The core goal of admissions offices is to grow or change enrollments. Growing enrollments not only generates revenue, but also projects an image of high demand for the institution. An institution’s mission and prestige is also impacted by admission’s efforts to change the demographic mix of its students. The difficulty in trying to grow or change enrollments moderately or aggressively is that most institutions don’t have the latitude to increase or change its classroom inventory proportionally.

According to The Condition of Education 2006, published by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, “The number of students enrolled part time and full time, the number of students at 2- and 4-year institutions, and the number of male and female undergraduates are all projected to reach a new high each year from 2006 through 2015.” The report states that enrollments in both graduate and first-professional programs will follow similar growth patterns. This enrollment growth combined with the lack of available space is hindering institutions’ ability to respond to these trends and grow enrollments effectively.

At this pace, higher education as a whole appears to be poised to hit a wall in the near future. At that point, institutions will no longer be able to grow enrollments because there will simply be no space for new students.

An additional concern is the impact of this space crunch on various institutions’ ability to achieve their strategic missions. I’ll explain this problem in my next entry.

To read The Condition of Education 2006, please follow this link: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/2006071_1.pdf

To view the Higher Education Landscape by CollegeBoard.com, please follow this link: http://www.collegeboard.com/highered/res/hel/hel.html

Sources:

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2006). The Condition of Education 2006, NCES 2006-071, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

CollegeBoard.com. Resources: Higher Education Landscape. http://www.collegeboard.com/highered/res/hel/hel.html