The Recruitment and Outreach Scorecard: Moving from a Tactically-Driven to a Strategy-Focused Enrollment Office

Enroll an academically talented class. Increase the number of underrepresented students. Grow out-of-state or international enrollments. These are common refrains heard across colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes. At the same time, increasing competition, demographic shifts, declining funding, and a tough public policy environment are just a few of the obstacles confronting enrollment professionals. Despite growth over the last decade in the numbers of high school graduates and adult learners, growing and shaping an institution's desired class and predicting yield have become increasingly difficult. In today's demanding environment, clearly communicating enrollment strategy and defining the performance indicators that drive success are imperative. Yet, while the discipline of enrollment management has transformed itself dramatically in recent years, measurement systems are firmly mired in the past. Executing effectively requires a new level of transparency, information access, and organizational alignment not common in today's higher education environment. The enrollment office - whether for undergraduate, professional, or graduate students, or continuing education learners - is one of the most accountable entities on campus today. However, simply counting inquiries, applications, or registrations received, as well as admission offers made, no longer provides the full insight needed to proactively manage prospective student enrollment. More often than not, today's enrollment process is a path with alternate entry and exit points; it is a complex network of information, influencers, and decisions (SunGard Higher Education 2007). Leading measures of student intent and engagement are needed to more accurately forecast outcomes. Think about the myriad activities in which an enrollment office engages annually in order to attract, engage, and enroll prospective students. From direct mail, advertising, and travel to campus visit programs and yield events, the typical enrollment office is a beehive of marketing and outreach activities. And increasingly, institutional leaders are demanding a return on these expended resources. One of the many challenges for the enrollment manager is not only to hypothesize, but also to demonstrate, a measurable relationship between these initiatives and desired enrollment outcomes. THE STRATEGY-EXECUTION CHASM There is no shortage of enrollment strategy in higher education. However, colleges and universities often suffer from an inability to execute. Using corporate America as a proxy, the sobering fact is that nine out often organizations fail to implement their strategies (Niven 2003). It is one thing to craft a seemingly well-thought-out plan; it is another thing entirely to deliver upon that plan. Why the chasm between plan and implementation? Research and experience suggest four common barriers: * Unclear Vision: Fundamentally, the people responsible for executing an enrollment strategy - enrollment counselors, associate and assistant directors, and managers - might not understand the big picture or the ways in which their actions directly contribute to enrollment goal achievement. * Unmotivated People: People have litde incentive to focus on the plan. Annualized reviews and infrequent feedback provide negligible inducements to change behavior. At one institution, enrollment counselors are provided reports at the end of the enrollment cycle that describe how their territories performed. Although such reports have some value, after-the-fact measurement provides litde incentive or information about how to improve performance. * Unfocused Management: Managers spend more time working in than on the enrollment business. Constant firefighting and the juggling of conflicting institutional priorities sap the ability of the most senior enrollment professional to manage strategically. * Disconnected Resource Allocation: Understanding and efficiendy allocating the resources required to implement an enrollment plan are more challenging tasks than most people realize. …