Strategic Enrollment Management

Strategic enrollment management [SEM] is a crucial element of planning for new growth at a university or college as it concerns both academic program growth and facilities needs. SEM focuses on what is best for students' success while increasing enrollment numbers and stabilizing institutional revenues. A student's success, according to an enrollment manager, is often based on the institution's graduation and retention rates. This means that students are often recruited based on the likelihood of them graduating. While this practice is acceptable for many privately run selective institutions, it is not a common practice of most public institutions such as community colleges. A real strategic enrollment management approach looks at the entire student cycle, from entry through graduation.

According to Thomas Williams enrollment management refers to the traditional task of “setting and meeting the goal of assembling a student body that comprises a predetermined and advantageous mix of students in terms of quality, number, and diversity in all its forms.” strategic enrollment management is a broader, more dynamic task that begins with an understanding of the world around us, anticipates changes, probes institutional mission and goals, modifying them if necessary, and coordinates “campus-wide efforts in such areas as marketing, student recruitment and retention, tuition pricing, financial aid, academic and career counseling, and curriculum reform.”

Often, SEM is understood to be focused on a college or university's traditional undergraduate students, and mobilized to meet the needs of the traditional college student. An additional area of SEM has been developed to apply these principles to the graduate student lifecycle: Graduate Enrollment Management (GEM). SEM focuses on the unique services and facilities needs specific to the adult graduate student.

Some of the components of strategic enrollment management include:

The Evolution of Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) resulted from the work of a number of people and organizations since schools started being concerned with this area in the early 1970s. Boston College (through the work of Jack Maguire in 1976) and Northwestern University (through the work of William Ihlanfeldt)[2] began to use research and specific communication strategies to increase enrollment at their schools. The idea of research and using the data to target communication and marketing efforts resulted in positive enrollment numbers and drew several entrepreneurs into the field of managing enrollments. Jack Maguire subsequently created and named the first enrollment management model for recruitment and retention of students.

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