Examining the Future of Enrollment Leadership

The work of enrollment leaders is shaped by challenges facing higher education. Recently, the College Board published The Future of Enrollment Leadership, a monograph drawn from a gathering of over thirty enrollment leaders who considered the challenges and opportunities that will face higher education over the next 15 years. The group also spent time imagining the roles that enrollment leaders will need to play to help their institutions thrive.

The Future of Enrollment Leadership explores many of the topics discussed at the meeting last year and at the Higher Ed Colloquium this month. Topics explored in-depth include:

• Evolving challenges and opportunities facing higher education institutions. Institutions are experimenting with and introducing new programs, outcome measures, and management structures to address a range of issues including globalization, demographic shifts, technology, and growing economic inequality.
• The growing role of big data and statistical analyses on campuses, particularly in enrollment and student success.  Enrollment leaders are called on to manage increasingly complex and granular data coming from a proliferation of new technology systems, tracking and analyzing everything in the college process including recruitment, applicant behavior, admissions and enrollment yield, campus life, retention, and graduation rates.
• The economics of higher education and the role enrollment leaders can play in guiding their campuses into uncharted waters. The pressing challenges and unique opportunities presented by the nation’s rapidly changing economic and demographic landscape are major forces defining the roles a successful enrollment leader is expected to play.
• The current and future opportunities and risks related to undergraduate admissions policies and practices. It is this longstanding responsibility for and expertise with admissions-related issues that positions enrollment leaders well for the challenges their institutions will face in the coming years.
• The increasing emphasis on degree completion and how enrollment leaders can advance student academic success. With increasing pressure to boost completion rates while not compromising academic quality or increasing costs, enrollment leaders will need the full participation of colleagues throughout the enterprise to succeed. From recruiting and enrolling the right students to establishing interventions to ensure those students graduate, the role of the enrollment leader must constantly adapt, grow, and collaborate.
• The growing centrality of enrollment leaders to the operations, strategic vision, and long-term success of their institutions. On many campuses, the role of enrollment leader has expanded structurally; they report taking on divisions beyond the traditional areas of recruitment and admissions, such as student services, institutional research, and strategic planning, expanding the enrollment leader’s reach and impact.

The Future of Enrollment Leadership also contains questions and issues that set the stage for enrollment leaders across the country to start these important conversations on their campus. We hope that the publication encourages and informs thoughtful conversations about these issues and the future of our field on campuses throughout the country.

Contributors included:

• Youlonda Copeland-Morgan, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management, University of California at Los Angeles
• Randy Deike, Senior Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Success, Drexel University
• MJ Knoll Finn, Senior Vice President for Enrollment Management, New York University
• Yvonne Romero Da Silva, Vice President for Enrollment Rice University
• J. Carey Thompson, Vice President of Enrollment and Communications, Rhodes College