When it comes to strategic enrollment management (SEM), “the issues are becoming more complicated, not less,” argues Don Hossler in his essay "Enrollment Management and Managing Enrollments: Revisiting the Context for Institutional Strategy," co-written with David Kalsbeek. The piece, published online in April, revisits their 2008 big picture essay on the rise of strategic enrollment management.
In the inaugural issue of SEM Quarterly (SEMQ), Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University, and Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management at DePaul University, reflect on SEM's evolution over the last five years. They believe that "nothing has changed"┬" as far as the set of strategies that can help a college or university achieve its goals--whether that is to "to increase socioeconomic diversity or to enhance institutional prestige, to optimize enrollment capacity or to elevate academic profile, and to balance complex cross-subsidies between and among different populations of students or between and among different academic programs.┬""
But, during that time, there have been dramatic changes in the external environment--most notably in the economic conditions that underlie college and university life--that have had immediate and serious implications for understanding the direction of enrollment management. To wit:
"SEM leaders are increasingly being asked to speak to the sustainability of the institution's enrollment strategy, which includes the viability of pricing and discount strategies, the high reliance on federal and state aid, the rising levels of student debt burdens and default rates, demographic shifts in the institution's primary market, its rates of student success and completion, the competitiveness of its market position, and so on," they write.
"In response to the pressing financial constraints elevated by the ongoing recession, concerns about sustainable strategy increasingly extend to the market viability of the institution's portfolio of academic programs and the adequacy of current delivery models for courses and programs (e.g., how the time and place courses are offered or how alternative modes of delivery such as online or blended/hybrid models might make a program more desirable or profitable; how the growing use of adjuncts impacts academic costs and quality; and so on). While these are, by definition and by necessity, academic responsibilities, they are key drivers of the growing pressure on senior enrollment officers to create a sustainable enrollment strategy, one that in fact may better be described as a sustainable revenue strategy."
These changes are so fundamental to the field, they argue, that the “S” in SEM could now stand for “sustainability.”
Published by AACRAO and Wiley Periodicals, SEMQ is free for AACRAO members. Find the full text of the essay--and others from leading thinkers in the field--online here.
By: AACRAO Connect