Beyond the Headlines: Enrollment Management as Higher Ed’s Strategic Fulcrum in the Enrollment Cliff Era:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 273 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guests Bill Conley and Bob Massa

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  273 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guests Bob Massa and Bill Conley

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Introduction and Guest Backgrounds

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guests today are Bill Conley and Bob Massa from “Enrollment Intelligence Now”. Our listeners may remember Bill and Bob from a previous show where we’ve discussed the enrollment cliff and other topics.

Since his retiring from Bucknell University, Bill is partnered with his longtime friend Bob Massa, former dean of enrollment at Johns Hopkins, to assist universities in overcoming their enrollment challenges, especially how things have changed in the post COVID era and what institutions must be thinking about to ensure their enrollment meet their goals and needs going forward. Bill and Bob join me today to talk about the massive changes and challenges that the enrollment managers are facing and what higher ed institutions can do to stabilize and even grow enrollment in this new normal.

Gentlemen, welcome back to the show.

Bob Massa: Thanks a lot, Drumm. Great to be here.

Bill Conley: Yes. Thanks, Drumm. Glad to be here as well.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure.

[00:01:20] The Evolution of Enrollment Management

Drumm McNaughton: We always have such fascinating conversations when you guys are on the show, specifically around enrollment, something that’s, uppermost in leadership’s minds right now. Before we jump into that, gentlemen, would you give us a little background so the listeners, those who haven’t joined us before, can get to know you a little bit.

Bob Massa: Sure. I began in admissions and financial aid at the graduate level, actually, at Columbia University Teacher’s College when I was working on my doctorate back in 1974, and only spent about a year and a half there, quickly went to Colgate University in the financial aid office and then worked with admissions in doing all of the freshman aid packaging. I also did some admissions recruiting for Colgate in New Jersey actually was my region. From there I went on to Union College as a financial aid director and then an associate dean of students., Went to Johns Hopkins as the dean of enrollment there in 1989, 10 years there. Then went to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania as their vice president for enrollment, and, Lafayette College as their vice president for marketing after that, and ended my career with a small four year stint at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Been active in the professional associations and Bill and I have been in Enrollment Intelligence Now a little over five years now since we’ve both been retired. It’s been a good ride.

Drumm McNaughton: Great. Thank you.

Bill Conley: Well, and the listeners will hear some familiar names because I just went to my 50th college reunion at Colgate University and Bob and I liked to kid ’cause he was working there when I was a senior and I said, “oh yeah, you know, I was a student when Bob was working there, but in fact, he’s all of six months older than me.

But anyway, I just kind of stumbled into admissions work after graduate school and realizing I needed a job and somebody told me admissions would be a good start. And what I didn’t realize when I started at Lafayette College, and then went on to be director of admissions at Drew University,

Bob Massa: i’m hearing a lot of names here.

Bill Conley: Yes, exactly. And then went on to be dean of admission at Case Western Reserve University. And in 2002 kind of succeeded Bob as Dean of Enrollment and Academic Services at Johns Hopkins, and then wrapped up my career at Bucknell University as vice president for enrollment management. And what I would put a cap on this is that certainly when both of us started in admissions work, we never thought of enrollment management and what would eventually roll up to be a much more holistic view of recruiting and retaining students. So, both of us feel that enrollment management has its critics, but it’s also a platform to organize yourself for meeting critical goals.

Drumm McNaughton: Well without enrollment management, without a good enrollment team, the institution struggles From a finances perspective. So you’re looking at this and Bob, with your experience in both the enrollment piece and the financial aid piece, I’m sure is very helpful for the institutions you work with.

Bob Massa: Well, it was very interesting. Enrollment management as a concept really started at Boston College in 1974. It didn’t spread, and I didn’t really hear of it until a few years later. But actually that’s kind of what I was doing at Colgate because I also worked in the admissions office. As I said, I had a region in New Jersey, and so I had this sort of dual position, if you will, and the only thing that I did in financial aid was with new students, which was freshmen. So, even back then, while we didn’t call it that at Colgate, it was beginning to develop.

Drumm McNaughton: And how would you define enrollment management now?

Bob Massa: Well,

Drumm McNaughton: You knew that was coming.

Bob Massa: Yes, no, I wish I knew that it was coming. I get my textbook definition out. I would define it as the integration of functions and departments that, before enrollment management, were kind of separate. So of course the obvious ones are admission and financial aid, but marketing is part of it, believe it or not, so is finance, so is, academic advising, and Bill mentioned. He said that his title at Hopkins was enrollment management and, academic services. So he had that component, which I did not have when I was there. So. It’s the integration of those departments to make sure that students are funded correctly, that they can get through and they can be successful, and that they graduate. It’s kind of a soup to nuts concept of administration. I don’t know, Bill, how would you?

Bill Conley: No, I think that captures the technical aspects, but what I would say is, it is the Vice President or Dean of Enrollment Management, their overarching responsibility is to express the promise to prospective students. Make sure the institution keeps the promise, vis-a-vis retention. And how do you know if you’re keeping the promise? Managing the data and the predictive aspects of experience? So I think that it’s assigning someone the accountability for the promise, or some people might say the brand.

Drumm McNaughton: I love that. It’s the way I would term it, it’s a holistic approach to students, excluding academics, although that does come into it in some degree, and it’s taking care of the students and making sure they’re successful going through.

Bill Conley: Yep. Yep.

Bob Massa: I think that’s true.

Drumm McNaughton: We’re all on the same page. I love it. It’s amazing.

[00:07:27] Current Enrollment Challenges

Drumm McNaughton: Gents, we are all facing headwinds right now, every college, every university out there is facing headwinds. People will say, “Hey, this is just because of the new Trump administration”, but I don’t buy that. It’s been going on for a while. Tell us about it, please.

Bill Conley: I’ll jump in Bob first to say that, some of this is going to sound like Deja, it was Yogi Berra would say Dejavu all over again, or, Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. And so for the last decade to 20 years, people have talked about the high school graduation rates and how it’s going to ebb and flow, but now we are clearly, this is not deja vu all over again, this is the real deal and what we’re seeing is that the recent census data that there’s, after this peak of 2025 in high school graduations, there will be a very gradual decline through 2033. And then by 2039 there’s expecting, on an annualized basis, not just one drop but, on an annual basis, a drop of 650,000 high school graduates per year. That computes to 15% decline, and again, it’s going to be a geometric reality.

The other thing is that it’s going to be very local, and we’ll get into this later with the listeners, is national data is useful to some degree, but most colleges are local. Their pull is within a hundred miles. So the reality is the Northeast, Midwest, and West are going to have a greater contraction in high school graduates than other regions of the country. 38 states are going to see the decline at that level, and some of them are going to be much steeper. And here’s a surprise, nobody will be surprised, 32% drop in Illinois, 27% in New York, 20% Michigan, 17% Pennsylvania, 29% in California is their expected decline through 2041. The one area of growth in this is the Hispanic population. It’ll rise from 26% of the high school graduates to 36%, but again, their likelihood to go to college is much lower than other populations. So in the end, we are talking about a very significant decline and, as we will talk a bit later, is you need to really understand its localized impact on your institution and your pool of prospective students.

Drumm McNaughton: It reminds me of the statement, ” all politics are local”. That’s what we’re seeing here.

Bill Conley: Yes. All enrollment is local. So what The other thing that I think people need to understand is not only is the end going to be shrinking, but we’re already seeing a significant shift or downward trend in the percentage of high school graduates going directly to four year colleges. And to put a fine point on it, in 2016 the peak was 70% of high school graduates went directly onto college of two year or four year. It is now down to 62%

Drumm McNaughton: Wow.

Bill Conley: And to, it is, and to put again a pinpoint into localized nature, Indiana, the latest data says in 2023, 51.7% of their high school graduates went straight to college in Indiana or anywhere else. That was compared to 66% five years ago. Again, we’ll talk more about where are they going if they’re, or what are they doing if they’re not going to college.

So again, we are just simply saying these are very real metrics and have very real impacts based on where your college is located.

[00:12:11] Financial Realities and Perceived Value

Drumm McNaughton: I’m gonna bet a lot of this has to do with costs and with the impact on perceived value.

Bob Massa: It does. I was just thinking that one of the reasons, I think, for the decline in the percentage of high school students going directly onto four year college, two or four year colleges, is this notion of value. You know, most people don’t realize this, but the average net tuition that families pay for undergraduate education, now adjusted for inflation of course, it actually, hold onto your seat, Drumm, it actually fell in the past 10 years.

Drumm McNaughton: Doesn’t surprise me.

Bob Massa: About 40% for four year publics and by about 12% in private nonprofit colleges, if you account for inflation. And this is according to the college board’s annual trends and college pricing report.

It excludes loans, but it includes grant aid. So the flip side of this is that colleges are deriving less revenue. Right? So if it’s costing, in adjusted dollars, if it’s costing families less, then colleges are deriving less income because they’re giving more of a discount. They’re giving more financial aid.

Drumm McNaughton: And we’ve seen that discount rate go up significantly.

Bob Massa: That’s right, that’s right, and we’ll talk about that in a minute as well. And so when you read in the paper today, or for our listeners that are on college campuses, they know this firsthand, the financial challenges abound in higher education and not just because of the government’s attack on higher ed, as you pointed out earlier, Drumm. Another thing to consider, higher income families, at particularly at expense of private colleges, are still going to be paying a lot because the list prices actually have increased. For example, twitch and fees, room and board, if you bring all of them together, 10 years ago, 2014 to 2015, at public, four year colleges, went down in inflation adjusted dollars, but it actually increased 35% from those two years, from 2014 to 2024. When you look at the price in the catalog or on the website in 2014, and you look at the price in 2025, a 34% increase. Now, of course, inflation during that time was about 33%.

Drumm McNaughton: Sure.

Bob Massa: So that’s why the real, cost is less. And this is really the same with private colleges. So the total average net price, including room and board increased by only about 4%, adjusted for inflation, 2014 to 2024. But when we look at the average actual price, the significant change, it went from $44,000 to $58,000 today, or 32% increase, slightly under the rate of inflation.

That said though, the data that was just released, I just read this a couple of days ago, from Sallie Mae and Ipsos, a survey of a thousand students and a thousand parents, showed that the families spent on the average about 9% more on college in ’24, ’25 than they did in ’23, ’24. So again, when we take inflation out of the equation. These prices are rising. Families in that survey said that on the average half of the price was funded by their own funds.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Bob Massa: 27% was accounted for by scholarships and grants and the rest through loans.

Drumm McNaughton: There’s other things that are going on as well. Competition is a big, big thing right now, especially you’re seeing a lot of low cost options out there.

Bill Conley: Yes, and I read an article recently and an individual who is one of the senior directors at Fitch, who does. As the college, the kind of, the integrity of their finances. And her comment was quote, “the only thing that will restore stability in the higher education sector is a renewed sentiment that it’s worth it”. So, I think this is really important.

Drumm McNaughton: I have read that, and this was the Lumina Gallup survey that comes out just recently, that people are perceiving more of a value of higher education now than they were even a year ago.

Bob Massa: You know, Drumm, it really depends on how the question is asked.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, of course. Always.

Bob Massa: Because the question in that Gallup survey was, “how much confidence do you have in higher education”? Not so much on the value side, but how much confidence and in 2015 57% said they had a great deal of confidence in higher ed.

That fell to 36% in 2023, but there have been reports of students who feel that, and this is the Gallup survey of students, that students who are currently enrolled, almost three quarters of them, said that they thought their program was worth it, and only 8% said it wasn’t. So students and parents have a little different view here, in terms of the value.

Bill Conley: And moving to, the competition, I’m a former AP US history teacher. When I say former, it was in another era, but I used to tell the story of the railroad industry when it almost went belly up. And one comment was, “the problem was the railroads thought they were in the railroad business, not the transportation business”. And, they didn’t anticipate vehicles that could fly and vehicles that could travel on the road, et cetera. And I think this is something that higher education, too many people have been thinking and strategizing that they’re in the four year private college business. No, they’re in this post-secondary education business and the competition in that area has been going on, whether it’s YouTube certifications, stackable courses, certifications, on the job training, and sometimes higher education said, “oh, well we slew the dragon a number of years ago at the University of Phoenix and remote learning and all of that”, and everybody thought that would eat their lunch. And what they did was, of course, incorporated some of those in structural platforms.

But to go back and link this, so we are seeing that if they’re not going to college, what are they doing? We are seeing that according to a poll that was 1600 college bound students, the percentage who definitely plan on going or returning to college, interestingly by race, 50% of both black and Hispanic said they intend to go on to college. What was an outlier was only 42% of the white identified white students said they were going to.

And therein lies a very subtle demographic reality is they’re more likely to have access, whether it’s from family wealth or other options, where college might not seem to be as important. And again, for so many colleges, the white student population, which is decreasing faster than the overall, that we talked about earlier, they seem to be peeling off. And of course the male population has been peeling off for years at a higher rate of not going on to college. So, I think that, again, we’ll talk about this in our, what are we gonna do about it is, you really need to understand your local economy and how students within a hundred miles, high school students, are making decisions.

But to further confuse everybody about perceptions, in this survey, 45% of students agreed with the following statement, “getting a college degree is not worth the investment because I cannot afford to go into debt when I am not guaranteed a future career path”. And I think, that is where so many students and families are looking.

Bob Massa: I would just add to that, students, when they’re in high school, unfortunately, don’t really understand borrowing, and I would say that a lot of parents don’t either. I mean, recent data from, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that 58% of the borrowers, over half of the borrowers, had $25,000 or less in loans when they graduated, and that 80% of all borrowers had $50,000 or less. So that really goes against this notion that everybody’s coming out with a six figure debt. It’s just not true.

Drumm McNaughton: You’re absolutely right with that. But this generation, they’ve seen their parents struggle going through the great recession, et cetera, and they’re afraid of debt. They are, frankly afraid of debt. And so looking at it from, the perspective of we’re marketing as a college versus the other one you said, institutions haven’t learned, or many of ’em haven’t learned that their job is workforce development. And that workforce development doesn’t necessarily mean blue collar jobs, but it means training people for their future. And they haven’t realized that one yet.

Bob Massa: I don’t know if they haven’t realized it or they’re just not marketing it well. And there’s of course in the academy, there has been, historically, resistance to link the liberal arts, for example, with careers.

Drumm McNaughton: Really? Resistance in higher education. I’ve never heard of that, Bob.

Bob Massa: There has been. Just a little bit of that, but the point is, I think many institutions are coming around to realize that they need to communicate very clearly what their value is, what their successful alumni are doing via stories, not, Madison Avenue kind of advertising, and, it’s essential that they’re transparent in that. And that’s one of the things that we would recommend, obviously to presidents and chief enrollment officers and chief marketing officers, that they begin to talk very clearly about the value and how students are going to get there. For example, many colleges and universities are really ramping up their career services. Whereas it used to be, somewhere, in the back room, it’s now front and center in many places.

[00:22:57] Impact of Political and Demographic Changes

Drumm McNaughton: One thing that we haven’t touched on is the political environment. I don’t wanna spend a lot of time on that other than to say it’s impacting international enrollments, curriculum, financial aid, research dollars, et cetera. Sum it up in, in a minute.

Bob Massa: Yes, we’ll know sometime in the fall from the NCES data, although they have a skeletal staff now with all of the cuts. There certainly will be stories about it in the national and local press about the decline in international students. We know, for example, that the issuance of F1 Visas declined 22% in May of ’25 versus May of ’24. And the decline overall in the first half of this current fiscal year is about 15%. The Associated Press last week had an article about the wait times in China for US Visas. They were so long that many students are just opting out.

And, it also said in that article that Hong Kong universities are experiencing an increase in transfer inquiries from international students who are studying in the US. So that’s another issue, that it’s going to impact, not only the bottom line financial line for colleges and universities, but it’s going to impact the educational experience of all students.

As recently as today, there was an article in Inside Higher Ed that quoted Nafsa in suggesting that, international enrollment in the US could decrease by 30 or 40%, and that’s $7 billion to the US economy. So, it’s a problem.

Drumm McNaughton: So we have seen, and you guys have detailed the biggest challenges that higher ed is facing right now, and frankly, they’re significant.

[00:24:35] Strategies for Higher Education Leaders

Drumm McNaughton: So what’s a president supposed to do about this?

Bill Conley: Well, I think we, there’s the long game, which is a challenge. balance what do you need to do in long term change to adapt to the realities of the demographics. But there’s also, we need a class. next year. So in the long game, I think we have like four or five things that we would just urge the president and board of trustees and cabinet levels to, to And the first one that came to my mind was mission they old, dusty but think many of them are outdated in terms of what the new realities are. And if your mission statement, we talked about liberal arts and other things are out of sync with the demand curve, it’s not throwing your mission away, but it’s really, how can you redefine it, how can you re-express it differently so it supports changes that you’re gonna have to make downstream. And the faculty will point, “this is not mission statement”, but if your mission statement says it is, that helps. So that would be my first thought. Bob?

Bob Massa: Yes, I think aligning enrollment targets with demand, and again, that’s something that colleges have not traditionally done, but in the new reality, the new financial reality and the new demographic reality, they’re going to have to do that. It’s really important, for example, to study the trend over time of applications from different regions of the state and different programs, to align your recruiting efforts to where the students are and what they’re interested in. And then basically, proactively, look at program demand and consider consolidation or in some cases eliminating programs with low enrollments. That’s a tough one.

Drumm McNaughton: Mission statements are the basis for everything going forward. Having done multiple institution strategic plans, people go, “ah, mission”.

NO! People need to understand what you stand for and that’s your mission statement. And then if you’re not aligned with your enrollment targets with demand and your mission statement, you’re completely out of alignment and you’re gonna be going every which way but the right way.

Bob Massa: Remember in the beginning when Bill was talking about his definition of enrollment management, and he said, “keeping the promise”. I mean, that’s really what we’re talking about here. The mission statement has to contain that promise and we have to deliver on it. And we, meaning not the enrollment managers alone, obviously, I mean, the core of the institution are the faculty and they have to deliver on that promise. Otherwise, we won’t have students to

Bill Conley: Well, and a promise is a promise. What, what’s the promise? It’s the mission statement. So if you, something that nobody wants,

that doesn’t help, even if you’re fulfilling it, you’re fulfilling it for fewer and fewer. But I think we’re a lot of certainly public’s college level, legislatures eliminating programs, using metrics say, in the last four years, if you didn’t have more than three graduates in this program, close it.

So we’re seeing a lot of that, the, colleges need to really look at those numbers, and it’s hard ’cause you have tenure faculty and everything. But that’s foot traffic and if students are not enrolling in these programs in any numbers to say your average class size is eight is not necessarily a positive.

Drumm McNaughton: No, No our projects most recently have all been focused on academic alignment with demand.

Bill Conley: So Bob, there are lots of elephants in the room, but you know, this kind of, long range, the discount rate, as expressed, or the declining net tuition rate, how do you tackle that one.

Bob Massa: Yes, I mean, we talked a little bit about that earlier, and there’s gonna be even more challenge now, I think with the changes in the parent plus loan. Fortunately, the student loan, the direct loan hasn’t been changed thanks to the Senate. But the parent loans now have a cap on them of $20,000 a year and $65,000 total.

Whereas before, we’re talking about undergraduates now, before parents could borrow the difference between the total cost of education , and the financial aid that they were getting. And on the graduate side, the graduate plus loans of course, have been eliminated and students can now borrow a maximum of $20,500 a year or a $100,000 total, unless they’re in professional programs, and then that goes up to $50,000 annual and $200,000 total.

But, we could do an entire podcast really, and take, three more hours, to talk about discount rates. It’s extremely, extremely difficult to reduce dependence on discounts in order to enroll a class. I mean, once you get into the game and it escalates and your competition is doing the same thing. If you’re aiding just about everyone with scholarships or grants, you can really consider a tuition reset.

Most places don’t like to do that. I had some experience with that in the last four years of my career at Drew, and actually we saw a slight increase in net tuition, slight increase, in net tuition revenue per student when we lowered the tuition because we gave less financial aid. But the real benefit was that we enrolled more students, 12% more students and so the total net tuition revenue actually went up. And I believe if we began to roll back our list prices, then this notion that college is too expensive, it’s not gonna dissipate, but it’ll lessen.

Here’s the problem though. If you are at an elite institution that’s only giving financial aid to, 40% of the students and 60% are full payers. You cannot afford to decrease your tuition at all. It’s only if you’re aiding just about everyone that you can afford to do that.

Drumm McNaughton: So, with that, that rolls into the international students because many institutions have depended on international enrollment with very little, if any, discount to the tuition to help them make their bottom line.

Bob Massa: Right. And that’s, when we say that there’s going to be a $7 billion hit to the economy, that’s part of it. I also read a short piece today by Karen Fisher of the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which she said that argument of a massive loss of financial resources if international students, decreased by 30 or 40% is not flying in some circles, especially for the critics, because exactly what Bill was talking about earlier, that international students are concentrated. On the west coast, on the east coast and in a few regions of the south, but other than that, they don’t have that big an impact on the economy. So people in regions that are not in those major metropolitan areas aren’t as concerned about the decrease in international students. But as a nation as a whole, it’s gonna be a hit.

Drumm McNaughton: Folks.

[00:31:40] Conclusion and Next Steps

Drumm McNaughton: This ends part one of our podcast with Bill Conley and Bob Massa. Tune in next week for the second half of the program where we’re gonna get into a lot of the solutions that higher education institutions can do. I look forward to seeing you next week.