Mapping the Enrollment Landscape
Five near-term strategic priorities for admissions teams
The extraordinary convergence of crises our nation has faced since the start of the pandemic has amounted to a stress test for higher education, revealing strengths and vulnerabilities that previously went unnoticed, were underestimated or were misunderstood. In doing so it has also shed new light on market conditions that will likely define the challenge for enrollment leaders in the immediate future.
This insight paper was created to help enrollment leaders reorient to a higher education marketplace that is being transformed by a historic convergence of disruptive forces, including the pandemic, a persistent labor crisis, a troubled political climate, change in the psychological profile of college goers, and, relatedly, increasingly widespread doubt regarding the value of postsecondary education.
The report is organized into five main sections, each addressing a different strategic priority, as follows:
- Understanding the decreasing demand for higher education
- Navigating a hostile cultural context
- Serving a new kind of student
- Increasing market share
- Retooling the admissions office
Each of the five sections above comes with a corresponding self-test, aimed at helping enrollment leaders assess their readiness to engage each strategic priority and triage their attention across competing efforts.