strategic enrollment management

Planting a Tree

I planted a tree in our back yard as part of an elementary school project. In the first year I made sure it had appropriate water, soil, and enough light. But I could barely see its early growth. Similarly, changes in higher education take time to ripple through the system.

Mergers & Acquisitions in Higher Ed

Mergers and acquisitions are increasingly seen as tools to address financial stress, enrolment challenges, and competitive pressures. But they are not without pitfalls. Yet, when handled well they can create opportunities for students and preserve legacies that might otherwise be lost.

The Wisdom of the Crowd in Enrolment Forecasting

The crowd sees signals that may not show up in your data systems—early student concerns, housing bottlenecks, employer demand shifts. Together, they create a more balanced view of the future.

Setting Enrolment Targets in Higher Education - Part 4: How Predictive Modelling and AI are Transforming Enrolment Planning

Enrolment Forecasting is fundamentally a predictive modelling process: given a series of inputs, what are the outputs likely to be? But enrolment target setting is a little different. It’s a human process, informed by data: what is our strategic goal, and how do we get there?

Setting Enrolment Targets in Higher Education - Part 2: How do Enrolment Targets Become Reality?

In the last blog, we discussed how targets are created.

Announcing HESA x Plaid: Data with Purpose

Today we are announcing a new partnership with Higher Education

Setting Enrollment Targets in Higher Education - Part 1: What Are Enrollment Targets—and How Do We Set Them?

Good targets follow the SMART principle: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. But enrolment planning layers on additional complexity that SMART alone doesn’t capture.

6 Steps to Developing a Metric to Understand Course Compaction

Just as strategic enrolment management looks at metrics at the institutional, department, program, and course level, so too should course compaction and curriculum offerings be understood at different levels of aggregation.

Four Ways Course Compaction Benefits Instructors

While instructor FTEs and student contact hours may go up due to course compaction, strategic thinkers understand that class size, classroom amenities, and instructor workloads impact student learning experiences and success.

Course Compaction: Indicators of Negative Compaction

Course compaction can improve student program progression rates by streamlining course offerings, but as with any enrolment management initiative, there must be metrics developed to evaluate its effectiveness.