Enrollment managers are busy people. Not only must they meet or exceed enrollment goals every year, but they are increasingly tasked with improving student retention, the institutional brand, and college rankings. To do this, they must often take into account the academic program portfolio to understand how programs resonate with students. There is a good reason for that.
If you have loosely followed the legal education market, you’ve likely heard concerning tales of declining enrollments and underemployed or, even worse, unemployed law school graduates with exorbitant debt loads.
Consider this: in 2016, there were 236,000 academic programs offered by 6,700 title IV eligible institutions of higher education in the U.S. That is an increase of 34,500 academic programs since 2012, or one new program per institution per year, not counting program closures.
In today’s market, when many schools are struggling to grow enrollment, the search for new academic programs is highly competitive. Your institution may have identified some great new program opportunities through robust market research and thorough discussions about institutional priorities. Yet it is almost certain your competitors are coming to similar conclusions about where the best opportunities lie.
We have seen growing interest in social impact programs as institutions explore program ideas that will appeal to today’s students. Such programs, spanning everything from social entrepreneurship to social justice, are designed to help students appreciate less conventional conceptions of impact, such as environmental, and may focus on a particular community seen as disadvantaged or underserved.
If you have followed healthcare education over the past decade, you have noticed a push toward higher levels of education for health care practitioners. Nursing education is no stranger to this trend, and for good reason. Evidence suggests improved patient outcomes due to better educated nurses.
