Tag: Resolutions

  • New Year’s Resolutions for Higher Ed

    New Year’s Resolutions for Higher Ed

    As we enter the new year, I want to share some thoughts about what higher education needs to accomplish as a sector in 2026. I view these as resolutions: tough challenges we need to tackle with courage and determination. Are you ready?

    Fix Accreditation

    I have participated in accreditation as a college president, a law school faculty member and as a board member of the NWCCU, the Northwest’s regional accreditor, and so I say this from experience: Our accreditation system is horrible. It wastes massive amounts of time and accomplishes almost nothing to guarantee students a good education. We need to scrap it and start over. Instead of multiyear cycles, we should review schools every five years, in a process that takes no more than six months. It should focus on just three things: student outcomes, responsible financial management and academic freedom. Schools that do not meet strong, clear, objective standards in these areas should be placed on probation and, ultimately, decertified if they fail to improve. We have to stop rubber-stamping failure.

    Discuss Creating a True National Higher Ed System

    If I use the phrase “American higher education system” with colleagues from Europe and Asia, they laugh. “System? You don’t have a system! You have a giant collection of unregulated institutions that perform very inconsistently, many of them for-profit scams.”

    There is so much truth in this reaction. The venerable Higher Education Act of 1965 no long meets our national needs. We need to start a rational discussion about reform of the higher education regulatory landscape. We need a smaller number of higher-performing universities, we need to eliminate institutions with poor outcomes that provide limited or no real return on investment, we need to provide truly affordable undergraduate programs in every state, we need to cut regulations and legal rules that drive up the cost of compliance, and we need to limit student debt. This is not the year for reform—Congress is a divided mess. But we need to start discussing the future.

    Focus on Community Colleges

    The foundation of American higher education is the part of the sector we talk about least: our community colleges. Community college is the best place to provide four vital services our students and our country desperately need: remedial education to make up for poor K–12 schools, valuable job training in skills and trades to help students prepare for the workplace, ESL classes to help nonnative English speakers thrive, and low-cost general education to help students determine whether they want to proceed to a four year degree.

    Community college quality is inconsistent across the United States: excellent in some states, poor in others. As a result, there is no one-size-fits-all set of reforms we need to enact. Every state government needs to have a serious, honest conversation led by the governor on how to strengthen and improve this vital sector.

    Start Low-Cost, High-Quality Undergraduate Experiments

    College costs too much. Instead of pretending this is not true, we need to develop new low-cost, high-quality models. We cannot rely on new institutions to do this: The entry costs and accreditation barriers are too high.

    Here’s a place to start.

    The eight (relatively wealthy) Ivy League universities should jointly create Ivy College, a low-cost undergraduate lab school in a place they currently don’t serve, like Los Angeles. They should cut everything ancillary to great undergraduate education that drives up costs. That means no research, no sports and recreation, no subsidized activities, no alumni association, no communications department, no health and counseling, no permanent campus (just rented office space). They should reduce the number of majors and the number of electives. Simplify admission, with a lottery for every student scoring 1100 or above on the SAT. Get federal regulatory waivers for compliance cost drivers.

    If we tried this for four years, we would learn so much! Then, the Big Ten schools should follow suit.

    Advertise on Television

    A recent Pew poll found that 70 percent of Americans think higher education is headed in the wrong direction. How do we improve public trust in higher education? Reform will help, yes, but we also need a more effective approach to public relations. When other industries run into trouble, they don’t rely on heartfelt op-eds and books published by university presses to make their case. They launch proactive television and a social media ad campaigns.

    ACE should enlist the top 100 universities to bankroll ads that explain the ROI of higher education and the value of university research to national security, health and the economy. Trusted figures should explain why college matters. Celebrities should explain why they benefited from college. And we should remind people that American research universities helped win the Second World War.

    John Kroger served as president of Reed College, attorney general of Oregon, chief learning officer of the U.S. Navy and a visiting faculty member at Harvard and Yale Universities and Lewis and Clark College.

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  • Moving Beyond New Year’s Resolutions to Embrace a Multi-Year Enrollment Strategy 

    Moving Beyond New Year’s Resolutions to Embrace a Multi-Year Enrollment Strategy 

     

    Developing New Year’s resolutions for personal growth is something many of us do. Unfortunately, it is often a set-it and forget-it process that is simply reupped the following year. When done correctly, however, creating a resolution that is developed as a sustained, long-term strategy—and that is regularly returned to and adjusted as needed—seems to be the best way to meet our personal goals.  
     
    As enrollment managers, we all have pursued the first approach in our professional lives by evaluating last year’s successes and failures annually, making a few tweaks, and then seeing how it all works out again the following year. The truth of the matter is that this approach was relatively sustainable for a time. Simply buying more names, adjusting the aid-leveraging model annually, or a developing a wider marketing plan often could drive greater enrollments—mostly because those tactics generally were designed to “add more fuel to the fire.” As long as the applications continued to grow, annual tweaks could help to maintain the core enrollments as well as improve on the margins for many institutions.  

     

    The Need for More Effective Strategic Enrollment Strategies

    Unfortunately, outside of key private and public flagship institutions, headwinds have developed over the past decade that are affecting higher education enrollments in significant ways. Ultimately, they may lead to campus closures for some, and to campus financial distress for many. As outlined in a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, “Predicting College Closures and Financial Distress,” those pressures include:

    • Post-pandemic enrollment challenges from traditional students (decreasing 15% from 2010-2021).




    • Changes among adult learners (“The number of adult students over the age of 25 has fallen by nearly half since the Great Recession”).




    • Growing competition.




    • A lack of public support for higher education nationally. 

    The combination of all these factors has brought about the need for enrollment managers to develop a wider multi-year strategy that includes tools with the ability to enable deeper, more highly data-informed fine tuning throughout any given cycle. A one-size-fits-all approach to creating a nuanced strategy can no longer work in an environment of shrinking applications and increased competition. 

     

    Liaison’s Partnership Philosophy

    Liaison is uniquely positioned to assist with higher education institutions in a true partnership. With the technology, services, and consultative approach that we provide our partners throughout the nation, we can assist in developing a comprehensive enrollment approach unique to your campus—ranging from single-point to full-enrollment planning solutions that are uniquely tailored to your unique needs. Liaison’s partnership philosophy, technology solutions, and industry knowledge and insights can not only help strengthen your enrollment planning and goals for this year but also set you up for long-term enrollment success.  

     

     

    Craig Cornell is the Vice President for Enrollment Strategy at Liaison. In that capacity, he oversees a team of enrollment strategists and brings best practices, consultation, and data trends to campuses across the country in all things enrollment management. Craig also serves as the dedicated resource to NASH (National Association of Higher Education Systems) and works closely with the higher education system that Liaison supports. Before joining Liaison in 2023, Craig served for over 30 years in multiple higher education executive enrollment management positions. During his tenure, the campuses he served often received national recognition for enrollment growth, effective financial aid leveraging, marketing enhancements, and innovative enrollment strategies.

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