THE ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT REVIEW

Transcription

1 THE ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT REVIEW Volume 22, Issue 3 Spring, 2007 Editor: Don Hossler Associate Editors: Larry Hoezee and Daniel J. Rogalski Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and Planning This issue of the Enrollment Management Review presents a critique by the editor examining key ethical and policy issues at the heart of current enrollment management strategies Overview I am deeply troubled by the short-sighted, self-interest focus on revenues and prestige reflected in the enrollment management decisions of many selective admissions 4-year colleges and universities, both private and public. Tom Mortenson, Postsecondary Education Opportunity, December 2005 In the last 30 years, enrollment management has gone from a little understood or practiced concept --first envisioned in 1976 by Jack Maguire at Boston College -- to a major administrative strategy. In a relatively short period of time we have gone from the enrollment managers of the most likely to be found at small, private, tuitiondriven institution -- to the present, where senior enrollment officers are rapidly becoming the norm at colleges and universities. Increasingly, even large public flagships and selective privates are appointing associate vice presidents of enrollment management as well as associate vice presidents. A colleague recently noted that campuses are now paying enrollment managers more than senior academic officers because of the stakes associated with undergraduate enrollments. Even many graduate programs in areas like business, law, and medicine now have senior enrollment officers. These developments should not be surprising, as they reflect the increasing importance of the functions associated with enrollment management. Resource dependency theory (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978) tells us that organizations will devote considerable time, energy, and money to protect their market position and the resources that are valuable to them. Private institutions without large endowments have always relied heavily on tuition and fees for their survival. With the decline in public funding, and the rise of the importance of rankings, many four-year public institutions have also become much more attentive to undergraduate student enrollments. Against this backdrop, the presence of a senior enrollment officer has become normative at four-year colleges and universities and also increasingly so at community colleges. However, the ascending importance of the enrollment management function has also started to attract critical media attention not an unexpected development. The academy has always had an ambivalent relationship at best with management and business

2 practices in higher education. In A History of American Higher Education, Thelin (2004) notes several critiques of the connections between big business and colleges and universities. When the word marketing was introduced in the areas of admissions and fundraising, many faculty and student affairs administrators reacted negatively. When speaking with faculty groups, I still often use the phrase applied social science research instead of market research because business terminology does not resonate well with some faculty members. Recently, there have been a series of stinging critiques of the practice of enrollment management. In 2005, the November issue of the Atlantic Monthly examined enrollment management practices. One of the senior writers, Matthew Quirk, had this to say about enrollment management: Over the past twenty years, often under cover of the euphemisms with which the industry abounds, enrollment management has transformed admissions and financial aid, and in some cases the entire mission of a college or a university. At its most advanced it has a hand in every interaction between a student and a school, from the crafting of a school s image all the way through to the student s successful graduation. Any aspect of university life that bears on a school s place in the collegiate pecking order is fair game: academic advising, student services, even the curriculum itself. Borrowing the most sophisticated techniques of business strategy, enrollment managers have installed market-driven competition at the heart of the university. (Quirk, 2005) Here, I examine the critiques of enrollment management and related developments in our colleges and universities. My remarks focus primarily, but not solely, on the effects of enrollment management on access and equity and particularly on the current uses of institutional financial aid, while also addressing other aspects of enrollment management practice. Critiques often seem to start with the presumption of a golden age prior to enrollment management s development when colleges and universities were presumably altruistic in their admissions, financial aid, and retention policies and practices and when students presumably came to college solely for a love of learning rather than for the enhancement of personal prestige through better jobs after graduation or for the financial benefit of large merit scholarships. Such romantic views of higher education are not always helpful. Most leaders of our educational institutions are realists; their jobs necessitate this characteristic. Substantive critiques of institutional enrollment management practices grounded in a pragmatic view of how current policies and strategies have evolved over time and a thoughtful analysis of some of the undesirable effects these practices have created in the past and the present will appeal to many senior campus policy makers. Idealistic calls for a return to a time when the motives of students and institutions were pure are effective at garnering the attention of the media and social critics, but are less persuasive to campus administrators, who have reason to doubt there ever was such a time. Indeed, history suggests there was not.

3 History can help us understand what kinds of reforms are likely to be achievable in the complex political and financial world where colleges and universities exist. The distinguished historian of American higher education, John Thelin, has always had more than a passing interest in college admissions. Two of Thelin s books (1982, 2004) call attention to a range of admissions and financial aid practices that could be viewed as historical precedents for many current enrollment management activities. Similarly, Rupert Wilkinson s new book, Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America (2005), documents how institutions have used their financial aid dollars in ways that were not always consistent with the intent of the donors and that were in the pursuit of institutional prestige and influence. Some of these admissions and financial aid strategies have even been practiced by the most prestigious colleges and universities in the nation. One need only read Jerome Karabel s book, The Chosen, to see how even Harvard, Princeton, and Yale have used what we might now call enrollment management practices in their efforts be considered number one the best university in the United States. A Look at Enrollment Management Both in my classes and in conference presentations I often make the point that many of the most pressing public policy issues affecting postsecondary education are related to the practices of enrollment management. Whether dealing with issues of access and equity, the role of SAT and ACT tests in admissions, affirmative action, or the appropriate use of merit aid, enrollment managers often find themselves at the intersection of institutional aspirations and federal and state policy. Though many college presidents and boards of trustees are not fully aware of them, the complex set of pressures that face enrollment managers often include being asked to find simultaneous and optimal solutions to issues of net revenue from tuition; to raise the institution s position in the U.S. News & World Report s college rankings; to enhance the institution s racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity; and to achieve visible, tangible results in the areas of access and equity. When asked to describe my job toward the end of my eight-year tenure as Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Services at Indiana University Bloomington, I offered the following description: It is my job to manage the nexus of revenue, prestige, diversity, and access for the campus. This nexus mirrors conditions and trends in the larger society. The historical analyses of John Thelin make it clear that colleges and universities have always been strongly influenced by larger societal trends and have never been the totally insular ivory towers some observers have suggested. In this context, are the practices of enrollment management much different from the strategies pursued by other organizations in our winner-take-all society? Should we expect the leaders of educational institutions, including enrollment managers, to be any more successful at resisting the pressures and expectations of their many stakeholders than the leaders of other institutions? Ultimately the analytical approaches and many of the strategies employed by enrollment managers are not the problem. The same financial aid analytic techniques employed to identify the price thresholds of National Merit Scholars could be used to optimize

4 scholarships and grants for low-income students or low-income Latino students. The same marketing campaigns that might be employed to communicate with valedictorians could be used to communicate with first generation rural high school students. The problem is not with the concept of enrollment management; if there are problems it is with the goals established for enrollment managers. Enrollment goals are established by boards of trustees, presidents, and provosts. It becomes the task of enrollment managers to achieve those goals. I am not suggesting enrollment managers do not play a role in establishing enrollment goals for their institutions, but the criticisms of enrollment management should ultimately be focused on the goals of prestige, influence, rankings, and revenue that are being pursued by so many colleges and universities. All college and university presidents want to make decisions to advance their institutions. To prepare for this essay I did a quick review of the literature on strategic planning and perused several institutional strategic plans posted on the Internet. The most commonly mentioned themes I found were building and sustaining a great faculty; encouraging environments where excellence in teaching and learning takes place; having great facilities; and, for research universities, providing superb research facilities. Although I did not undertake an exhaustive search, I found no mention of themes like recruiting an outstanding student body or developing strategic enrollment management offices. Current financial aid practices at many institutions make some of the trade-offs associated with enrollment management strategies abundantly transparent. Once senior campus administrators, enrollment managers, and critics of these practices understand that all institutional revenue is fungible to pursue institutional goals, we are free to examine some of the trade-offs being made with current financial aid strategies. Drawing on my consulting experience over the years, I present some hypothetical examples of trade-offs, starting with some financial aid modeling results. These results suggest a midto-large-size institution would have to spend about $10,000,000 over a four-year period to base fund a targeted effort to raise its average SAT scores by 10 to15 points. That same $10,000,000 could be used to raise faculty salaries at this hypothetical institution by 1 percent. The same dollars could be used to hire 100 new assistant professors, or to renovate three or four research labs. Before I leave this example, I will take it one more step. Returning to my point that all presidents want to do things that advance their institutions, I pose the following question: Among the choices presidents can make to spend their money, which of the options I have outlined in the previous paragraph are likely to result in immediate, measurable increases in the institution s quality and prestige? Faculty raises will not have a pronounced effect on perceptions of quality, nor will adding buildings or renovating science labs. When universities hire new faculty they never know for sure if these new additions will turn out to be great new stars. The only one of these choices that would reliably lead to immediate, visible, tangible results is increasing the average SAT for an entering class of students. Herein lies the seductive power of many enrollment management strategies. All presidents well, at least most presidents know it takes a long time to build great colleges and universities; but the general public, boards of trustees, and alumni want immediate results. And thus institutional goals are set.

5 Financial aid provides the clearest example of the trade-offs inherent in enrollment management strategies; in other areas of enrollment management they are more subtle. In a society that values equal opportunity for all, it is hard to argue in favor of early admissions, but many institutions continue this practice because it helps them achieve their enrollment goals. Lest I be totally critical, I should mention that at least these policies are largely transparent. In contrast, institutions that play games with the admissions process, for example, by not accurately reporting the SAT scores of their entering classes or their retention rates, add to the growing cynicism around the college admissions process that high schools students show. One small study I have thought would be fun to do would be to see how many institutions that have made the SAT optional still report average SAT scores for the U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) rankings and/or still require the SAT if students are applying for scholarships. Anecdotal evidence suggests that students with high SAT scores still send them to SAT-optional institutions. This could obviously result in significantly higher reported SAT scores in the USN&WR and a bump in the rankings, which would leave me wondering what the real goal is behind making SATs optional. Lloyd Thacker, through the Education Trust, is mounting a new study of the college admissions process and how it affects high school students. The underlying question behind much of his study is: What are the societal values we are teaching students through the college admissions process? What are we teaching them about the way the world works? Perhaps social reproduction theory is correct. Have we created a system in which most colleges and universities do more to perpetuate than to reduce social inequalities? The answer, of course, is... YES! Colleges and universities do both they perpetuate and reduce inequalities. But has the pendulum swung too far toward perpetuating inequalities as institutions focus too much attention on rankings, influence, revenue, and prestige? Summing Up The point of this essay is not to suggest that all enrollment management practices are inherently bad, or as some have suggested, that enrollment management practices should be banned from postsecondary education. However, from time to time, the swinging pendulum that metaphorically sets the momentum and direction for the practices of colleges and universities swings too far in one direction and needs to be recalibrated. Colleges and universities have always used admissions- and retention-related practices to achieve institutional goals and this will not change. But have some of our practices now reached a point where they are both unhealthy for our institutions, for society, and for students? The answer to that question seems clear, but what to do about this state of affairs, however, is less certain. In the last year I have attended several meetings of college presidents where there has been a palpable desire to discuss the dilemmas facing the higher education industry due to tuition discounting and merit aid; yet no one can actually start this conversation for fear of an anti-trust lawsuit. Some colleagues in enrollment

6 management and higher education finance have quietly expressed the wish for new federal or state financial aid policies with the potential to save institutions from themselves by creating incentive structures that discourage so much discounting. Clearly, these issues are on the minds of many enrollment managers. In the past year there have been at least five national meetings where concerns about enrollment management practices and the image of enrollment managers has been a major focus of the meetings. Nevertheless, what can be done in our decentralized postsecondary education system remains unclear. Perhaps, for example, new federal and state need-based aid initiatives might require an institutional match. Individual states could consider the same strategies. There is a limit as to how much institutions are going to spend on campus-based financial aid. If incentives could be created to spend more on need-based aid, this could begin to de-escalate the merit arms race. Perhaps the Department of Justice could find ways to work collaboratively with higher education associations to make it at least possible for a group of presidents to meet and more openly talk about the prisoner s dilemma that has been created around merit aid. The ways our ranking systems have evolved, obviously, are one of the major problems. It is unlikely that USN&WR is going to stop publishing rankings or change their methods very much. Alternative rankings might include weighting for the number of Pell Grant recipients that are enrolled. Federal or state policy makers might make the number of low-income students who matriculate and graduate part of their funding formulas. These approaches would likely alter some of our current practices. For several years I have kept thinking that eventually presidents and boards of trustees would push for more transparency and candor in some of their admissions practices and in the way they report data. Whether the standards for accounting and reporting required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 will eventually include colleges and universities remains to be seen. In a recent meeting of college presidents I attended, several suggested that an independent auditing firm be charged with conducting random mandatory audits of institutions reports for the common data set and for organizations like USN&WR. It is a sad commentary that college presidents have begun to consider such a step, and it reflects the general unease and mistrust with how colleges and universities report their admissions, financial aid, persistence, and graduation data. Although the extent to which trustees are aware of the reporting liberties their institutions take is unknown, there are some simple questions trustees could ask about the data their institutions report, including the following: When we report the academic profile of our entering class, are all students included? Does the profile include new students admitted in the summer? Does it include all students admitted conditionally and through other special admissions programs? What is our discount rate for all students? For residents and nonresidents? What percentage of our financial aid is awarded on the basis of merit, and what percentage is awarded on the basis of need? When trustees ask for this information they should be certain to ask people preparing the

7 information to report the percentages strictly on the basis of whether a student received his or her financial aid award on the basis of financial need or because of high grades, SAT scores, and/or a high class rank. Some merit aid goes to students who have financial need, and institutions can distort their relative commitment to merit and need if they do not keep these separate when they report this kind of information. The real question is what is the relative level of commitment we make to needy students and to high achieving students, i.e., students who usually come from advantaged affluent backgrounds? When looking at persistence and graduation rates, similar questions should be asked. Are any groups excluded in these figures? Are we using the formulas to calculate these figures exactly in the way they are intended to be used? Do we do things any differently than most institutions? If so, what? Most of my points in this section have focused on senior policy makers at colleges and universities because this is where most of the goals are formulated that enrollment managers are charged with achieving. Is this meant to imply that enrollment managers play no role in these matters? No. In recent months I have heard several senior enrollment managers note that at our professional meetings we seldom see sessions on ethics in the profession. At last year s AACRAO SEM conference there was more focus on enrollment management s role in access and equity than I have noticed before. Among enrollment managers there has been a fascination with the latest electronic tools, the newest thinking about marketing and branding, and financial aid modeling. This is understandable; on a daily basis, these are the tools of our trade. Perhaps, however, enrollment management, a relatively new field, has now reached a stage of professional maturity where we are starting to ask larger questions about the nature of our work and its broader social purposes. There is nothing wrong with working hard to help the institutions achieve their goals and to be stronger and better educational institutions. Problems, of course, arise when the focus is on wrong ends and the wrong means to achieve them. Enrollment managers might ask themselves how often they conduct meetings where staff talk openly and frankly about all strategies and tactics. If such reflective discussions don t occur, it is probably a good indicator of activities staff would be embarrassed for others to know about. When we compile reports for our provosts, presidents, and trustees, do we include measures of change in unmet need or accurate measures of how our merit aid strategies might be harming low- and moderate-income students? Ultimately it is the most senior policy makers on our campuses that make the decisions about goals and directions, but at least behind closed doors, do we make sure that the decision makers are aware of all the tensions and trade-offs inherent in the goals they have established? If we do not, we will never know if they would have made different decisions. Enrollment management is not ruining higher education, as Tom Mortenson worries. But the relentless, unfettered pursuit of prestige, influence, and revenue can certainly harm the academy and eventually weaken our institutions as we spend more and more resources on things that have less to do with educating students or creating new

8 knowledge. The task before us is to recalibrate the pendulum. Our colleges and universities will always compete with one another and pursue their own best interest; this is the nature of the market-oriented system of higher education we have created and it is unlikely to change. Our priority now should be to find better balance in the goals established for enrollment managers and their tools and strategies in achieving their goals. References Mortenson, T. (2005, December). An Editorial: Five Questions for Enrollment Management. Postsecondary Educational Opportunity, No Pfeffer, J., & Salancik, G. R. (1978). External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependency Perspective. New York: Harper & Row. Quirk, M. (2005, November). The Best Class Money Can Buy. The Atlantic Monthly, 296(4). Retrieved February 24, 2007, at Thelin, J. R. (1982). Higher Education and Its Useful Past: Applied History in Research and Planning. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co. Thelin, J. R. (2004). A History of American Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilkinson, R. (2005). Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.