During junior and the first half of senior year most high school students often find their mail flooded with solicitations from universities and colleges.
What is behind this flurry of marketing pieces? Each college’s enrollment management system collects student data from PSAT or PLAN registration, college fairs, or website visits (to name just a few sources) which are then used to aggressively solicit potential applicants. As Jack Maguire, the father of enrollment management systems noted over 35 years ago, “To the Organized, Go the Students.” (Bridge Magazine, 1976)
As a recipient of this attention, the best approach is to sit back and let the wave of paper flow by. If an offer beckons, such as a waiver on an application fee, indulge. These solicitations are guided by algorithms written to increase the school’s application pool, broaden the geographical scope of its student population, or to recruit students that will help bring up the school’s median standardized test scores. Objectives are as varied as the institutions themselves, but the paper blasts are driven by the metric objectives of the institution’s enrollment management system.
Enrollment Management Systems arose from Boston College’s crisis in the early 1970’s. Boston College, after 113 years of aspiring to become the ‘Catholic Harvard,’ had instead become the ‘Chestnut Hill Catastrophe.’ The profile of the college was woeful:
Virtually the entire student population was from the greater Boston area (it was primarily a commuter school) or portions of New England or the Mid-Atlantic area; worse still, the number of high school graduates from this region of the country was projected to decrease by 45%.
BCs endowment was around $5 million; it had negative net assets.
BC was ‘hemorrhaging students’ (p. 5 “The Creation of Enrollment Management at Boston College,” Jonathan Epstein, Concord, MA, 2010). Its retention rate was low though there were no metrics in place to accurately measure.
Boston College was in discussions with the University of Massachusetts to sell the Chestnut Hill campus, which would then become ‘UMass Boston”.
In order to save BC the Dean of Admissions,, Jack Maguire, fabricated the ‘principles of enrollment management circa 1976.’ Maguire created an enrollment management system containing extensive research and analysis, applicant trend identifiers, competitive school metrics, and a ‘sophisticated rating system for admissions,’ which remains wholly in place today (p.11 Ibid.). In essence, Maguire recognized the interplay of customer service, research, and marketing.
By the time Doug Flutie, the future Boston College Heisman Trophy winning quarterback, applied to BC in 1981, applications had risen from 7,000 to 14,000, and acceptance levels had dropped from a high of 90% to 35%, while the applicant pool had expanded from being mostly regional to national in scope.
Improving selectivity is the bedrock of virtually all successful enrollment management programs. Selectivity attracts more academically competitive applicants, raises US News rankings, which attracts alumni contributions, and better faculty, all leading to an upward spiral of success. The BC success story did not go unnoticed. USC, one of the legion of schools to follow the enrollment management model, not only implemented its own enrollment management system, reducing its admissions rate to 25% in 2007, but in that same year it established the USC Center for Enrollment Research. During the 2017-2018 admissions year USC accepted fewer than 13% of its applicants. Undoubtedly the steep escalation in its applicant pool, 64,000 students, a 14% increase from last year, can also be attributed to the opening of Iovine & Young, the extensive interdisciplinary offerings in Dornsifer, and Viterbi Engineering’s 30 majors with its Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship programs. The dynamism of its faculty, depth and breadth of offerings cannot be underplayed, nor can the efficacy of its enrollment management system that “…encourages enrollment professionals to place their trust in corporate strategies and support efforts to transplant them into the higher education sector.”
Expect the marketing solicitations to continue to flow with an ever stronger current.