Under Pressure: Grad Enrollment Pros Sound Off

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0:00:11.8 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Our guests today share insights from EAB’s newest collaborative survey effort with NAGAP, the Association of Graduate Enrollment Professionals. Our guests unpack how graduate admissions teams are navigating mounting pressures and shifting strategies to meet enrollment targets in a rapidly changing landscape. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:42.2 Camilla Arias: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Camilla and I’m a senior analyst on EAB’s Adult Learner Recruitment Team. One of my areas of focus in the last six to 12-ish months has been on how emerging trends like non-consumption, the use of AI, and decreasing university budgets are impacting graduate programs and leaders. To learn more about how graduate enrollment teams are dealing with and navigating these changes, our Adult Learner Recruitment Team has partnered with NAGAP, the Association for Graduate Enrollment Management, to survey nearly 600 enrollment leaders across the country from late 2024 to early 2025. Joining me today to talk about the survey findings and their implications for graduate enrollment teams is my colleague, Pam Royall, and NAGAP expert and Global Higher Ed consultant, Donald Resnik. Can you both briefly share a little bit about your backgrounds and your respective roles?

0:01:37.8 Pam Royall: Absolutely, and Donald, I’ll start. I’m Pam Royall, and I serve as head of research, and that is for our Marketing and Enrollment Solutions group at EAB. I had the privilege of working with both undergraduate partners and graduate partners and, of course, work very closely with Camilla with our Adult Learner Recruitment. And I was largely responsible for the research that we’re going to report to you today and tell you a little bit more about that lengthy partnership that we’ve had with NAGAP that we’re so pleased to be engaged in at this moment. Donald?

0:02:19.1 Donald Resnik: Thanks, Camilla, and thanks, Pam. I’m Donald Resnik, and I’ve been in higher education for, dare I say, over 40 years, having served as the chief enrollment and success officer for several universities. I’ve worked for and consulted with both public and private, large and small, and all in between. I am currently a global higher education consultant working on enrollment and student success issues and changes being experienced by institutes of higher education. As a side note, I also take tremendous pride in working with socioeconomically disadvantaged students and first-gen students that are applying for undergraduate studies. I have been a longtime member of NAGAP way back when it was the original organization of NAGAP. I had the privilege of serving on NAGAP’s governing board for well over a decade, including as its president, and I also am proud to say that I received the organization’s inaugural Distinguished Service Award, which is NAGAP’s highest honor.

0:03:20.4 Pam Royall: And, Donald, once you mentioned 40 years, I have to confess to my career before EAB, and it’s noteworthy here because I served as a faculty member in graduate schools of business for 20 years. So I really am in the weeds in terms of what’s going on now with our graduate enrollment because of that early experience that shaped my professional life.

0:03:48.3 Camilla Arias: Well, thank you so much for both being with me here today. We’re so lucky to have all of your many years of experience with us on the podcast. And, Pam, as you mentioned earlier, neither of you are new to this research. We are now in our fifth year of partnership and collaboration, which is quite wild. Could you share a little bit about the primary purpose of these surveys and what information we were hoping to glean? And was there anything about this survey in particular that was different from surveys in years past?

0:04:18.6 Pam Royall: Thanks. I think this is really an important question because it is rare to have five years of data. We started in 2020, and like many of the things we do at EAB, we were looking at the landscape. We were recognizing that things were really going to be different as a consequence of the global pandemic. And we wanted to really align ourselves with the challenges as well as the opportunities that were being presented for our enrollment partners. We wanted to give Graduate Enrollment Management Professionals, I’m going to use the term GEM to refer to graduate enrollment professionals, we wanted to let them have an outlet for talking about issues and also giving them feedback so they could see how they were comparing to their peers. And it was really an opportunity for us to set a new baseline. When you have the promise of longitudinal research, you want to establish a baseline so that you have something against which you can measure progress over the years. And the fact that we’ve done this research now for five years allows us to show what has trended in many cases, but it’s also given us an opportunity to introduce new topics each year. And one of the things that we’re always excited about is we share this information with our partners and NAGAP members and other GEM professionals is what other questions should we be asking? So it’s an evolving process and something that gets richer and richer each year.

0:06:15.0 Donald Resnik: So Pam, I think I, let me just reinforce a couple of points that you just eloquently outlined. Very, very important to reinforce that early on when we were reporting on these results, we were reporting at points in time. And while that’s helpful, it doesn’t give you any sense of direction, if you will. Now that we, as you state, are in our fifth year, very, very important for us to emphasize that we can and do report trends, which are incredibly beneficial. You can take informed action based upon trends now, certainly four into five years. Very, very beneficial. Last quick reinforcement point that these, obviously the surveys continue to evolve, as you indicate, not only with the questions, but also with the responses based on the participation and feedback that we secure from those that respond to the surveys that we send out. Many of the respondents’ feedback were, in fact, incorporated in the subsequent surveys, which is absolutely incredibly helpful. And you’ll see some of the results will suggest that our partners and participants were much more engaged and understanding of the issues, perhaps, than we even thought they were.

0:07:24.8 Pam Royall: And that research on artificial intelligence is a great example of that, right?

0:07:31.3 Camilla Arias: Well, with that, Pam, I’d love to go ahead and dive into that survey data. And starting with the hot topic, which is AI. I know in our survey last year, about a quarter of respondents said they had never used AI before. And I imagine that percentage has decreased since we last spoke. Can you tell me a bit more about how the use and perception of AI has changed among our survey participants?

0:07:52.7 Pam Royall: You’re right in that hypothesis. What we wanted to do was to give our participants an opportunity to talk about their personal experience with AI. That was part of it. So we asked them how they would evaluate either beginner, intermediate, advanced. We also gave them the option of saying they have virtually no experience and don’t even know what it is. That percentage that reported they had never used it decreased to 12% this second year. So that’s from our 2024 data. And those that consider themselves intermediate users, and the response option that they indicated is, I am using it successfully. That group increased by nearly the same amount. So that was significant. And then I want to make the point that we have, because this is their individual assessment of their familiarity with AI, we have age and years in higher education as the only personal demographics. We have other demographic characteristics of the institutions that they represent. But on those individual characteristics, there were no differences in terms of their level of familiarity. Now, this is one of those topics, as we look forward, we’re going to include the AI questions again in September of 2025, which will be our third year of tracking it. And Donald and I have already speculated how this result may change.

0:09:34.5 Donald Resnik: It’s funny, Pam, because as you know, I’m not a betting person, but I’m going to bet that nickel and go out on a limb that the next time we conduct this survey, the answer to the question will be 0% will have had no experience with it. So we’ll come back. We’ll take a look and see if I doubled my nickel or not, but I’m betting it’ll go to zero.

0:09:57.8 Pam Royall: Well, the privilege we all have is we work on college campuses. So we’re not under a rock somewhere, right? So AI is there. And Camilla, I also wanted to say, as we think about the most compelling uses of AI, they were related to really improving the efficiency of enrollment management operations. And that’s something that we’re going to talk about a little bit later.

0:10:28.7 Donald Resnik: It’s interesting. We were talking about longevity in the profession, and I often share the story back in the early, early NAGAP days, well over 30 years ago. NAGAP conducted a survey of its entire membership regarding the familiarity and priority of a really new technology known as the World Wide Web and the importance of establishing a homepage. I must admit that the results of that research were a little disappointing that GEM, Graduate Enrollment Management Professionals, were laggards around adopting the institutional web presence as a priority. We should not be that with AI, and it appears as though we are learning from that history. So it’s pleasing to see that we are not repeating history in a negative sense from years ago.

0:11:17.5 Pam Royall: Well, given the stat that we shared in terms of increasing familiarity with AI, I’m starting already for our September survey to think about what’s the next level of questions we should be asking about AI? It’s probably going to be less about individual use and more about the uses professionally, how we are, in fact, aiding GEM professionals because AI has been developed and explored and practiced in a meaningful way. So we look forward to reporting those results this fall.

0:11:58.0 Camilla Arias: Pam, as you mentioned and sort of alluded to, I think that a lot of GEM professionals are interested in AI as a way to optimize their work and improve efficiency, which seems really relevant right now as we talk about the staffing challenges that many higher ed institutions are facing. Nearly 80%, which is such a staggering amount of our participants, reported experiencing moderate to extreme stress related to their work. And even 50% said they were considering leaving their current roles. Can you tell us a bit more about why they might be feeling so much stress?

0:12:32.9 Pam Royall: This is another situation, Camilla, where I’m just kind of holding my breath as to what we’re going to learn this year because it’s not surprising, perhaps to anyone, the top of the list of stressors were budget constraints and other fiscal challenges. And we have data that reflects a period before the current presidential administration. And we all know what the environment is like now, where the tension, the uncertainty is so significant, and budgets are really likely to be far more stressful of a factor as they have been in the past. And they’ve been like number one. There’s also a matter of heavier workloads, and that is often linked to unfilled staff positions. And it doesn’t take a lot to say the staff positions might be unfilled because there’s no budget. We also know that leadership changes were identified as a stress factor. When a new university president starts and has ambitious goals that he or she sets, many GEM professionals feel the pressure of unrealistic enrollment goals. And that’s another real critical point of stress for them.

0:14:08.1 Camilla Arias: Well, Donald and Pam, is there anything based on your experience or the survey data that you think university leaders could do to turn things around?

0:14:16.5 Donald Resnik: It’s interesting, Camilla. I actually refer back to the years of previous analysis, and for some people, as recently as two years ago, 6% were saying they felt no stress whatsoever. Last year, that percent dropped down to 3%, and we were commenting in a number of venues saying, we want to be a part of that 3% that was feeling absolutely no stress. I don’t want to say I’m pleased to see that that number is now 0%, but that seems more realistic to me that everybody is feeling stress. But to the point, the question you’re asking, Camilla, obviously the results suggest that the biggest stress reliever is indeed the addition of staff support to the mission, as well as filling the vacant positions. And it is a very challenging environment to do both. A, get additional staff, and B, with the staff positions that you have vacant, filling them with individuals who are competent and capable. Respondents also, I note, indicated a growing desire for flexibility and a much more supportive kind of higher recognition environment from their leadership. So those are ways in which organizations and leaders can help turn some things around, being aware of those variables that are important to their prospective employees and current employees.

0:15:36.2 Pam Royall: And as I alluded to earlier, when asked what uses of AI in admissions were most compelling, GEM professionals identified several that could improve the efficiency of their operations. So always looking for how can we do more with less, obviously, less budget, less personnel. And specifically, they named reducing the time it takes to draft content for recruitment communications, AI can help. Number two, optimizing the flow of communications. And number three, automating the processing of transcripts. Those were the specific examples they gave that had the potential of improved efficiency. And let’s imply by that, perhaps reduced stress.

0:16:25.7 Donald Resnik: Interesting, Pam, if I can just quickly add, individuals are being hired in part now based on their AI skills that they’re bringing into the GEM profession. Job descriptions are now beginning to much more commonly ask for and indeed expect at least a comfort level with and ideally a much more fulsome understanding of AI. So I think those two points come together quite nicely.

0:16:51.5 Pam Royall: And if I were still teaching MBA students, I would be advising them to invest a certain percentage of their time in developing those skills and increasing their capabilities and also being warned of any cautionary tales about how it can go off the rails, right?

0:17:16.5 Camilla Arias: Definitely. Well, Pam, I want to jump back to something that you mentioned earlier, which is the idea of unrealistic potentially and aggressive goals. Let’s talk a little bit about those graduate enrollment goals. I know that last year we saw 40% of programs missing their headcount goals, according to our respondents, and yet goals still increased. So how did programs fare for the 2024 academic year?

0:17:43.2 Pam Royall: Well, while there were more respondents that said they met their goals in 2024 than in 2023, it was not a significant increase. And importantly, with higher enrollments and more revenue as their top enrollment priorities, it’s not surprising, again, that over 50% of GEM professionals saw their goals increase. So they’re missing goals as kind of a majority condition, and yet they’re being asked to do more. And we know that that’s a perfect formula for stress.

0:18:26.6 Donald Resnik: I couldn’t agree with you more. And from a pragmatic perspective, if I may add a quick point about the construct behind goals and priorities, it is one thing to state that something is a goal or a priority. And I have often said to follow the money to see where the resources are actually going, both human and fiscal, to in fact determine if this is really a goal and a priority. Once goals and priorities are established, it is incredibly important to manage the expectations along the way and, if in fact the expectations are significant, making sure that the resources, the requisite resources necessary to help achieve those goals and priorities are secured.

0:19:09.3 Camilla Arias: Right. And if we’re going to talk about enrollment goals, I think it’s only right that we talk about what is and isn’t working in terms of recruitment. So are there any recruitment tactics that stand out for prospective graduate learners? And has this changed over the years at all?

0:19:24.2 Pam Royall: We asked what student recruitment activities were providing the best outcome. That’s the way the question was raised. And we gave participants the opportunity to select one activity because we wanted the best. So we gave them a fairly extensive list of options and we learned that events were especially effective. And that was for the third year running. So events were identified as the most effective activity for increasing enrollments. It was the single most important activity for GEM professionals who are working in fully in-person programs. And for those that are working in hybrid and fully online programs, however, web inquiries tied with events for that number one position. And then email referrals from alumni, no, email and then referrals from alumni and SEO and SEM activities also contributed to enrollments but at a lower level in terms of the overall percentage reporting that those were their lead activities. At the bottom or near the bottom of the list, only a few indicated that their phone campaigns were producing strong outcomes. And I think we don’t have to explain why, but we all know how we react to the telephone and it certainly is true for prospects as well.

0:20:57.7 Pam Royall: One of the things that we added, because this is always so much fun about collecting data and giving our respondents an opportunity to provide write-in responses, we learned last year that an increasing percentage identified corporate partnerships as an important activity. And we added that to our list and it was identified as a strong producer by 8% of our participants. And I’ll compare that to events, our number one, which was identified by over 19% of our participants.

0:21:33.4 Camilla Arias: Pam, what this really drives home for me is that regardless of modality, it’s really important to have a diverse recruitment strategy to really reach the widest net of graduate and prospective graduate learners.

0:21:47.6 Pam Royall: Absolutely. Multi-channel, no question.

0:21:52.2 Donald Resnik: It’s interesting, what I was going to say is that GEM professionals historically have thought that they know what motivates their clients, that’s specifically prospective graduate students. What I have found incredibly intriguing over the couple of years we’ve been asking these questions is data suggests otherwise. In fact, there continues to be a disconnect or indeed a misalignment between what GEM professionals actually think students want and what students report are their motivators. GEM professionals, in fact, are trying to do many things, some tried and true, some innovative, and to your point, Pam, about corporate partnerships, some throwbacks. That’s not a new phenomenon, that’s back in the, dare I say, in the ’80s and to the ’90s. But they are also working on new programs that have relatively low startup costs that meets their current demands. So they are being creative in ways that might serve them well.

0:22:50.4 Pam Royall: And Donald, you talked about that disconnect in perceptions. One of the opportunities that we have at EAB is not only to survey GEM professionals, we’re surveying prospective adult learners, those prospective grad students, and we regularly produce, like annually produce, an extensive summary of findings from a large sample of prospective graduate students, and then we can look at those, how they align or misalign in this case.

0:23:23.8 Camilla Arias: Yeah, Pam, I’m so glad you mentioned that. We have our next survey coming up of prospective and current graduate and adult learners in just a couple of months. I’ll be really interested to see what we find about their motivations and how that compares to GEM leaders. Well, I know these, we could talk about these survey findings all day, and I would love to do that, but our time is coming to a close. I just want to make sure we can see if there’s any final advice that you would share with graduate enrollment professionals or university leaders about responding to the unpredictability and the trends that we see in the market.

0:24:03.3 Donald Resnik: So, Camilla, I don’t like to be Donald Downer here, but clearly stating the obvious, higher education is under intense scrutiny and under intense pressure as a result of many, many issues, including demography and its value proposition. We all know budgets are decreasing, funding is decreasing, the cost to deliver higher education continues to increase, and as everyone is well aware, the landscape continues to change, yet expectations continue to be for more and more. So the environment is not getting easier for us to work in, but the talent that we have in the profession, I am sure, will go a long way to helping us move forward.

0:24:53.8 Pam Royall: And Donald, one of the exciting things that we learned, we gave our survey participants an opportunity to look at a long list of trends that are potentially impacting the higher education landscape. And they were asked to identify them as negative or positive. And what we learned this year is that there were three trends that grad leaders are feeling particularly positive about. One we’ve mentioned already, and that’s corporate partnerships, 77% of the participants viewed that as a positive trend. So there’s hope for making progress in that area. And secondly, were opportunities presented by AI. They viewed not as much as a threat as they did a year ago, but now, or two years ago, now it was more of an opportunity. 63% reported it as a positive trend. And then you talked about demography. We’re really concerned about what’s going on, but our GEM professionals said the fact that there are more Gen Z students entering the graduate population is also a positive trend. And that was just under 50, that was 47% that identified it as a positive trend. So maybe to balance downer Donald, there’s some optimism for you. And certainly the work that we’re dedicated to doing at EAB is to capitalize on positive trends and mitigate negative trends and do as much possible in terms of getting you the right information to make strong and positive decisions.

0:26:40.5 Camilla Arias: Well, Pam and Donald, thank you so much for your continued work on these surveys. The findings and year over year trends are always so fascinating. And I appreciate you taking the time to dive deeper into the survey data today.

0:26:52.7 Pam Royall: We’re already excited about what’s next. I mentioned what we’re going to be studying in September, but as we have in the past, we will have three different surveys that we’ll be able to consolidate and report on throughout the year and look forward to sharing results, not only in podcasts, but also webinars and at conferences. So we hope that we’ll have a lot of our listeners join us on those occasions as well. Not to mention that Insight paper, which is really going to be a terrific summary for people to look at.

0:27:28.3 Donald Resnik: Yeah, it was great to be part of the conversation. It’s an ongoing dialogue and looking forward to seeing yet again, some interesting, hopefully more positive results going forward.

0:27:40.4 Camilla Arias: Thank you both so much for being with me today.

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