Five Summer Steps to Maximize Your Enrollment

1. Pivot to the next cycle. The fall incoming undergraduate class isn’t going to radically grow. Transfers will not save a small freshman class this year. With rare exception, chasing transfers all summer won’t net enough to merit spending your time this way. The National Student Clearinghouse reports a double-digit transfer decline since the start of the pandemic. Spring transfer enrollment from two-year to four-year institutions fell by nearly 12 percent from 2021 to 2022, well up from the 1.3 percent decrease the prior year. Pivot to your next undergraduate class so one small class doesn’t turn into two.

2. Upgrade your enrollment teams as soon as possible. Turnover costs institutions, and admissions has been hit hard, especially recently. This means you have less-trained admissions leadership and less prepared individual contributors. The competitive environment will exploit these issues. Can you stop turnover? Not entirely, but a key contributor to departures is lack of progress. No one likes to work hard and fail. Taking your admissions team, along with the marketing office, through a summer intensive will level-set your group and prepare them to improve results.

3. Qualify the interest of soon-to-be senior inquiries in your funnel. Starting the fall with a clear understanding of your interested pool is critical. Qualification doesn’t require an expensive data solution or vendor but will force you to put in the elbow grease needed to begin making relational connections to determine your most likely to enroll students. Don’t outsource this function.  

4. Revisit and remap your strategies to the admission funnel. When winter asks what you did all summer what will you say? Start by getting clarity on where you are and why. Building new initiatives without this step isn’t effective. Don’t be afraid to drop long-standing tactics to invest in a new more focused path forward. Once you have clarity and focus, align your efforts and make sure your staff knows why they are doing what they are doing. Too many leaders skip the clarity and alignment steps in strategy development and see limited improvement.

5. Address the elephant in the room – culture. Peter Drucker told us, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It isn’t about what you preach but about what you tolerate. Does your group understand the shared behaviors and values that contribute to a great team and results? What habits will new team members observe? Culture isn’t a session you do and then move on; it is a mindset and a commitment to showing up a certain way every day. Leaders set the tone. In your summer team meetings and retreats, you can intentionally upgrade your culture.