Whenever I get together with my enrollment management colleagues, we inevitably say some variation of, “This is a really challenging time for higher education.” Today is no exception, though the challenges du jour may be a little different.
Between political headwinds, institutional reorganizations, international student challenges, and hanging on the edge of the enrollment “cliff” that’s been discussed ad nauseam for years, higher ed does seem to be navigating some troubling waters.
We’re also seeing a gradual increase of college closures and mergers, particularly among nonprofit institutions since the COVID-19 pandemic.
What makes this all much more concerning is the level to which many institutions are unwilling to adapt to the myriad changes impacting the higher education space. Demand for online education, interest in degrees with defined career outcomes, and questions on the ROI of a college education may make it to the board table, but seldom result in meaningful change or innovation on many college campuses.
Fortunately, some institutions aren’t taking these changes lying down. Despite the rhetoric on college closures, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported in May 2024 that more than 23,000 degree programs have been added over the past two decades. We can debate how effective or market-responsive these programs really are, but one thing is for certain: adding programs alone without further action or strategies won’t save colleges and universities fighting for survival. (For all my marketing colleagues out there, it only accounts for one of the four P’s of marketing [product], while ignoring price, place, and promotion.)
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the many issues facing institutions today, but with a strong strategic enrollment management plan (SEM) in place, institutions can:
Let’s start building one together.
The operative word here is plan. Many enrollment professionals (and their institutions) focus too heavily on tactics, which may provide temporary solutions, but seldom produce sustainable, long-term enrollment results. A purposefully built SEM plan will engage constituents institution-wide around both strategy and results, align tactics with institutional mission and values, create a blueprint for all enrollment-related activities over time, and position the institution to effectively respond to the marketplace and sustain (or grow) net tuition revenue.
The best strategic enrollment management plans are data-informed and consider both internal and external factors as they are developed. These reviews provide a foundation for the rest of the plan, including tactics and opportunities for assessment.
Your plan should include the following core elements:
Though producing a strategic enrollment plan is good regular practice, it’s important to identify why your institution is creating the plan in the first place. For most schools, aligning various stakeholders and resources across campus with a common objective (e.g., increasing enrollment) will serve as the primary purpose for creating a SEM plan. At its core, a good SEM plan will effectively organize departments, people, programs, resources, structures, and systems to best support the plan’s objective(s). This broad organizational process can allow the institution to effectively make new investments where needed while reducing attention and resources allocated to areas that are underperforming and inefficient.
Setting goals for the plan can be particularly challenging as constituents across campus may have differing views not only on its intent, but also on the integrity of its planned outcomes.
Let’s look at some common examples and how you could respond to any areas of conflict.
The net tuition revenue (NTR) example
Increasing net tuition revenue is generally unpalatable to the educational purist (particularly faculty), though it is often the undercurrent for why a SEM plan is needed.
Here’s my argument: If we successfully increase net tuition revenue, that allows us to continue to deliver the high-quality education we are committed to providing while also investing in what makes a high-value education possible. This also means institutions can continue to support mission-centric, but potentially revenue-neutral or net loss, academic programs.
Tip #1: The net tuition revenue discussion often hits roadblocks because it focuses on money at its center. If we start with a focus on continued quality, innovation, and investment in our programs, faculty, and facilities, NTR then becomes the vehicle by which these ends can be achieved.
It’s easy to say that we simply want more students, particularly if net tuition revenue is a primary objective of the plan. While that goal is not atypical in the average SEM plan, it lacks specificity and doesn’t acknowledge the varied nature of tuition revenue across student types, academic programs, course loads, and other factors.
If net tuition revenue growth is the primary objective, it is critical to identify the academic departments or programs that:
Tip #2: Once these programs are identified, focus first on those with the highest net tuition revenue margin to have a more immediate impact on the institution’s bottom line.
Examples of other primary objectives
While many SEM plans consider revenue as a primary objective, others may focus on a target mix of students for mission-critical objectives or state mandates, or to address market factors like the declining high school graduating population. These goals could include growing student populations at a particular level (e.g., undergrad vs. grad), increasing enrollment among target student populations, reducing reliance on particular groups (e.g., regional students), improving gender ratios, or growing international students.
Further, some institutions may place less emphasis on recruitment activities and growing new students within their SEM plans, and more on improving retention. Retention initiatives allow the institution to focus resources on solidifying the quality of the academic experience, which reduces reliance on continued growth in new student cohorts, sustaining revenue, and creates a better “product” that, in turn, makes recruiting new classes easier.
Regardless of focus, articulating objectives clearly and securing buy-in from all major stakeholders is essential for achieving sustainable results.
No SEM plan can be successful without an honest assessment of the institution’s resources and program portfolio. I see it time and again when schools forge ahead with an end goal in mind — often to grow enrollment or to launch new programs — and have no intention of assessing actual market demand, its ability to deliver quality in a specific area of study, or the internal resources it needs to make these goals a reality.
One of the most common mistakes institutions make is to focus on symptoms rather than core, internal challenges, and then deploy quick-hit tactics to address them. The inclusion of an honest internal scan in your strategic enrollment plan provides an opportunity to identify root problems through a SWOT analysis — identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats — or other process.
Academic offerings must be objectively assessed from a qualitative and quantitative assessment lens, evaluating not only student enrollments, the prospective student funnel, retention, and graduation rates, but also the core features of programs themselves (e.g., curricular focus, time to completion, delivery method, market demand, costs, and unique value propositions).
Some of the primary items of your assessment should include the following:
These activities must be undertaken collaboratively with faculty, deans, institutional research, and administrative leadership. A transparent and honest process is critical to achieve outcomes that are objective and equitable.
Tip #3: Once this program review is completed, consider a program prioritization plan to adequately invest in programs poised for growth while assessing the long-term viability of other offerings. Healthy institutions undergo this exercise regularly (e.g., every five or 10 years) with opportunities for at-risk programs to be assessed in a probationary period. Programs that are in demand, provide distinction for the institution, have the capacity to grow, and produce positive net tuition revenue should receive priority focus in your enrollment plan.
Virtually every aspect of campus influences student enrollment, so aligning support structures, services, and human resources to achieve strategic enrollment objectives is vital. Even minor friction across these areas can negatively impact student enrollment.
For prospective students, consider how they:
For current students, examine:
More broadly, structural assessments should extend to campus-wide systems and processes — across technology, communications, and student services — to ensure seamless experiences that support recruitment, retention, and student success. This holistic view sets the stage for identifying opportunities in both existing offerings and new areas of expertise.
The SEM plan — and its academic program priorities — are most effective when paired with external data. Market demand is a critical driver of enrollment success; however, institutions must avoid viewing it in a vacuum.
Higher education is generally a reactive industry, and once demand is identified, institutions often scramble to capitalize on interest to develop programs that will generate new sources of revenue. Over time, the flurry of competitive programs creates market saturation, thinning student demand across a wealth of similar offerings. Sustained enrollment growth in these areas becomes increasingly more difficult, particularly as institutions struggle to differentiate their programs in an increasingly crowded landscape.
How is your institution and/or program currently viewed in the marketplace? Qualitative surveys of prospective students, guidance counselors, career advisors, faculty, employers, and community members can be helpful sources of intel on how your program is doing.
One group that is particularly important is your lost admitted students. These students demonstrated a committed interest in the institution and program, but were lured away later in the funnel by another option. They can help shine a light on the areas of opportunity your institution should focus on first.
Tip #4: Lost admits among your first-year undergraduate applicants can also be a potential source to recruit later as transfer or graduate students.
For undergraduate programs, competitors can often be assessed at the institutional level, with schools competing broadly on factors such as student experience, location, price, and career outcomes. While many of these institutions are already familiar to faculty and staff, data from the National Student Clearinghouse or College Board can help identify cross-applied schools or track where lost applicants ultimately enrolled.
Asking your prospective students and applicants about the other schools they’re considering — or where else they applied — can also be a helpful source for learning about competing schools, though not always fully accurate. This data can also be used to cross-tabulate and analyze program-specific competitors.
To assess graduate program competitors, data sources are a little more nebulous. The National Student Clearinghouse can be one source of strong data, though schools do not universally submit student-specific data at the graduate level to the Clearinghouse. For some programs, rankings organizations, discipline-specific accreditors (e.g., AACSB), or centralized application systems can provide insights on competing institutions.
Identifying potential new frontiers for the institution across its program portfolio should be another critical area for your SEM plan. Schools often look to faculty to raise their hands to propose new programs; however, while this approach can leverage potential untapped expertise internally, it may not align with demands and outcomes in the marketplace. Further, it can be enticing to chase the latest trend, but the desire to catch up only further complicates a saturated market and often leads to lackluster results.
The most sustainable opportunities depend on three critical factors:
While high-demand programs may seem like low-hanging fruit, they will only thrive if the institution has the academic credibility and infrastructure to deliver them effectively.
Consider the following as you evaluate new program opportunities:
Tip #5: Consider leveraging a tool like Lightcast to help answer these questions.
By methodically assessing each of these factors and how they intersect, institutions can avoid chasing the shiny new object and instead prioritize areas that leverage their strengths while meeting actual student and market demand.
Regardless of whether your SEM plan’s intended goal is to grow enrollments, it must include clearly defined student headcount targets across programs and student types. Targets establish benchmarks for success, keep stakeholders accountable, and allow the institution to measure progress on the plan over time.
Assess the following three key dimensions when setting enrollment targets:
Tip #6: Enrollment goals must be specific to be impactful. Rather than simply stating “increase undergraduate enrollment,” set measurable goals such as “increase transfer enrollment by 15% over three years” or “improve first-year retention to 82%.” These kinds of targets provide a blueprint for recruitment and resource allocation, while also signaling to stakeholders that the institution is committed to responsible growth and quality.
A strong marketing plan and a well-coordinated outreach and recruitment effort are at the heart of bringing enrollment outcomes to life. Institutions must determine how best to reach prospective students, communicate value, and differentiate themselves from an often crowded marketplace. And I’ll say it, the old playbook — pounding the pavement for months at college fairs or hounding students with phone calls — won’t cut it. These old ways are inefficient and costly, with limited return on investment. Admissions and marketing have to launch a coordinated effort in order to achieve strong outcomes.
Marketing and recruitment efforts must be founded in a shared understanding of how the institution or program is positioned in the marketplace: what makes your program or student experience distinctive, and why should a student choose your institution over competitors? (Hopefully, this became clear as you did some earlier institutional introspection.) The plan should articulate clear position statements for the institution and the priority programs identified to support the plan.
It should go without saying that recruitment efforts should be data-driven and appropriately segmented based on target programs and demographics. Strategies for traditional first-year students will look different from those for transfers, adult learners, or graduate students. Likewise, marketing approaches should account for geographic reach, digital presence, and the evolving ways students engage with information.
Aside from recruitment travel — which may or may not be relevant or valuable for your programs — other tactics may include enhancing digital advertising, improving the admissions website, streamlining the ways to connect with advisors or representatives from the institution, strengthening counselor outreach, or expanding articulation agreements with community colleges. What matters most is that recruitment initiatives align with the institution’s identified areas of opportunity and are resourced appropriately to deliver on enrollment targets.
We’ve certainly shared plenty on this topic, but once enrollment goals are clear, you must ensure your institution is visible and compelling to the right audiences. This means creating a concerted enrollment marketing effort.
Institutions often jump to identify tactics first — like launching campaigns or attending events without clear alignment to institutional strategy. A SEM plan keeps these efforts focused and mission-driven. Marcomm and admissions offices may be well-served by creating a connected strategic enrollment marketing plan that outlines these activities separately.
Consistent, authentic messaging is critical to aligning the best-fit students with your institution and inspiring them to take action. Students and families should hear the same story whether they’re visiting your website, reading an email, attending an open house, or speaking with a staff member. Fragmented messaging can erode trust, while unified messaging can instill confidence and promote a sense of belonging for prospective students.
Tackle these tasks in your plan to create a cohesive and relevant marketing plan for your prospective audiences:
Marketing and recruitment activities should not aim to do more of everything. Focus on doing the right things with intention, ensuring your institution connects meaningfully with the best-fit students and their families.
Tip #7: Your efforts don’t necessarily have to cost anything to have a meaningful impact on your enrollment initiatives.
Your admissions office serves as a central lever in achieving enrollment goals. Application requirements, admission criteria, outreach activities, and review processes all have a direct impact on both the size and profile of your incoming students. While some of these activities are in place to ensure only the strongest students are admitted, particularly for elite schools, they can serve as a barrier to meeting the enrollment objectives outlined in your SEM plan. By regularly evaluating admissions policies and practices, institutions can identify important opportunities to amend policies that may be counterproductive to enrollment success.
Much of the criticism of admissions processes of late has echoed outside campus walls, and institutions need to take an honest look inward for opportunities to reduce barriers for prospective applicants. This could include revising standardized test requirements, adopting more holistic review practices, or streamlining application processes to support plan outcomes. Clear communication of admissions standards can also support efforts to recruit better-fit applicants and improve yield. Ultimately, admissions practices should reflect the institution’s mission and strategic enrollment goals while remaining competitive and accessible in the broader market.
While marketing can generate initial interest and even support activities further down the funnel, admissions holds the key to helping students decide whether they can truly picture themselves at your institution. Your SEM plan must scrutinize every step of the admissions process, because any friction here directly translates to lost students.
Common issues in admissions include cumbersome application forms, unclear requirements or program details, or a lack of timely communication. Prospective students expect efficiency and transparency; when they encounter confusion, they can often disengage or navigate to another school entirely — particularly if they have an abundance of choices and are predominantly focused on features like cost and convenience. A SEM plan should identify these obstacles — or, at the very least, provide a mechanism to identify them — and create the resources and space to address them.
As you review your admission practices, pay close attention to the following initiatives:
Onboarding: Provide a seamless handoff to academic and/or student affairs to ensure students feel welcomed and supported from their enrollment commitment all the way to sitting in their first classes.
When admissions activities and processes are clear, supportive, and student-centered, the result is not just improved yield but stronger long-term retention.
As we all know, arguably one of the most important facets of enrollment management today is financial aid, particularly aid that is provided by the institution (e.g., scholarships and grants). The way an institution structures aid — both need-based and merit-based — directly influences access, perceived affordability, and yield. Beyond simply awarding funds, your financial aid policies communicate institutional priorities and ensure students have access to appropriate funding sources internally and externally.
A thoughtful aid strategy balances enrollment goals with financial sustainability. It requires careful modeling to understand the complex interaction between tuition rates, discount rates, net tuition revenue, and student success outcomes. It is imperative for enrollment leaders to collaborate with finance offices to ensure that aid not only brings students in the door and sustains (or exceeds!) revenue goals, but also actively supports student persistence through graduation.
Rather than treating financial aid as a back-end function, institutions should integrate aid strategy (and the staff that supports and deploys it) throughout enrollment planning. This means understanding — both in your financial aid and admissions units — how different scholarship models affect yield, whether aid policies support goals for target student populations, and how financial support impacts student persistence.
Aid strategy in your plan should include the following elements:
When built intentionally, a sound financial aid strategy can create a win-win: more students are able to access a college education more affordably, and institutions are able to have the resources to continue offering a high-quality education.
From institutional websites, CRMs, and student information systems to AI chatbots, student portals, and marketing automation tools, there’s no shortage of technology available to support your enrollment efforts. Regardless of which platforms you’re using, institutions must ensure that their systems are robust, accessible, and, as much as possible, integrated.
For enrollment efforts, technology plays a critical role in communication and efficiency. Automated comm flows, online portals, and predictive analytics like lead scoring can streamline recruitment and retention efforts and cater to each unique student journey. To be able to fully leverage the value of these tools, staff need the training and support to use these systems effectively.
A good strategic enrollment plan will assess the full breadth of its student-facing technology infrastructure that impacts all phases of the prospective student journey, including staffing, necessary resources, and any new investments needed to upgrade existing or purchase new tools. While technology doesn’t replace your strategy, it makes execution scalable and responsive while providing important mechanisms to assess the ROI of your efforts.
One critical step schools often miss in their plans is to assess how well their technology infrastructure is used. Many institutions have sophisticated CRMs or marketing automation platforms, but fail to fully maximize their capabilities. Others overlook just how important the institution’s website — the front door to nearly all of your prospective students — is to your recruitment and enrollment efforts.
Here’s what you should tackle for technology in your SEM plan:
Technology should be considered as important as your staff — it is essentially your not-so-hidden weapon and plays an incredibly vital role in recruiting and enrolling students.
Those of us in higher ed marketing shudder at being called “sales” people. It’s a perpetual dirty word in our work that suggests marketers and recruiters only care about numbers and revenue — and thus, only care about initial enrollments. And while I think it’s a misnomer that sales is somehow bad, I think the vast majority of us in the education space continue to pour our blood, sweat, and tears into the work because we genuinely care about student success. We aren’t marketing to students just to get them to sign up once and collect revenue; we’re enriched by those students who walk through our doors in admissions, and we relish when they walk across the stage with a diploma a few years later.
To that end, a strong SEM plan must include intentional strategies to support student success, belonging, and persistence. This means identifying barriers to retention — academic, financial, social, or personal — and addressing them through coordinated support services.
Effective retention planning requires collaboration with stakeholders across campus. Faculty, advisors, student affairs, and frontline service staff (e.g., bursar, financial aid, and registrar) all play vital roles in ensuring that students are supported. Investments in retention not only help improve student outcomes, but also help sustain an enrollment base that reduces pressure on marketing and admissions to meet lofty new student enrollment goals each year.
As the old adage goes, retaining a student is cheaper than recruiting a new one. A strong SEM plan ensures retention is not treated as an afterthought but as a central pillar of the strategy.
Improving retention requires a holistic view of all aspects of the student experience. For traditional undergrads, that usually includes everything from the classroom experience to housing, student involvement, health and wellbeing, financial support, and mental health. Grad and adult students have a vast variety of needs depending on the population you serve, but their needs and corresponding services should be addressed independently from traditional undergraduates to adequately support them. Regardless of the population you serve, it’s critical to create community and belonging that keeps students engaged.
What should appear in your plan for retention activities:
Early alert systems that identify and support at-risk students before they are forced to drop out of courses or withdraw entirely
Ultimately, retention provides a mirror to assess the strength of your academic programs, student services, and campus culture. Students who are successful both inside and outside the classroom are likely to persist to graduation, become successful alumni, and (hopefully) recommend their experience to future students.
A SEM plan is useless if you don’t provide target metrics and a means for assessing plan outcomes. And importantly, institutions must regularly assess their progress against the plan and provide the space and flexibility for continuous improvement. Metrics must be clear and supported by reliable data and systems to provide real-time opportunities to take action.
Effective assessment practices should focus on a combination of quantitative metrics — like leads, applications, yield, retention rates, and net revenue — and qualitative insights about the student experience that can be gleaned through surveys or focus groups. By embedding assessment into the SEM plan, institutions can ensure staff can respond readily to both successes and challenges.
Incorporate the following activities to ensure you can adequately assess the success of your plan:
Commit to continuous improvement, adjusting tactics and shifting resources as needed to respond to trends.
By creating a successful data foundation with a means to track progress and improve, institutions can not only support better outcomes for the plan but can also ensure they have the appropriate ingredients for enrollment planning and sustainability well into the future.
If you’re like me, you have probably heard about strategic plans that live on in perpetuity in a binder on a bookshelf somewhere on campus. Committees upon committees stew upon the ingredients of the plan, produce a beautifully bound document, and then flounder somewhere halfway on fully implementing it. The best laid plans are nothing without execution, which typically requires an all-hands-on-deck approach that needs critical buy-in from all of your stakeholders. Involve stakeholders early and maintain communication throughout implementation to build shared ownership for success.
So what should implementation look like? Assign clear responsibility for each strategy, establish timelines, and find ways to ensure accountability with SEM plan advocates, project managers, and campus leadership. One thing I’ve gotten a much deeper appreciation for on the agency side is project management — institutions must treat their SEM plan as a large-scale project to manage with regular check-ins, transparent communication, and mechanisms for changing course.
Before you put your SEM plan in motion (and ideally throughout the creation of the plan), every unit — from marketing to faculty to student services — needs to understand how their work connects to the plan, what is expected of them, and how their individual success translates into success across the institution. Special care must be taken to minimize silos and encourage collaboration, which can be supported by tracking plan milestones “publicly” across institutional stakeholders.
While the best things in life are free, your SEM plan likely isn’t. And where institutions really go wrong? They underestimate the actual resources needed to make their plans successful. Mistakes in resource planning will jeopardize results and likely sour campus stakeholders who bear the burden of strained bandwidth or difficulty accessing resources to support their activities. Investments in staff, staff time, operational budgets, and infrastructure must be fully assessed and outlined as part of your SEM plan. Depending on your goals, operational investments will be critical to support efforts across marketing, student recruitment and admissions, financial aid, academic programs, and student services.
Sound resource planning should include:
Building plans for sustainability, going beyond short-term enrollment wins to ensure long-term viability
SEM planning simply cannot happen without robust quantitative and qualitative data. To anchor your plan, the appendix provides an opportunity to include summary data that supports the activities and goals you’ve outlined in your plan.
Too often, I see schools create lofty enrollment goals with little evidence to support their intended outcomes, often accompanied by a meager investment in resources. By including historical data and projections as part of your plan, the institution can hold stakeholders accountable to intentional and informed goal-setting with appropriate investments.
At the very least, be sure to look at three to five years of program-level enrollment data, including net headcount, retention and persistence, and graduation outcomes. Admission funnels by program should also be analyzed from prospect to enrollment with a focus on conversion rates at each stage. Finally, include summary data on operational budgets, financial aid, and staffing dedicated to each of the target areas of your plan. Stakeholders should be able to easily reference data in the appendices that informed the creation of the strategies and goals outlined in your plan.
I’m sure convincing you that SEM planning is important isn’t the challenge — having the bandwidth and resources to create the plan is. However, we don’t have to look far to see the perils of not having a sound enrollment strategy that unifies key internal stakeholders around a sustainable, long-term plan.
I won’t kid myself (or you) into thinking this whole process is easy. Building the plan is a significant lift, and it’s critical to have both strong leadership champions and day-to-day project managers to steward the creation and execution of the plan. With the right leadership and investments in place, a strong SEM plan can not only serve as a guiding light for today but a beacon of (enrollment) hope for tomorrow.