The Role of the Strategic Enrollment Thinker
The strategic enrollment thinker is often not seen as an essential part of an educational team, but the person is crucial to the school community. Currently, schools substitute this position with faculty and young professionals who are not capable of providing the essential direction and leadership to ensure a strong enrollment process and ultimately, the ability to achieve one’s mission.
What is strategic enrollment thinking?
Strategic enrollment thinking is accomplished by a person who has the ability to develop, implement, and maintain a systematic process for creating the required student and parent body combinations – in both quality and quantity – to help a school to achieve its mission.
Quantity includes the right numbers of full-pay and financial aid students needed to generate the necessary operating revenues and the necessary parent population to support the operational, fund-raising and word-of-mouth initiatives.
Quality refers to the talents and attributes of the student body – but not limited to – the varying talents and attributes, the balance of weaker vs. stronger students at each grade level, and the demographics of the population, i.e, boys and girls, class size, location, or residential status. This orchestration of the student and parent body will give the school its best position for creating a community that best matches and sustains the educational experience, leading to the achievement of the school’s mission.
What does a strategic enrollment thinker talk about?
Strategic enrollment thinkers are having conversations around the quality and quantity of the student body with a team of people who are invested in the process. To advance the thinking, these conversations need to be held at the board level and the senior administrative level, followed by a communication of the information to other key people.
If conversations aren’t happening, the school is less likely to maximize its resources and more likely to leave opportunities on the table. For example, who offers or develops these types of strategies: the school needs to lower or raise the number of students at certain grade levels to balance the openings with the available full-pay applicants. Or perhaps there is going to be a gender imbalance at a particular level and a school needs to make a decision on whether or not to discount seats to improve the gender balance. Another example is when there are too many children requiring additional time and attention and the current class can’t absorb more of them, but the ones available are full-pay families whose income you need. Looking forward at you enrollment situation, an example might be thoughtful planning around available tuition revenues or foresight to inform the powers-that-be when the current admission season is going to come up short. Making the wrong or a untimely decision can affect either quality or quantity. Having strategies to adjust for the quality and quantity in your pool is required to make the most out of a fluctuating market full-pay market.
Which aptitudes make for a great strategic enrollment thinker?
A great enrollment thinker considers more than just the day-to-day details. If you are just putting out fires, you aren’t gathering the data, learning from your current process and building a strategic operation. Once the enrollment thinker is given space by the head of school to remove him/herself out of the mire of those fires, he/she can build a plan that will evolve each year. This person needs to be:
- Able to put together a plan of operation.
- Able to understand the complexities that exist in running a school’s operation and the varying grade level operations.
- Able to determine what makes for the best student match with the program, class, or grade level.
- Able to understand quantitative requirements of the student body by grade level and how to create the healthiest mix of students in numbers – short and long term.
- Able to communicate the strategic thinking in an effective manner to the head, trustees, peer administrators and other employees.
- Able to utilize both net tuition thinking and raw numbers techniques for matriculating students by class, grade level or division to fulfill budgetary requirements.
Who are the leaders in the strategic enrollment thinking process?
The dean of enrollment or admission should typically take the leadership position. This person needs to understand strategic enrollment thinking and how to maximize the strategy.
The head of school needs to be the champion for the efforts, bringing all senior administrators – chief financial officer, principle or division head, director of development, director of communication, and dean of students – around the same table. Other administrators may be appropriate to bring on board as well, depending on the operation of the school.
The program people are key in this process as numbers of students, types of students, the remial or enrichment accommodations of students need to get the appropriate attention in the assessment and recruitment process. Schools can’t do strategic enrollment thinking without the help of faculty and the educational leadership nor can it be done without the strategic enrollment thinker.
Where does the strategic enrollment thinker fit in to the school or senior team?
The strategic enrollment thinker is connected to every aspect of the senior team. Each school’s operation may be different and may include other persons, for example, department heads or athletic director. The list below shows primary ways in which the strategic enrollment thinker is connected with the senior team. The table shows the senior team members who may have a strong interest in the respective thinking of a strong enrollment thinker.
The strategic enrollment thinker:
- Implements the strategy for generating the majority of the income for the operation of the school.
- Shapes the educational program through the enrollment of various types of students and parents.
- Acquires the parent body that will strengthen the mission of the school through their beliefs and loyalties, not limited to volunteering, financing, and commitment to the school’s mission.
- Forms partnerships in shaping the brand messages and image of the school with the rest of the community.
| Head of school | Chief FinancialOfficer | Principal or Division Head | Dean of Students | Director of Advancement | Trustees | Director of Communication |
| A | A | A | ||||
| B | B | B | B | |||
| C | C | C | C | C | C | C |
| D | D | D | D | D |
Why does strategic enrollment thinking fail?
Strategic thinking falls short when no one is paying attention to its importance. In many schools, class room teachers take over the roles of leadership as a head of school or director of enrollment. Although they may have strong credentials in building an educational program, their shortcoming -in my opinion – is often their inability to understand the underlining operations that make a school work, i.e, enough full-pay families, a strong brand image, facilities management or the proper management of adults (faculty and parents). Due to this lack of knowledge, this type of leader may not spend enough time in these areas and the process of enrollment management can fall short for those schools where there isn’t a strong supply and demand advantage for recruiting full-pay students. When there is no leadership and no vision for the enrollment management system, the business model for the educational program will flail or fail.
Conclusion
With or without an identified strategic enrollment thinker, an enrollment management process will operate on its own – effectively or ineffectively. To best achieve the school’s mission, it behooves the leadership to pay attention to strategic enrollment thinking as an integral operation within a school’s community.