Refocusing Enrollment Management: Losing Structure and Finding the Academic Context.

Enrollment management has come to be defined in structural terms when what is needed is an understanding of institutional academic context. Concentrating on which offices should be brought together to do enrollment work can lead to being stuck on structure, forcing institution to reflect enrollment management rather than ensuring that enrollment management reflects institution. Enrollment management needs to use an academic lens to define an EM Ethos-the underlying fundamental character and spirit of an institution's culture. This EM Ethos makes structure servant rather than master of enrollment policy and strategy. This refocusing of enrollment management on academic context can provide at last a template institutions developing their enrollment management approach. It is a template based on vertical communication that articulates a strategic vision, horizontal communication that opens dialogue and completes feedback loops, and structure consistent with institution's academic mission. Enrollment managers who speak language of academic context-with data and research-will eventually be heard more convincingly than those who speak language of structure. Enrollment structure follows academic understanding, and therein lies future of enrollment management. Structuralism: The Historical EM Throughout my career in enrollment management I have been an unabashed structuralist. I left one institution when a senior administrator suggested that significant enrollment offices reported to enrollment manager for convenience. At University of Cincinnati we paid ultimate homage to structuralism and built a building to house structure, bringing ten different offices from five different buildings into one facility designed to enhance a blending of responsibilities. One might say we made a structure structure. To this day, I obsess about units included in enrollment management organization. In some respects, such an obsession is understandable. Many of earliest proponents of enrollment management (EM) concentrated on offices that needed to come together to accomplish a more purposeful approach to EM. Jack Maguire, father of EM, called it a grand design (1976) that developed to bring about a synergy among functions such as admissions, financial aid, and retention, which too often were viewed as independent and working at cross purposes (Britz 1998). How else could institutions change this silo culture but with a structure that brought disparate units together? Certainly, structural approach to EM took a permanent place in literature when Kemerer, Baldridge, and Green introduced what has been called the quintessential enrollment management structural forms (Henderson 2001). Their seminal 1982 book suggested that EM was organized in increasingly complex structures: marching millions committee, let's-give-the-admissions-director-something-more-to-do coordinator, conflict avoidance matrix model, and now-we're-serious division. Here was a recipe EM that took into account how difficult organizational change might be in a given campus culture. The committee might be a good way to begin EM process while a coordinator might take advantage of existing mid-management staff to develop collaboration by dint of personality. A matrix model raised EM to senior levels of campus administration without realigning offices in different administrative areas. Only division was able to effect most transformational change by bringing all appropriate areas together under a cabinet-level officer. Hossler (1986) added change models to structural mix by suggesting that EM organizations developed based on urgency of need change. Stable enrollments could, at best, yield incremental change, probably best achieved through a committee; a crisis brought on by plummeting enrollment would require more draconian change, often creation of a new division. …