As students reassess their calculus in making college choice decisions, SEM professionals need to sharpen their pencil, be daring, and demonstrate an openness to new ways of doing business. This includes practices that touch on organizational change, internationalization, school counselor preparation, student success, and graduate education. This issue of SEM Quarterly speaks to how current SEM practitioners are increasing our understanding of these topics and what we can do to enhance our practice.

We have long known that internal environmental factors affect organizational change. John Haller, through a study using archival document analysis and semi-structured interviews of two private Catholic institutions, found that influential leaders, purposeful change, and organizational culture affect organizational change. This is the third in a series of SEMQ articles that examine organizational change at Catholic institutions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Higher educational institutions are increasingly called upon to internationalize. Shaimaa Nabil Hassanein provides a review of higher education institutions’ use of concepts, definitions, rationales, approaches, activities, and applications, and proposes a framework for internationalizing the student’s journey, along with potential enrollment management practices that contribute to institutional internationalization.

College admissions counseling is a process requiring school counselors to develop and implement curricula educating students about the outcomes associated with college attendance as well as specific steps in the admissions and selection process. Tara Hornor and Aaron Oberman conducted a research study that analyzed the curriculum of CACREP-accredited school counselor preparation programs that found only one-third of the programs provide formal training in college admissions counseling.

While enrollment management often focuses on student recruitment and onboarding, it is essential that it also supports student success. Meng Ni and Kara Haley-Shakya explored how students’ initial two years at college influence degree GPA and duration of completion. By highlighting the importance of the first two-year cumulative GPA and credits in forecasting degree outcomes, they present implications that include improved academic advising and collaboration between college and high school counselors.

Underrepresented students report a variety of barriers when considering graduate education. Jeffrey Ragsdale, Maria Medrano, Rebecca Weston, and Ambika Mathur describe and evaluate a nontraditional approach to the graduate application process that involves identification of potential applicants by graduate faculty and staff that resulted in an increase in Hispanic graduate students enrolled, as well as an increased graduation rate among all Hispanic students enrolled at the institution.

Jennifer McClure provides us with a look into the book, Higher Education on the Brink: Reimagining Strategic Enrollment Management in Colleges and Universities (2022), which presents a compelling need for postsecondary institutions to be daring and address the need for changes that have long been advocated and are now critical to the survival of higher education institutions by integrating SEM, strategic planning, and change management to achieve the critical transformation.

The world is changing all around us. To do enrollment management in this dynamic environment is to be entrepreneurial, creative, empathetic, and attentive to the changing needs of our students.

Happy reading.