“Where should we be recruiting next year?”
“Are we priced too high?”
“Why is our enrollment from this market falling?”
“What are our competitors doing that we aren’t?”
Questions like these are being debated on campuses everywhere. And they rarely come with simple answers.
There is usually plenty of evidence in the room. Institutional enrollment and application data. Recruitment results. Market information. Years of experience. Conversations with students and partners. What colleagues have seen work elsewhere.
The challenge is that everyone may be looking at a different piece of the picture.
One person assumes program changes can be made without impact to a market because that’s worked in the past. Someone else points to visa uncertainty or changing student preferences. And still another knows that a peer institution seems to be succeeding in the same market.
Each may have evidence supporting their view.
SIOs tell us that one of their increasingly important roles is helping the institution move from those competing narratives toward a more complete, shared understanding of what is actually happening. For any of the problems they collectively seek to resolve, which can be solved, which can be influenced, and which can really be controlled at the institutional level?
That requires more than looking inward at institutional results. It means putting those results in context—understanding the broader market, what is happening among peers and competitors, and how the many factors influencing student decisions may be interacting.
The work, today, is to provide the institution’s experience and judgment a more comprehensive foundation. Because the better the institution can see the whole picture, the better the questions become—and the better the decisions that follow.