Key Enrollment Indicators - The Building Blocks of Strategic Enrollment Management

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Why are Key Enrollment Indicators Important?

College and university leaders, especially senior enrollment management officers, are challenged with complex issues when trying to strategically drive institutional health and student success. Shifting demographics, the need for increased net revenues, online learning options, declining transfer markets, and many other pressures demand a long-term vision for enrollment rather than endless short-term, tactical approaches. Where can institutional leaders begin to unpack these complexities and develop a plan with the strongest potential to help the institution realize its strategic plan and vision for success? Key Enrollment Indicators (KEI) are a good place to start.

KEI is a set of factors that help the institution understand its complex enrollment patterns in the context of its unique culture and enrollment profile. They are divided into two groups, enrollment cohorts, and metrics of success. Understanding the KEI of the institution will help its leaders, faculty, administration, and staff make better choices about where enrollment initiatives (strategies and tactics) will have the greatest impact on the institution’s health and student success, constantly moving toward what Michael Dolence called its “optimum enrollment” in the context of the academic mission1.

Enrollment cohorts are the broad audiences or student types currently enrolled at an institution or new ones that an institution may seek to enroll. These differ by institutional type. The table below displays possible or common cohorts for two-year and four-year institutions, smaller (largely undergraduate teaching institutions) and larger (flagships or other large institutions with complex sets of enrollments).

Table 1. Common enrollment cohorts by institutional type/size.

While these are some common cohorts and may describe your institutional makeup, there is no “one size fits all” set that can be applied to an institutional type. There are colleges near military bases where “military” is a distinct cohort. Four-year institutions with very small international enrollments may not need to segment this group apart from freshmen. As a general rule, the fewest number of cohorts is best, not the most number of cohorts. When a student type tends to behave much like another in initial and ongoing enrollment patterns, they should be combined. Discrete segmentation can occur later when tactics are applied. Having too many cohorts leads to diffuse strategies and too many irons in the fire at one time.

Identifying Your Unique KEI

Once the enrollment cohorts have been identified, the next step is to collect data across the student lifecycle for each cohort you identified. For example, what was the pre-enrollment “funnel” for dual enrollment, direct from high school, transfers, workforce, and adult learners at a two-year institution? What was the persistence rate for each cohort once they started on a degree/credential pathway? Collecting five years' worth of these data will help identify any anomalies that may come from just a single year’s data. This is often a place in the process where institutions may not have all their data in one system or even capture the needed data to complete each stage of the lifecycle. The best possible data should be used, but it is not uncommon to use this exercise to identify data and system gaps and note future improvements as needed.

Figure 1. Student Enrollment Lifecycle for a Two-Year or a Four-Year College or University

These data points start to form our second KEI group, metrics of success. Some of these metrics are simply counts, such as the number of inquiries or applications, or the number of new students or graduates. Others are the conversion rates between each stage of the student lifecycle. The next table lists common metrics that may be used in creating an institution’s KEI. Like the enrollment cohorts, these are subject to the unique nature of enrollment at each institution. The last column of these KEI are a level beyond merely tracking the flow of students across the lifecycle. These are sometimes referred to as “momentum” indicators, as they track patterns associated with students being or off track to complete a term, year, credential, or degree.

Table 2. Common Key Enrollment Indicator Metrics of Success (term and enrollment cohort specific)

How KEI Are Used to Model Enrollments and Drive Discussion

Using a simple set of cohorts, the next table displays how these could come together to form an enrollment model. For this example, just three cohorts — freshmen, transfers, and graduate students — are used. The dark purple column near the center shows the number of new students for each cohort. The columns to the right calculate the number of pre-enrollment cycle students required at each stage of the “funnel,” based upon historical conversion data for that cohort. The columns to the right show the persistence rates for that cohort, also based upon historical patterns.

Table 3. Simple Enrollment Model Using KEI

Table 3 is the starting point. It allows the institution to see that if it doesn’t change its KEI, it can’t change its overall enrollment outcomes. This begins the discussion on which KEI would help the institution meet its overall target for enrollment over time. The model's value is that it allows various stakeholders to discuss their perspectives on the best path to move the institution forward in its enrollment and foster student success. Many institutions assign this improvement to the recruitment area, meaning that the KEI to be improved is the number of new entering students in one or all cohorts. This, however, neglects improvements in student outcomes. Why do 40% of freshmen leave before completing a degree? What are the barriers that keep graduate students from completing their degrees in a timely manner? What are the areas where the institution has control over those barriers? While these questions inevitably start the institution into a premature tactical discussion, important issues are beginning to surface. Improving persistence rates can be considered another important way to meet enrollment outcomes.

From that discussion, the starting point model can be copied, and many versions of it created until the institution feels it has arrived at the best mix of its student cohort numbers, improvements in student outcomes, and the overall target for enrollment that aligns with its mission, vision, and culture. This takes time, and there are typically divergent perspectives on where and how to grow enrollment. The academy's strength lies in its debate and must be respected and leveraged to allow this “best fit” combination of KEI to emerge. The discussions are naturally iterative and lead into conversations of strategy (“how would we do this?”), and the role of leadership or an external facilitator is to keep it coming back to the higher level of optimum enrollment mix.

Table 4 shows a potential best fit model resulting from stakeholder discussions and leadership endorsement. It combines the challenge of increasing new student levels across all three enrollment cohorts and improving persistence in each. By doing this, the strategic enrollment management (SEM) plan goals become clearer: increase each cohort from its starting point level to this outcome over the next (perhaps five?) years.

Table 4. Best Fit Model to Meet Enrollment Outcomes and Student Success

Just changing a few KEI results in enrollment increases of about 500 students, once its strategies and tactics are identified and successfully implemented? This is now the stage where diving deeper into KEI is needed to determine where specific points of attack are needed to improve results. Returning to the momentum metrics in the right-hand column of Table 2 is a starting point for persistence work. What other persistence/student success initiatives are already in play, and how can they be integrated into this plan? What additional data is needed to understand where students are not engaging at the level desired or needed? How can faculty, advisors, student support services, and students be better connected so that they can get just the right support, just when they need it?

The model must also be used to examine strategies in the pre-enrollment funnel. How could recruiting and/or lead generation be more cost-effective if the conversion rate from inquiry/lead/prospect to applicant was increased? How can the admissions office connect admitted students to faculty in their majors to increase yield? What new methods, sources, and partnerships will be needed to reach adult learners who can add to transfer and graduate numbers?

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

This is just one part of the SEM journey. Gaining support at the executive level before you start, creating representative and cross-functional planning teams, methods for developing and focusing goals, strategies, tactics, etc., are all part of a strong SEM planning effort and, more importantly, designing the process to create buy-in and set up for implementation success.

KEI help an institution frame their enrollment issues by defining enrollment cohorts and success metrics then placing those into a model. It is a method to drive discussion, not a way to forecast enrollment precisely. There will be a margin of error with any model, and modeling improves over time and use. Institutions shouldn’t embark on KEI work and expect it to be a crystal ball or provide answers on the best strategies to drive enrollment outcomes.

Allow time for institutional stakeholders to absorb the concepts and data being shared with them. Too often, the process is rushed, and. as a result, a single person or office winds up creating a report that isn’t “owned” by others who will be asked to implement its success. This is especially true for chief enrollment management officers, who live with these data daily and are under pressure to produce enrollment results. While they want to bring faculty, leadership, and other administrative units along with them, allowing time for questions, debate (which is part of the absorption process for faculty), and reflection.

The KEI process inevitably identifies gaps in data. You wished you could track things, such as student engagement, their intentions or goals for education, and “black holes” where students disengage or depart, and you don’t have information to explain it. Rather than seeing these as limitations of your process, embed them into the plan as strategies or tactics for collecting better information as you move forward. Seek data that proves or disproves the current narrative about why students leave or why they aren’t successful. Use these to help improve student support and help the institution shift its culture to being student-ready and away from a culture where the narrative is that students aren’t college-ready.

1 - Dolence, M. G., & American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. (1997). Strategic enrollment management: A primer for campus administrators. Washington, D.C: American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.