Having worked at three institutions in the graduate space and seeing the various ways graduate enrollment is organized – or actually not – in higher education, below I share some thoughts on how to increase graduate enrollment (at institutions offering graduate education).
First, the most inefficient structure I experienced, at more than one institution, is a decentralized model. Here graduate programs are housed in each separate school or even specific major department with their own separate recruitment, admission, and processing units. At institutions with multiple schools, this replication results in lost economies of scale, inconsistent practices, fractured recruitment, and different pricing models.
Next, I experienced hybrid graduate spaces. Here, the application process, or back office operating processes by which a prospective graduate student applies is centralized institutionally within one area – that I call a graduate operations area. I don’t refer to this as graduate admission as in hybrid structures, the individual schools make the admission decision, just the application processing is more streamlined, consistent, and efficient. I experienced success with this organization structure given the standardization of the application process. Knowing that different schools have different application criteria or requirements, there is some customization needed in the operations area so having a best practice CRM that can warehouse and accommodate the different application requirements is important.
In these organization structures, graduate recruitment is still split into different schools. There are some pros and cons of this. Having recruitment housed in separate schools provides for a level of specific knowledge or expertise of the programmatic strengths or competitive advantages of a particular school. However, the organizational alignment of the recruitment function in a particular school is tricky as larger programs receive the most attention while more boutique programs receive less recruitment attention. This lends to the question of the value of particular boutique programs depending on enrollment and faculty size relative to tuition revenue versus cost. There can also be institutional mission considerations. For instance, a faith-based institution offering a religion master’s program that has low levels of enrollment versus the size of the faculty department. Decentralized graduate recruitment functions also exhibit less economies of scale and experience redundancies in recruitment – meaning, I have seen programs cannibalize and recruit at similar events for the same institution.
At the opposite end are fully centralized graduate admission organization structures. Here, not only is the application process centrally warehoused but the recruitment function as well. In these structures, the question becomes, who makes the admission decision? Arguments can be made that the individual schools should still make the admission decision given specific programmatic expertise in the field to which an applicant applies, as individuals here can best assess an applicant’s qualifications. However, graduate admission professionals can be trained to understand an applicant’s qualifications or, at least, can do an initial application review of qualifications and make decisions to admit or not depending on how clear cut the admissions criteria. Setting up admission criteria with specific program faculty is important with this consideration.
However, in this organization structure, the question then becomes how best to scale recruitment such that the institution has the human resources to successfully recruit and enroll graduate students? Where does the recruitment team come from – new hires for a new department (meaningful cost) or reallocation of staff from schools (and what is the school buy-in and impact on morale in this case)? Additional questions involve, how do you ensure the team is staffed optimally to support the schools from a recruitment, admission and ability to achieve enrollment targets perspective?
Taking a centralized organization approach, similar to the undergraduate admission approach, often involves institutional culture and level of tuition revenue dependency as considerations. Centralized approaches are most efficient without a doubt. Centralizing recruitment again is tricky as, based on my experience, all schools want people to support their individual programs and many times there is a resource limitation as smaller programs want recruitment support and larger programs want more recruitment support than is currently allocated.
Also, separation of labor decisions need to be made. What is the role of the recruiter? To cultivate applications and pass the recruiting work to the school after the point of admission or complete the recruitment process until the student commits to enroll? Again, this involves institutional culture and the degree to which schools are comfortable delegating recruitment to a centralized area.
Organization structure plays a meaningful role at institutions interested in growing graduate enrollment. Additional opportunities include program additions using existing curriculum but packaging differently to control cost while stimulating demand. For example, a faith-based institution may offer a masters program in Business Ethics integrating existing curriculum from Religion and Business. Additional growth opportunities include offering graduate certificate or credentialling programs using existing foundational curriculum that build into master’s programs. For example, offering a Certified Financial Planning Certificate that leads to a Master’s in Finance. Today prospective graduate students want to learn in the modality most convenient for their lives so offering hybrid modality – in person, online or both helps facilitate graduate enrollment. Last, I experienced, leveraging financial aid at the graduate level, similar to the undergraduate level, by awarding low discounted merit-based grants (10% to 25%) to admitted graduate students facilitates enrollment growth.
Broadly, to address the undergraduate demographic cliff involves building out different enrollment populations and institutions with graduate programs have diversification opportunities in this space.
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