Improving higher education enrollment efforts is crucial to enhancing retention and student success rates. Strategic enrollment management plans exist to create specific strategies that address higher education challenges and increase enrollment rates.
This guide explores how strategic enrollment management plans work, why they’re important, and their key components. It also dives into the four main steps to implementing them and provides examples of strategic enrollment management plans to help you understand them better.
Strategic enrollment management (SEM) describes how higher education institutions manage and oversee incoming student enrollment. It typically involves developing a plan to attract a diverse student population to create more predictability for the admissions team or committee. Enrollment management also ensures that the institution only accepts students who align with its broader goals and values. This may include meeting certain criteria such as standardized test scores, high school GPA, recommendations, or area of study requirements.
Another key goal of strategic enrollment planning is to optimize recruitment and enhance student success. SEM requires participation from professionals like enrollment managers, registrars, enrollment service professionals, and admissions officers. It may also involve others engaged in programs meant to enhance student success, recruitment, and retention.
SEM helps maintain institutional sustainability and resilience. This can include aiming to increase or maintain enrollment by enhancing recruitment strategies, using financial aid packaging, delivering effective academic programs, and improving service levels. Treating all these aspects as interconnected when forming an SEM plan is the key to effectively improving enrollment.
Many higher education institutions are facing enrollment challenges that make SEM a valuable solution. The main challenges include:
SEM aims to address these issues by making effective planning models and taking proactive measures to address key challenges affecting your institution. It’s important to understand your institution’s unique challenges. Informed decision-making helps create well-thought-out strategic plans.
For example, if an institution is experiencing new student preference challenges, the admissions committee should consider offering flexible enrollment choices and smoother application processes. Institutions can also combat skepticism about the value of degrees by creating brand strategies that showcase the institution’s unique values and strengths. Doing so helps ensure they attract students that match what they stand for.
These strategies can involve targeted ads, social media marketing, and personalized outreach. It also helps to use technology and innovative solutions that analyze the institution’s data against external factors to enable accurate, informed decision-making.
Consider a strategy the University of North Carolina System used in 2023. It conducted a study to learn the return on investment (ROI) of educational programs to graduates. The study showed that 91 percent of its graduate programs and 94 percent of the system’s undergraduate programs would provide a positive ROI for students. Their bachelor’s degree holders would earn a median lifetime amount of $1.2 million, which is about $572,000 more than people without degrees.
Say your higher education institution conducts a similar study on its own graduate and undergraduate programs as part of its SEM plan. You could then publish the results to show prospective students the value of earning a degree at your institution.
If you notice that the institution’s programs do not provide a favorable ROI, you could use the study’s data to identify the issues with these programs and form an SEM plan to strengthen them.
An SEM plan can help your institution identify its strengths and weaknesses and create goals and strategies to improve enrollment rates. Consider the key elements of an effective strategic enrollment management plan.
Data is a key component of SEM plans because it reveals your institution’s main challenges and ways to go about implementing an effective solution. Innovative technology solutions can help enable data-driven decision-making.
These platforms gather data to provide valuable insights into demographic changes, student feedback, and application trends. It uses this information to predict future enrollment trends and patterns, showing you which areas need improvement to increase enrollment rates.
These platforms may also provide advanced predictive analytics tools to help enrollment teams monitor progress, target high-potential applicants, allocate resources more efficiently, and forecast revenue implications when achieving enrollment goals.
This component focuses on strategies that institutions can implement to enhance student recruitment outcomes. It can involve creating student recruitment goals and objectives for enhancing degree programs and learning modalities. You will typically need to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to monitor the progress of these goals.
For example, say your goal is to enhance the number, level of academic preparedness, and diversity of new students at the institution. The objective could include increasing the number of first-time students from out-of-state markets, while the desired KPI is a six percent increase in first-time students from outside the institution’s state.
You’ll then outline key strategies for reaching the six percent increase, such as tailoring student outreach and communication to align with their unique interests or increasing the discount rate for out-of-state students. Try to use this as your strategic enrollment management plan template.
These strategies should also include admissions marketing tactics based on your goals and objectives. This includes identifying what works and what doesn’t within different marketing channels to implement more effective strategies. Provide data-backed information based on market assessments or institutional performance assessments to support marketing tactics recommendations.
Your enrollment management plan should also focus on improving retention. One of the main objectives of enrollment management is to improve student success rates. You can achieve this by maintaining and improving student retention after successfully recruiting students.
This component should include a set of goals, strategies, and decisions about important contributing factors such as academic support programs, faculty and peer engagement, and financial aid. Create specific KPIs and metrics for each retention strategy you create.
For instance, you could increase retention through financial aid programs that support students with financial challenges. You can also implement programs to assist at-risk students, job placement programs, and career readiness programs to improve student success and retention. Make sure to market these benefits during recruitment.
Student financial support and scholarship optimization are other important SEM factors that require focused attention. They aim to provide more widespread access to higher education through effective financial aid options.
For example, you might provide additional financial support that their existing grants may be unable to cover. This can include day care services and free children’s meals for students who are parents. The institution can also broaden its eligibility requirements for student aid, scholarships, and discounts.
It may help to provide early access to important tools and information needed to successfully finance and complete their education. Making current and prospective students aware of these efforts can help your institution recruit and retain students with financial challenges.
Cross-departmental collaboration is another valuable element in achieving SEM goals. This involves creating strategies to form stronger partnerships between enrollment services, marketing teams, academic affairs, student affairs, alumni affairs, and finance departments.
This collaboration is crucial to effectively improving student enrollment and retention because all strategies are aligned to benefit one another instead of clashing. Each department uses its unique roles, knowledge, and responsibilities to create strategies that optimize the enrollment funnel.
Learn the key steps for developing and implementing a strategic enrollment management plan.
First, gain a solid understanding of your institution’s current position. This involves researching and assessing the demographics of your student body, current enrollment trends, and the most popular programs within your institution. Compare this data with external market research, such as the recent trends affecting enrollment and student preferences.
Using this knowledge, define what success should look like for your institution. This might include increasing overall enrollment, attracting a more diverse student body, or improving retention rates. It’s important to develop realistic institutional goals.
You can do this by setting a specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goal. Identify KPIs such as admissions inquiries, conversions, admissions, and click-through rates to track and measure progress.
Once you establish a goal, you need to develop strategies that align with institutional priorities and resources. Most importantly, they must help you achieve the set goal. For instance, if your goal is to attract a diverse student body, you might offer scholarships to students from low-income families or build partnerships with international schools.
Enrollment teams may also work with the marketing department to create marketing strategies that enhance awareness of the institution’s unique offerings. The marketing team may even suggest additional opportunities for conversion, such as virtual or in-person events, digital offerings, and off-campus recruitment events at high schools or community colleges.
When implementing your strategies, make sure that all departments are on board with the new plans. This means departments, from admissions to student services, need to collaborate for desirable results. After implementing strategies, having a technology solution in place can help monitor and track strategy success.
If some KPIs take longer than others to achieve, these platforms may help you identify which strategies are not working well. You can then adjust either the goal or KPI to be more realistic or change your strategy to achieve the goal. Keep in mind that the higher education landscape changes rapidly, making it important to monitor progress and adjust goals.
Institutions can benefit from taking proactive steps to address barriers to enrollment and student retention. As your institution improves enrollment and retention rates, continue to monitor emerging enrollment barriers and student concerns.
As soon as you notice that one will become a major issue for your institution, create a goal and strategies to mitigate those risks. Innovative technology solutions can identify these patterns early and provide alerts when future enrollment rates will decrease. Addressing these concerns early can help maintain sustainable growth for the future.
Technology innovations like student success software support strategic enrollment management efforts with accurate data collection, analysis, and measurement. These solutions facilitate data-driven decision-making and enhance collaboration across departments. The main benefits include:
Understanding the unique needs of your higher education institution and its students is crucial to developing an effective strategic enrollment management plan. That’s why Student Success & Engagement aims to help higher education institutions evaluate, track, and understand data specific to their students and metrics.
Watermark offers valuable software solutions to enhance higher education institutional success. One case study showed that our platform helped an institution increase its retention rate by five percent within three years and gain a top-10 ranking for student engagement nationally.
Our platform offers real-time student performance insights and has helped institutions increase their retention rate by six percent within a year, influencing 260 percent more engagements with students. The platform also has an Enrollment Report to help you keep track of enrolled students, student statuses, programs, and success staff. Prioritize strategic enrollment initiatives for long-term success and request a demo with Watermark today.
