Most colleges and universities implicitly make a promise to students during the admissions process. That promise is that they will receive the help that they need to attain their academic career goals. Even the best-intentioned school, however, is hindered in keeping that promise by a fundamental lack of information regarding future enrollment trends in each program and the capacity to support those trends. This is why academic program capacity management is so vital to higher education.

Institutions generally focus on an overall admissions goal when recruiting incoming classes. This approach doesn’t address the following key needs: predicting the percentage of that new class that will ultimately select each program at the school, and the capacity of those programs to effectively support those new students. The reality is that many institutions have academic programs with little room for additional students.  As new students choose these programs, their “gateway courses” become more severe bottlenecks to everyone in that program. A more systematic approach of “enrollment management” versus focusing on a global admissions goal gives an institution and its students better odds for success.

In addition to delivering on the “promise,” proper management of academic program capacity allows for informed faculty hiring. In the short term, fewer enrollment surprises mean fewer last-minute, frantic searches for adjunct instructors to teach courses with higher-than-expected enrollments. In the long term, institutions can focus on pinpointed hiring and allocation of available funds to add faculty of strategic importance. Knowing the projected enrollment of a program for future semesters also allows institutions to perform proactive facilities planning, eliminating the need to renovate or reconfigure space on the fly.

Check back in next week to learn how academic program capacity management is currently being addressed in higher education.