Here’s how to start an effective strategic enrollment management plan

Community colleges across the country are experiencing declining enrollments, from 20% reductions in New York to 25% in Oregon¹. Further, more than one in ten community college presidents are concerned that their college may merge or close in the next five years². Clearly solutions are needed to succeed within this troubling future. To help get a handle on this tough enrollment situation, many colleges are turning to strategic enrollment management (SEM), as it offers a straightforward way to prioritize efforts for a successful fiscal future.

SEM is traditionally a tool used by four-year institutions to prioritize marketing and recruitment efforts. As open-access institutions, community colleges haven’t spent time here, instead focusing their energies on serving the students who showed up on the first day of class.

However, shifting demographic and economic trends, funding decreases, and state mandates have dramatically changed the enrollment landscape, such that many colleges are facing an uncertain future. The bottom line is that in order to maintain financial viability, community colleges must evaluate external and future forces impacting enrollment, then prioritize resources for the efforts that make the biggest difference.

What community college SEM plans get wrong

Current SEM plans try to do too much, but don’t achieve the right results. Often, they take so much time to create that they’re obsolete by the time it comes to implement.

Four problems we’ve discovered with typical community college SEM plans:

• They comprise an unrealistic laundry list of all the hopes, goals, and initiatives that the college would like to accomplish
• They contain goals that are tied to past trends and inadequately account for external forces or future outlooks
• They lack the specificity and ownership required to fulfill enrollment objectives
• They don’t account for resource availability and thus fail to prioritize

To overcome these pitfalls, community colleges must make tradeoffs and prioritize resources for the most impactful strategies.

How to get SEM planning right

Through our research, we’ve identified the key imperatives that colleges must address in order to get SEM planning right. The first imperative is to analyze the forces shaping the enrollment landscape.

Many factors affecting enrollment are out of college leaders’ control. While what happens in the state house, regional economy, or local high schools often can’t be changed, these shifts can and should be factored into strategy to create informed and effective responses.

These are the six most impactful forces affecting future enrollments that community college leaders should analyze:

1. Demographics

Economists expect traditional student pipelines to shift drastically in the coming decade, and some regions will be more affected than others. Factor these changes into your enrollment strategies; consider the age and experience of likely future students in your decisions about what programs to offer, which student services will be most in-demand, and which recruitment models will be most effective for this future demographic.

2. Feeder institutions

Examine your most important feeder institutions, including high schools, employer partners, and other colleges to better understand which strategies need revisiting. For instance, compare historical yield among major student feeders alongside anticipated growth of those feeders, and use this insight to change how you allocate recruitment resources.

3. Public policy

Public policies, whether they be state funding cuts, performance-based funding, promise programs, et cetera, can have immense implications for college enrollments. For example, colleges impacted by new performance-based funding measures should conduct a program review to ensure the college’s portfolio can meet the funding requirements and, where issues arise, develop strategies and investment plans to improve or sunset underperforming programs.

4. Labor market

Community college enrollments rise and fall with the economy, and these fluctuations are far from our control. However, state and local agencies often provide insightful data—including industry and occupational projections—that can inform enrollment strategy as it pertains to program review, employer partnerships, and other workforce-linked processes. Use these projections to create programs today that will appeal to tomorrow’s workers or to promote training programs to job seekers located near an employer partner.

5. Competition

Complete SEM plans must consider competitive pressures. Identify your key competitors, their competitive threat, and risk to your market share. From this analysis craft responses to maintain or grow your market share. In practice, a regional public may be expanding their partnerships with local high schools; respond to this new competitive threat with either a change in recruitment tactics to retain your share of traditional students or with a shift in resources toward adult recruitment to combat the traditional student losses from this increased competition.

6. Market opportunity cost

Different student segments lead to different costs and ROI, and community college leaders should determine which markets (e.g., adult students, recent high school graduates, dual enrollment students) to prioritize for enrollment efforts. Start with low-cost and high-return markets to generate revenue that can be used for markets that require a greater time or financial investment.