With enrollment facing a cliff, higher-ed needs to get creative

Why enrollment is facing a cliff:

There’s an elephant in the enrollment offices of higher-ed institutions across America: an impending enrollment cliff. In a few years, the amount of high school graduates is going to drop dramatically. This isn’t because of poor performance of students or schools, it’s an actual decline in the amount of students as a whole. You see, this group of kids was born around the great recession of 2008. With financial hardships affecting young professionals and families the most, a dramatic drop in births followed. Now those kids are in or are about to enter high school and many schools need a strategic game plan to stay afloat. 

Implications for small and liberal arts colleges:

The impact of the enrollment cliff is most likely to affect smaller, more liberal art-focused campuses for a few reasons. First, they are already feeling the strain of enrollment issues as students opt for less expensive public schools or alternatives to a four-year degree. There’s also the real-world impact of what a liberal arts degree gets you for the amount of money you put into attending the school, as many students see how their parents and friends are struggling to pay off financial aid from their time at university. This is leading to schools having to merge like Cabrini and Villanova recently announced or close their doors outright. 

Implications for larger colleges and universities:

With shrinking options available for applicable students, competition to get into larger state schools and elite universities will increase. This is both a good and bad problem for state schools to have. Their mission is to help educate their state’s population, but who can deny a stronger student from out of state willing to pay more to attend the university? This will have wide implications as these schools become more exclusive and inevitably raise their admissions standards, prioritizing students with means over merit. Despite healthy enrollment numbers, larger schools are still facing financial hardship. Miami of Ohio, with nearly 20,000 students, recently told staffers they need to cut or merge programs in order to stay afloat.

Tactics to reach new students in creative ways:

While it won’t solve every problem these schools will face, curating immersive experiences for prospective students will go a long way in drawing attention to your school. Let’s take a look at how we solved problems for both small and large colleges.

The University of Denver was ready to launch its James C. Kennedy Mountain campus, an essential aspect of its strategic initiative, the 4D experience. To get prospective student buy-in, we made enrollment brochures, a unique landing page on the DU website for prospective students and DU community members, and a second film that captured the mountain campus’ limitless potential and distinctive qualities that would bring the 4D Experience to life.