becomes the model for everybody. That’s where I feel like we lose the differentiation that’s been so important for higher ed.

Much of this work is done with forms of predictive analytics. How does it accelerate in the AI age? How does it change?

I’m a Luddite, so I haven’t fully thought this out. In general, we need an examination of these algorithms. We can’t keep regarding them as a black box, because it’s clear that they’re putting in factors like race and income. The demographic decline and the Trump administration cracking down on international enrollment adds fuel to all this. The more you starve the schools, the more they will double down.

How do these external pressures impact the core functions of what the university does — the teaching and learning, and the research?

There probably is a lot more pressure on grade inflation and not failing students. Part of enrollment management is also retention. So, you know, we treat this student as a customer rather than as a student. It probably leads to trying to find the most popular fields that lead to employment. It probably is worse for the humanities — but I haven’t done enough of a study of that.

What are some potential realistic solutions? What environment do you think would be better?

What I would like to see is an environment where we go back to basics, in terms of not putting low-income families in harm’s way. We need to tamp down on ever-increasing use of non-need-based aid and financial-aid leveraging. If we were going to go for a medium solution, what Baylor is doing now shows that you can still leverage your money but protect people making under a certain amount. That is something I would like to see. What I found really interesting about that was that they were able to do it without much sweat. They might argue that there was sweat, but they did it.

But I think we probably need deeper reforms. And I’ve been working with a group of higher-ed people on different types of proposals, but we haven’t quite nailed it down. There is always the question: How systemic can you go? You have Kevin Carey’s proposal, which would be price controls. It would be the federal government kind of telling states what to do. But it would affect just public higher education, and I think he acknowledges that the schools that would probably not opt into this would be the flagships and research institutions.

So it’s a huge change. We’re considering a range of ideas, but we definitely want to do things that seem more possible in the political environment that we normally live in — which is not the one that we’re actually in right now.

So what would be more possible in a normal political environment? You have talked about more collaboration among institutions to offer opportunities to low-income students and counter some of the negative effects of competition.

It’s crazy, because even collaboration has to get through antitrust barriers at the Justice Department. We need discussions about these things, even before we get to the proposals for solutions. We need to acknowledge that the way that higher education and student aid work now is not the way that they worked 30 or 40 years ago. We need to acknowledge the role that these enrollment-management firms play. Congress has never focused on EAB or Noel Levitz or any of these companies.

There’s a question as to whether financial-aid leveraging itself should be prohibited. The firms have pushed it to the point where they’re arguing for schools to leverage all of their aid, rather than just a portion of it.

The first thing is, we just need to have a hearing on it. It’s just amazing to me — higher-ed hearings are always the same issues. College prices are up, student debt is up, but if you don’t look at these factors behind it, you can’t even get to the solutions.

How can parents and students get informed about some of this influence on higher education and protect themselves?

We need way more reporting on this. I just wanted to get the message out. I saw the book as a first step. It would be really helpful to get this to college reporters and have student newspapers reporting on this — it would be a really powerful thing if schools had to answer to their students about it.

How does the consolidation of some enrollment-management and consulting companies in higher ed affect the business practices?

Once private equity gets involved, it takes out any of the moral considerations. It just makes everything even more focused on profit and raises the business stakes. The thing is, these colleges do have missions, as much as they focus on their margins, the mission is not totally out of their minds. There are people there who definitely care about serving students well, but when these decisions are really being driven by these companies, it’s another story. And then when these companies are taken over by private equity, the whole purpose of private equity is to build the company up so they can then sell it and make as much money as possible. Then it’s all market-driven. There’s no mission.

Higher ed doesn’t necessarily focus enough on the fact that these companies have no regard towards mission. It almost works like the stock market — every year we have to have a better class, we have to have better metrics, we have to have risen up U.S. News. It’s just like quarterly earnings, and I don’t think that’s how higher ed should operate.

The Chronicle reached out to both EAB and Ruffalo Noel Levitz, but neither firm offered comment.

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If you’re interested in helping students land in meaningful work after graduation, check out my book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does.