Several months ago, the Chronicle featured an article on advising focused on the work of Dr. Ned Laff, who detailed the importance of broad-based advising and the gaps between what today’s students need and what they frequently receive. Drawing upon an advising career at multiple colleges, Laff focused his comments on the disconnect between advising […]
Introduction As a higher education leader for almost 20 years and a former department chair for ten, I have witnessed time and time again how the right department leader can animate an academic program. As John C. Maxwell once said, “The reality is that 99 percent of all leadership occurs not from the top, but […]
I. Introduction The Great Resignation, the Great Attrition, the Great Disengagement, and the Big Quit are a few of the names for the phenomenon occurring throughout different industries, including higher education.1 Higher education is not immune from this great exodus and is at a turning point as retention of faculty, administrators, and staff is more […]
The beginning of the fall semester is a tumultuous time for students, parents, staff, and administrators. Everyone is focused on enrolling new students and supporting continuing students. The weeks preceding the start of the term up through add/drop are intense for academic advisors as we urgently strive to manage the influx of appointments, walk-ins, calls, […]
We’ve arrived at the final of six posts about enrollment management, yet we haven’t really touched on why enrollment management (EM) is different from just admissions, or marketing or financial aid, or some of the other areas that are often found in a typical EM portfolio. In itself, this might be instructive; if you’ve found […]
In my last post, I wrote about how admissions works, although the lesson, perhaps, is that the term “admissions office” means very different things at different institutions. And while it’s still true that we in admissions and enrollment management all agree on one thing—that if a student never applies, they won’t enroll—it’s also true that […]
Introduction Like a great many other institutions, we emerged from the pandemic knowing that the disruptions of the last few years would inevitably lead to changes in the preferences and desires of our student population around the educational model and how education gets delivered. We also knew that, to remain successful and competitive as an […]
In my last post on student recruitment, I mentioned that recruitment and admissions—although often thought of as the same thing—are actually very different functions at some universities. But because there are about 1,600 four-year public and private, not-for-profit colleges and universities that are at least nominally selective, the line and distinction between the two varies […]
It has been said that all the world is simply a struggle between the “Haves” and “Have Nots.” How you view admissions and recruitment at your university probably depends a lot on which type of university you work at, whether you’re at a public, private, or for-profit institution, and—especially—what the mission of your institution looks […]
Having read in the last post about how marketing is an integral part of every college or university, it’s natural to wonder about the markets themselves: Who are they? Where are they? How have markets changed? And, especially in times of economic uncertainty, are there new markets we should be looking at? The good news […]
