Enrollment Planning

What is enrollment planning?

Enrollment planning is the process of developing and managing an institution’s program offerings. It’s one of the most important responsibilities of a school’s admissions team. A good enrollment plan can help a university reach its goals, while a flawed plan can cause serious problems.

Strategic enrollment planning requires time, skill, and experience to ensure sufficient resources are available to meet an institute's projected enrollment demand. Educational institutions employ admissions and enrollment management software to handle the school's whole admissions process and student enrollment.

As part of strategic enrollment management (SEM), enrollment planning requires a tactical thinking process that considers the institution's mission and the role that enrollment management plays in achieving the institution's missions.

Enrollment management is divided into four major categories:

1. Admission management: An essential component of enrollment management and the coordinated effort that moves and guides students from being prospects to getting enrolled and beyond. The admissions function collaborates strategically with the departments in charge of administering an institution's enrollment, orientation, curriculum, and student success.
2. Retention: An institution’s capacity to retain and re-enroll students from one year to the next is known as retention. Every independent school's reputation is built on retention. The community members (particularly teachers, school leaders, counselors, and those in charge of admissions) need to be both successful and aligned for the students to succeed. It's critical to gather and evaluate data to help institutions recognize underperforming individuals and those on the verge of dropping out.
3. Research: Gathering and evaluating data on internal and external factors impacting enrollment, student performance, and the institution's image is part of the research process. The staff should research daily, weekly, monthly, annually, or even on an ad-hoc basis, and that research should adequately reflect the school's stakeholders' opinions and enrollment projections. Data allows educational institutions to make needs-based modifications to critical areas that influence the living and learning environment.
4. Marketing: The process of matching a product's or service's strengths and distinctive features with the recognized requirements, interests, and skills of potential buyers and then promoting them accordingly. Marketing initiatives at independent institutions include defining institutional image, setting enrollment objectives to fulfill overall objectives, determining the institution's market niche, and combining marketing and communication efforts.

Enrollment planning looks at broad environmental patterns and evaluates how they impact the wider pool of eligible students to apply to a college or institution. It then establishes goals for the student body and engages with campus-wide initiatives to ensure that these goals are consistent with marketing, recruitment, admission, tuition setting, financial assistance, academics, and student success activities.

The planning team will gather information from stakeholder departments and analyze key objectives during strategic enrollment management planning. The models are then designed to depict the many potential scenarios for which an institution's admissions and financial aid departments should aspire and how student success initiatives should align with the optimistic new student base.

The strategic enrollment planning process is frequently carried out by an enrollment management or admissions office. Many institutions hire consultants to assist them in this process.

Why is enrollment planning important?

As colleges and universities continue to readjust their budgets to be more fiscally responsible, the need for effective enrollment planning becomes paramount.

Although higher education institutions, such as high schools or community colleges, cannot expect to increase enrollment of new students each year, they can optimize their enrollment strategies to ensure that they reach the enrollment goals for their academic programs. Strategies include recruitment, student retention, managing demand, and recruiting prospective students, among others.

Effective enrollment planning provides relevant and accurate data that is critical for the school as a whole. It enables an educational establishment to enhance academic affairs, assess their value proposition, and present a more engaging story to potential families and benefactors. It's an essential element of the financial viability planning and decision-making process since it helps spot market movements.

Benefits of strategic enrollment planning

Strategic enrollment planning is one of the major factors contributing to academic excellence in an establishment. A school's strategic enrollment planning involves crafting and maintaining an adequate and beneficial admission scheme to increase the student population.

Enrollment planning helps an institution in a variety of ways, including:

• Supporting long-term enrollment and financial health.
• Deliver cost-effective goals by creating an action-item led strategy with ROI in mind.
• Providing realistic, verifiable goals for student recruitment, student performance, and the school's market presence.
• Ensuring that the institution's goal and present condition are in sync with the evolving competitive market.

Elements of a strategic enrollment plan

Strategic enrollment planning is a holistic approach to recruitment and enrollment that helps outline what should be done to achieve enrollment goals. An effective enrollment management plan incorporates the following elements:

• Institutional and situational assessment: The institutional and situational evaluation, like a SWOT analysis, focuses on institutional strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and dangers. It includes data regarding enrollment trends and local competitors for specialized and differentiated academic programs.
• Student recruitment and enrollment strategy: Defines the aims and objectives for student recruitment based on degree programs and learning mode. Furthermore, it includes the exact metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that the staff will utilize to assess whether or not the goals have been fulfilled.
• Student retention and student success strategy: Includes objectives, tactics, and narratives concerning critical aspects such as academic (faculty) engagement, financial aid, peer engagement (extracurricular activities), and academic support programs. This section should also include precise measurements and KPIs for each of the selected retention tactics.
• Marketing strategy: Because many enrollment managers are also in charge of marketing, a section on marketing strategy is crucial for an effective enrollment management plan. The slogan, brand promise, brand qualities, and a brief explanation of the evidence to explain why the branding strategy is relevant and applicable should all be included in this section of the plan. More significantly, market research, advertising, the university website, and direct marketing techniques should all be recognized and addressed.
• Student financial support strategy: Some colleges extensively use tuition discounts, and other schools rely on government funding. If a section on student financial aid is included, it should cover the discounting method, target discount rates, and net tuition income for incoming student cohorts.

Enrollment planning best practices

Higher education is continually looking at enrollment trends and upcoming demographics to set targets for each school. This helps in increasing recruitment efforts and the retention rate of undergraduate enrollment.

Here are some best practices to follow when creating a strategic enrollment management plan:

• Set attainable enrollment targets rather than forecasts for enrollment success. Enrollment targets should also go beyond a single figure. They must be divided into subpopulations based on their major, ethnicity, region, transfer, and so on.
• Enrollment is driven by engagement. Having a good set of marketing and recruitment key performance indicators to follow helps schools assess their yearly efforts and make critical choices on budget allocation and strategy. It also allows them to change their approach in real time rather than waiting until the end of the cycle.
• Financial help should be awarded so that students may receive what they need when they intend to enroll. Provide accurate information to potential students regarding their institution's expenses and financial aid possibilities, programs, and procedures.
• Create a recruiting database and inquiry pool. Use an enrollment management software that integrates with existing tools such as the student information systems (SIS) software or the school management software to streamline the sharing of student affairs data collected by the school.
• Maintain the confidentiality of prospective and existing student information and respect the private nature of this data under federal, state, and local laws.