Handbook of Strategic Enrollment Management

Don Hossler, Bob Bontrager

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118819531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Administración de la educación

Improve student enrollment outcomes and meet institutional goals through the effective management of student enrollments.

Published with the American Association for Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), the Handbook of Strategic Enrollment Management is the comprehensive text on the policies, strategies, practices that shape postsecondary enrollments. This volume combines relevant theories and research, with applied chapters on the management of offices such as admissions, financial aid, and the registrar to provide a comprehensive guide to the complex world of Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM). SEM focuses on achieving enrollment goals, and sustaining institutional revenue and serving the needs of students. It provides insights into the ways SEM is practiced across four-year institutions, community colleges, and professional schools.

More than just an enhanced approach to admissions and financial aid, SEM examines the student's entire educational cycle. From entry through graduation, this volume helps SEM professionals and graduate students interested in enrollment management to anticipate change and balancing the goals of revenue, access, diversity, and prestige. The Handbook of Strategic Enrollment Management:

• Provides an overview of the thinking of leading practitioners that comprise SEM organizations, including marketing, recruitment, and admissions; tuition pricing; financial aid; the registrar's role, academic advising; and, retention
• Includes up-to-date research on current issues in SEM including college choice, financial aid, student persistence, and the effective use of technology
• Guides readers creating strategic enrollment organizations that fit the unique history, culture, and policy context of your campus

Strategic enrollment management has become one of the most important administrative areas in postsecondary education, and it is being adopted in countries around the globe. The Handbook of Strategic Enrollment Management is for anyone in enrollment management, admissions, financial aid, registration and records, orientation, marketing, and institutional research who wish to enhance the health and vitality of his or her institution. It is also an excellent text for graduate programs in higher education and student affairs.

PART ONE
SETTING THE CONTEXT

Part I provides an introduction to Strategic Enrollment Management. Chapter 1 defines SEM and offers a brief history of its emergence and evolution. The chapter discusses several definitions of SEM that collectively point both to organizational structures and research that inform SEM policies and practices. Drawing upon discussions of public management's theory of new managerialism, which focuses on the growing use of for-profit business practices in non-profit and public organizations such as postsecondary educational institutions, this chapter helps to frame the rise of SEM in a wider context. It also examines how the combination of demographic trends, public policy shifts, and the emergence of the “Best Colleges” rankings published by US News & World Report, plus a growing focus on institutional prestige, has contributed to the attention SEM has garnered from public policy makers and critics of postsecondary education practices.

Chapter 2 more closely examines how public policy shifts toward viewing postsecondary education as a private good has resulted in both public and private postsecondary institutions competing for students in a market model. This, in turn, has resulted in colleges and universities focusing more attention and resources on their ability to attract a sufficient number of tuition-paying students. This chapter also looks at how the changing demographics of traditional-aged students are altering the competitive landscape faced by all postsecondary sectors.

Chapter 3 considers the structure of SEM organizations. The authors examine the variety of university executives to whom senior enrollment officers report and the importance of their ability to work effectively with all senior members of the president's cabinet, particularly the chief financial officer (CFO). The discussion moves on to the importance of campus-based, enrollment-related research and a strong technology infrastructure. Administrative units such as admissions, financial aid, orientation, and others often included within SEM organizations are discussed. The authors also note the dearth of research on the efficacy of different organizational structures for SEM units. This is because success is often dependent upon a complex array of factors that are based on institutional culture, institutional wealth, and the location of the campus, for example. Nevertheless, Chapter 3 helps to establish a common understanding of SEM units.

CHAPTER 1
Origins of Strategic Enrollment Management

Don Hossler

This chapter presents a brief historical overview of the factors that led to the rise of Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM). This chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive history, but instead provides a context for the chapters that follow, which offer a comprehensive overview of the organizational structures, processes, types of research, and strategies that underpin the concept of SEM. This chapter examines the historical roots of SEM and discusses why demography, governmental trends toward the privatization of postsecondary education, the role of rankings, and institutional isomorphism (the tendency of organizations to mimic the structure of similar organizations) (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) have created a context in which SEM will likely not only remain a fixture in postsecondary education, but will grow in its importance among colleges and universities.

Complete histories have been written on the rise of SEM (for example, Henderson, 2001; Hossler, 2011). Indeed, SEM has not only emerged as an important managerial function in the United States but also in other parts of the globe as well. The global trends toward the privatization of tertiary education, as well as globalization, international rankings of colleges and universities, and demographic trends in many industrialized nations are making SEM an increasingly common organizational concept in other nation states.

Before providing a historical overview of emergence of SEM, we offer a brief introduction to SEM to set the stage for this chapter. One important caveat is warranted in this introduction: Although some chapters in this handbook may refer to for-profit sector postsecondary institutions as part of the competitive forces that influence the enrollment strategies of non-profit colleges and universities, this volume does not provide an overview of SEM activities and strategies in the for-profit sector. To date, too little is known about the strategies, policies, and practices of the for-profit sector to be included in this book.

Strategic Enrollment Management is perhaps best described by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal (1991), as a structural framework that can be simultaneously considered as an organizational structure, as a set of processes, and as organizational policies. In this context, SEM is simultaneously a set of processes and policies associated with the recruitment and admission of college students, as well as the retention, academic success, and graduation of students enrolled in postsecondary education. It is also a managerial paradigm for organizations associated with these processes. Typically, SEM organizations include the offices of admissions, financial aid, registration and records, and an enrollment-related institutional research office. In addition, offices such as orientation, academic advising, the bursar, and sometimes offices associated with student affairs and/or institutional marketing can also be included in SEM organizations.

Bob Bontrager and Christine Kerlin (2004) posited that SEM comprises the following components:

• Characteristics of the institution and the world around it
• Institutional mission and priorities
• Optimal enrollments (number, quality, diversity)
• Student recruitment
• Student fees and financial aid
• Retention
• Institutional marketing
• Career counseling and development
• Academic advising
• Curricular and program development
• Methods of program delivery
• Quality of campus life and facilities

This chapter considers several definitions of SEM, followed by a brief history of its origins—the adoption of for-profit business strategies, demographic trends, and shifts in public policy provide a short historical account. In addition, theoretical frames that have been employed to explain the rise and use of SEM are examined. This chapter ends with a discussion of the future of SEM.

DEFINING STRATEGIC ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT

A number of definitions for SEM have been advanced since the books and articles first started to appear on this organizational concept. Bontrager (2008) defined SEM as follows: “Strategic Enrollment Management is defined as a coordinated set of concepts and processes that enables fulfillment of institutional mission and students' educational goals” (p. 18). Another leading scholar and practitioner in the field, David Kalsbeek (2013), defined SEM as “A comprehensive approach to integrating all of the University's programs, practices, policies, and planning related to achieving the optimal recruitment, retention and graduation of students.”

Don Hossler and John Bean have proffered the following definition:

Enrollment management is both an organizational concept as well as a systematic set of activities designed to enable educational institutions to exert more influence over their student enrollments and total net tuition revenue derived from enrolled students. Organized by strategic planning and supported by institutional research, enrollment management activities concern student college choice, transition to college, student attrition and retention, and student outcomes. These processes are studied to guide institutional practices in the areas of new student recruitment and financial aid, student support services, curriculum development and other academic areas that affect enrollments, student persistence, and student outcomes from college (revised in 2001 from Hossler, Bean, & Associates, 1990, p. 5).

This discussion of components and definitions of SEM share a common focus on the systematic integration of the functions of admissions, the relationship between tuition and fees (pricing) and financial aid, and student retention, along with the use of research to inform institutional policies and practices. The importance of curriculum offerings and the quality of the student experience are also recurring themes that are emphasized for the role they play in attracting and retaining students.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF STRATEGIC ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT

These definitions and the discussion of SEM emphasize the intentional role institutions can play in shaping the class and represent key elements of SEM. However, it bears noting that the issues that determine a student's decision to enroll or persist in a college or university (at the undergraduate or graduate level) are far too complex to manage; the real goals are to influence the student's decisions in an ethical manner (assuming that the institution was a good choice for the student in the first place).

This section sets the stage for a brief historical overview of the demographic, societal, institutional, and public policy factors that shaped the emergence of SEM. In successive chapters, the processes, policies, and organizational structures that have been outlined in this introduction will be examined in more detail.

The Impact of Demographic Trends

In the United States, the emergence of SEM can trace its origins to the mid-1970s. At that time a confluence of societal, demographic, and institutional factors created the context for the development of what has arguably become one of the most important administrative functions to emerge at senior levels of college and university administration since the rise of the senior development officer, which emerged in the 1950s (Lasher & Cook, 1996). Collectively, these trends created an institutional environment in which college and universi...