The Enrollment Question I Get Asked Most, and Why It's the Wrong One
A new program doesn't create enrollment on its own. What predicts the number is whether academic affairs, enrollment, and advancement are already telling the same story.
I spent my first ten years on campus, primarily in advancement, first at a large public university, then at a large private one. From there I moved into consulting, helping institutions build the communications framework to support enrollment and fundraising, the work of telling a campus's own story well to very different audiences. After 15 years, and conversations with hundreds of institutions, I stopped counting the schools and started noticing a pattern.
I'll put it as plainly as I know how: Success grows where real alignment is achieved.
I've never once had an institution tell me they weren't interested in growing. Every school wants more of something, more enrollment, better retention, a stronger fundraising year, healthier margins. Ambition is never the differentiator. I remain in awe of the tireless work happening at institutions every day for the sake of providing a quality education and experience to each and every student they serve.
What separates the schools that actually get there from the ones that just talk about growth, is whether their offices are aligned in telling the same story about how they'll get there.
Why a new program is never enough on its own
I've watched this play out most clearly around new academic programs, because a new program feels like an announcement, but it isn't actually a growth strategy by itself. A new program alone doesn't fill seats. A story about that program fills seats, and that story has to work in at least three different rooms at once. It has to resonate with a seventeen year old deciding where to apply. It has to reassure a parent that this is a concrete path to a real job. And it has to speak to a donor thinking about legacy in a different register altogether, where the appeal usually isn't about their own path forward but rather what kind of institution their gift is building.
Those are three genuinely different conversations, and I've seen plenty of good, well-researched programs underperform simply because nobody in academic affairs and nobody in enrollment ever sat down and agreed on what story they were actually telling, and to whom. The program was right, the opportunity was there, but the alignment wasn't.
The most common mistake I see, in one form or another, is looking for certainty in the wrong place. Sometimes it's a comparison that doesn't actually hold: borrowing a number from a school that looks similar from the outside, similar size, similar mission, similar region, and treating it as a preview of what should happen for your campus.
Most often, it's this question asked directly: How many students will this program get me? Both instincts come from the same reasonable place. Wanting some certainty before committing to something new. But neither a peer's number nor a guess is really an answer, because that number was never a property of the program in the first place. It's a property of how aligned the story is by the time that program launches. Two campuses can offer the identical program and land in very different places, not because one had better luck, but because one had academic affairs and enrollment building the same pitch together for months, and the other handed enrollment a catalog description the week before a fair. When I get asked for the number, what I'm really being asked is whether the story is ready yet. That's a question worth answering honestly, and it's one a campus actually has control over.
The campuses I stop worrying about
There's a version of this I see less often than I'd like, but I know it immediately when I do. The president is out fundraising, and the story donors hear sounds like the same one the admissions office is describing to prospective families that same week. The provost and the enrollment team aren't meeting once a year to sign off on something, they're in regular conversation, trading what's landing and what isn't. And the growth story itself, whatever it includes, a new program, a new building, a shift in who they're recruiting, has an identity running underneath it that both the fundraising pitch and the admissions pitch point back to.
I don't worry about the number for those campuses. Not because I have better data on them, I don't. I don’t worry because the story is strong enough to carry whatever number shows up, and strong enough to make the next semester's number better than this one's. That's the whole difference. It was never about having the right prediction, it was about whether the story could hold up under real use.
What the schools that get this right actually do
The campuses I've seen do this well treat it as ongoing work, not a single planning session before a launch. Academic affairs stays close enough to enrollment to know what's landing with prospective families this cycle, not last cycle. Enrollment stays close enough to academic affairs to know which programs are strong enough to promise a return on, and which aren't there yet. And advancement is looped in early enough to build its own version of the story instead of inheriting a leftover version after the fact.
That kind of collaboration is where the willingness to make a tough call actually comes from. The campuses that struggled most weren't short on good people, they were the ones where nobody wanted to sunset a beloved program that had quietly stopped serving students or the budget. Alignment doesn't just help you sell new things well, it gives you the shared clarity to know when something old needs to go.
What I keep coming back to
If fifteen years and more than a hundred campuses have taught me anything, it's that true collaboration puts an institution in the best position to tell its story well, and to keep telling it. The schools I admire most treat their story the way a good teacher treats a favorite lecture, worth revisiting every semester, worth sharpening every time. They never get tired of continuing to tell it and continuing to refine it.
That's not a marketing tactic. It's a discipline, and it's the thing I've seen hold up again and again in rooms that otherwise had almost nothing in common. It's also, not coincidentally, why our own work at Rize sits across two teams rather than one. An academic operations team to help a partner build and launch a program well, and an enrollment team to help make sure the story about it reaches the people who need to hear it. Neither one does much good without the other.
As the first in her family to graduate from college, Kathleen is inspired by Rize’s mission to expand access to quality education and loves contributing to partnerships that help students reach their full potential. Outside of work, she enjoys experimenting with new recipes, reading good books, soaking up the Florida sun with her husband and family, and doting on her two very lovable pugs.
The Enrollment Question I Get Asked Most, and Why It's the Wrong One
A new program doesn't create enrollment on its own. What predicts the number is whether academic affairs, enrollment, and advancement are already telling the same story.
I spent my first ten years on campus, primarily in advancement, first at a large public university, then at a large private one. From there I moved into consulting, helping institutions build the communications framework to support enrollment and fundraising, the work of telling a campus's own story well to very different audiences. After 15 years, and conversations with hundreds of institutions, I stopped counting the schools and started noticing a pattern.
I'll put it as plainly as I know how: Success grows where real alignment is achieved.
I've never once had an institution tell me they weren't interested in growing. Every school wants more of something, more enrollment, better retention, a stronger fundraising year, healthier margins. Ambition is never the differentiator. I remain in awe of the tireless work happening at institutions every day for the sake of providing a quality education and experience to each and every student they serve.
What separates the schools that actually get there from the ones that just talk about growth, is whether their offices are aligned in telling the same story about how they'll get there.
Why a new program is never enough on its own
I've watched this play out most clearly around new academic programs, because a new program feels like an announcement, but it isn't actually a growth strategy by itself. A new program alone doesn't fill seats. A story about that program fills seats, and that story has to work in at least three different rooms at once. It has to resonate with a seventeen year old deciding where to apply. It has to reassure a parent that this is a concrete path to a real job. And it has to speak to a donor thinking about legacy in a different register altogether, where the appeal usually isn't about their own path forward but rather what kind of institution their gift is building.
Those are three genuinely different conversations, and I've seen plenty of good, well-researched programs underperform simply because nobody in academic affairs and nobody in enrollment ever sat down and agreed on what story they were actually telling, and to whom. The program was right, the opportunity was there, but the alignment wasn't.
The most common mistake I see, in one form or another, is looking for certainty in the wrong place. Sometimes it's a comparison that doesn't actually hold: borrowing a number from a school that looks similar from the outside, similar size, similar mission, similar region, and treating it as a preview of what should happen for your campus.
Most often, it's this question asked directly: How many students will this program get me? Both instincts come from the same reasonable place. Wanting some certainty before committing to something new. But neither a peer's number nor a guess is really an answer, because that number was never a property of the program in the first place. It's a property of how aligned the story is by the time that program launches. Two campuses can offer the identical program and land in very different places, not because one had better luck, but because one had academic affairs and enrollment building the same pitch together for months, and the other handed enrollment a catalog description the week before a fair. When I get asked for the number, what I'm really being asked is whether the story is ready yet. That's a question worth answering honestly, and it's one a campus actually has control over.
The campuses I stop worrying about
There's a version of this I see less often than I'd like, but I know it immediately when I do. The president is out fundraising, and the story donors hear sounds like the same one the admissions office is describing to prospective families that same week. The provost and the enrollment team aren't meeting once a year to sign off on something, they're in regular conversation, trading what's landing and what isn't. And the growth story itself, whatever it includes, a new program, a new building, a shift in who they're recruiting, has an identity running underneath it that both the fundraising pitch and the admissions pitch point back to.
I don't worry about the number for those campuses. Not because I have better data on them, I don't. I don’t worry because the story is strong enough to carry whatever number shows up, and strong enough to make the next semester's number better than this one's. That's the whole difference. It was never about having the right prediction, it was about whether the story could hold up under real use.
What the schools that get this right actually do
The campuses I've seen do this well treat it as ongoing work, not a single planning session before a launch. Academic affairs stays close enough to enrollment to know what's landing with prospective families this cycle, not last cycle. Enrollment stays close enough to academic affairs to know which programs are strong enough to promise a return on, and which aren't there yet. And advancement is looped in early enough to build its own version of the story instead of inheriting a leftover version after the fact.
That kind of collaboration is where the willingness to make a tough call actually comes from. The campuses that struggled most weren't short on good people, they were the ones where nobody wanted to sunset a beloved program that had quietly stopped serving students or the budget. Alignment doesn't just help you sell new things well, it gives you the shared clarity to know when something old needs to go.
What I keep coming back to
If fifteen years and more than a hundred campuses have taught me anything, it's that true collaboration puts an institution in the best position to tell its story well, and to keep telling it. The schools I admire most treat their story the way a good teacher treats a favorite lecture, worth revisiting every semester, worth sharpening every time. They never get tired of continuing to tell it and continuing to refine it.
That's not a marketing tactic. It's a discipline, and it's the thing I've seen hold up again and again in rooms that otherwise had almost nothing in common. It's also, not coincidentally, why our own work at Rize sits across two teams rather than one. An academic operations team to help a partner build and launch a program well, and an enrollment team to help make sure the story about it reaches the people who need to hear it. Neither one does much good without the other.
As the first in her family to graduate from college, Kathleen is inspired by Rize’s mission to expand access to quality education and loves contributing to partnerships that help students reach their full potential. Outside of work, she enjoys experimenting with new recipes, reading good books, soaking up the Florida sun with her husband and family, and doting on her two very lovable pugs.
