Enrollment management has become an integral aspect of higher education in many areas of the world. We had an opportunity to hear from professionals representing Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the United States at the AACRAO annual meeting this spring. Each presented a perspective on how enrollment management has evolved in his or her country or region.
Paul Abela is Executive Director of the Association for Tertiary Education Management (ATEM), which covers Australia and New Zealand (and has a new chapter in Papua New Guinea). ATEM, the only association representing the higher education sector in the region”including enrollment managers, marketing, finance and faculty management among many others, is 37 years old and has 1350 members. It includes public universities, community colleges and private institutions. The professional development activities it conducts for them include the largest conference for higher education professionals in Australia. The functional inclusiveness of ATEM is illustrated by its campus review best practice awards, which include awards in student administration and customer service, marketing, communication and public relations, leadership, research management, IT management, community engagement, and an award to a new entrant in tertiary education.
Enrollment management professionals are critical to all aspects of student life: retention, admissions, enrollment, advising, positive outcomes, and the values and mission of the institution. The profession's growth was driven by changes in higher education. Equity and workforce demands led to increased managerial responsibility. As a result of cuts in national funding to education, Australia purposefully ramped up international student recruitment by opening a specialized International Office. International recruitment and marketing has been conducted by institutions as consortia, with no criticism or talking down of competitor institutions. After Australia's international move,┬" universities became a multimillion-dollar business, as well as multicampus and multinational.
The massification┬" of higher education, of course, brought with it increased complexity. In writing of the evolution of enrollment management in Australia, Celia Whitchurch of the University of London developed a typology of topical areas, each performed by professionals in different ways as the profession evolved. Beginning as bounded professionals,┬" within a function or organizational location, over time they performed as cross-boundary professionals,┬" who used boundaries to build strategic advantage and institutional capacity. Later still, they performed as unbounded professionals,┬" who disregarded functional boundaries and focused on broadly based projects across the university, such as widening participation and developing their institutions.
A Canadian perspective was presented by Jody Gordon, Vice President, Students, University of the Fraser Valley in Abbottsford, British Columbia. A decline in numbers of high school graduates due to a low national birth rate, offset slightly by immigration, put pressure on higher education. To set the scene, she explained that the government subsidizes public higher education at a rate of 30 to 50 percent in Canada. An average of 50 percent of high school graduates enter public higher education institutions immediately after high school, which rises to 70 percent 5 years after high school graduation.
Canada has increased the numbers of its colleges and polytechnics that are now degree-granting. It has developed degree partnerships, 2-plus-2 degrees, and dual enrollment programs between universities and colleges. Course by course transfer systems have also been developed in the western provinces and Quebec; and other provinces are starting to take notice of the flexibility and mobility offered to these students.
Shrinking traditional markets, decreased government funding and increased competition has led to collaboration among institutional divisions, streamlining and improved support services. This has led to changes in the profession of enrollment management. In her professional life, Gordon has gone from Registrar, to Director of Enrolment Services and Registration, to Associate Vice President of Enrolment Services and Registrar. She now is Vice President, Students, with a more traditional student affairs portfolio. Gordon foresees expanded responsibilities for professionals in enrollment management in the future.
Conceptually, Gordon described a shift for many Canadian professionals from gatekeepers to Strategic Enrollment Management professionals, a change in focus from inputs/outputs to student success. These professionals are now often considered at the level of Deans or higher. No one association in Canada is covering all of the enrollment management area, but the Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada (ARUCC) did focus on student success as the theme of its 2012 conference. The Canadian Association of College and University Student Services (CACUSS) focuses on student affairs.
Bob Bontrager, Senior Director of AACRAO Consulting and SEM Initiatives, focused on the development of enrollment management in the U.S. context of changing population, economic factors, and higher education funding over the past 30 years. Many other countries are now experiencing similar influences, resulting in rising interest in enrollment management internationally. This is especially true in Australia, Canada, and the UK. Implementation of enrollment management principles in other countries involves more than simply replicating what has been done in the U.S. To the contrary, Bontrager suggested that one of the ways American enrollment managers can be most helpful to their international colleagues is to help them avoid pitfalls experienced by U.S. institutions. He further noted that American practitioners are learning from new ways of implementing enrollment management in other countries.