Enrollment Growth University: Higher Education

Welcome back to the final episode of Enrollment Growth University. 5 years. More than 250 episodes. And hundreds of hours of being inspired weekly by our peers throughout higher education. All doing amazing things. Building. Experimenting. Innovating. And creating amazing experiences for our students. And I’m so excited to share that Helix Education is now a part of RNL, the leading provider of higher education enrollment management, student success, and fundraising solutions. It has been such an honor to learn with you these past 5 years. So find me on LinkedIn (@ericolsencreative) and drop me a line to say hello if you’ve enjoyed the show. And then head on over to RNL.com. They have an amazing resources section with fabulous blogs, webinars, and interviews. So while this show may be ending for now, the learning won’t stop. And may you continue to fight the good enrollment growth fight.

Andrew Hannah, Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship and Analytics at University of Pittsburgh, and Co-Founder and President of Othot joins the podcast to talk about the demographic cliff coming for higher education in 2025, and how big data modeling might be the pathway for institutions to help circumvent it.

Dr. Nicole Smith, Chief Economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce returns to the podcast to talk about the counterintuitive findings from their new series of reports on “The Uncertain Pathway from Youth to a Good Job”, and whether or not our graduates’ immediate economic self-sufficiency needs to become our primary mandate.

Dr. Mark Lombardi, President at Maryville University joins the podcast to talk about the power of co-creating academic programs with local employers vs. insisting our degree programs as-is are the exact match for their upskilling priorities.

Professor Dan Rockmore, Director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College joins the podcast to discuss the AI education maturity curve, the role of the academy vs. industry when it comes to artificial intelligence, and the economic reality when industry is willing to pay our AI faculty far more than we can.

Dr. Unnati Narang, Assistant Professor of Marketing at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign joins the podcast to talk about the first week of class prompt that improved student engagement by 30%, other pedagogical tests that didn’t move the needle at all, and how to make sure we’re all learning off each other’s online pedagogy experiment curves. Check out this resource: The “Idea Advantage”: How Content Sharing Strategies Impact Engagement in Online Learning Platforms

Dr. Greg Heiberger, Associate Dean of Academics & Student Success at South Dakota State University joins the podcast to talk about how the metaverse can make our in-person students’ educational experience more immersive, and our online students’ experience more communal.

Dr. Sheila LeBlanc, Associate Vice President of Continuing Education at The University of Calgary joins the podcast to talk about the adoption curve for microcredentials in higher education and the need to adopt a shared language for degree and micro-credentials in order to accelerate it.

Ben Congleton, CEO and Co-Founder at Olark joins the podcast to talk about the enrollment power of a live chat experience, and how these chat transcripts in the aggregate can become some of our most valuable inputs and feedback loops for website content improvements.

Dr. Adam Fein, Chief Information Officer at University of North Texas joins the podcast to talk about embedding microcredentials within our degree programs, and whether or not microcredentials are an existential threat to higher education or its wonderful partner.

Dr. Rebecca Vidra, Senior Lecturer at Duke University joins the podcast to discuss her personal experience and challenges navigating higher ed’s financial aid gauntlet with her own daughter, and how all of her “insider” knowledge didn’t leave her or her daughter any less confused.

Dr. Nicole Barbaro, Sr. Communications Content Manager at WGU Labs returns to the podcast to discuss their follow-up study on faculty perceptions of EdTech and online learning, as well as how we can better learn off our peer institution’s tech learning curves.

Bob Ubell, Author & Vice Dean Emeritus of Online Learning at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering returns to the podcast to talk about what has gotten in the way of the great Clayton Christensen’s belief that online education would rapidly escalate the consolidation of higher ed, and whether or not that inevitability is still yet to come.

Dr. Jeffrey Docking, President at Adrian College joins the podcast to discuss how the survival strategy for small liberal arts colleges must contain a shared services approach to liberal arts education with other similar institutions.

Mollie Waller, Executive Director at Youth Solutions joins the podcast to discuss their Jobs of Michigan’s Graduates (JMG) program and the high-touch, high-time requirement for successful student mentorships that truly make an impact on retention and graduation.

Michelle Meyer, NIL Coordinator at San Diego State University and Founder at NIL Network joins the podcast to talk about the economic and enrollment impact of the NCAA’s new name image likeness policy, and what a truly “free agent” system in Division I athletics might look like.

Allison Turcio, Assistant Vice President for Enrollment and Marketing at Siena College joins the podcast to talk about the difference between merge field “personalization” and actually making your prospective student communications “personal”.

Jayson Boyers, President of Rosemont College, explains how partnerships can help small schools increase enrollment and better serve their communities. He also discusses how to find “natural partners” and designing curriculums around them; why smaller schools are better positioned for partnerships than other marketing and growth strategies; and how the right degree programs can transform local communities.

Christy Jackson, Sr. Director of Reputation Management and Communication at UNC Charlotte and Chris Gonyar, Director of Emergency Management at UNC Charlotte join the podcast to discuss why operational and communicational responses must be aligned during a crisis, and how to ensure that actually happens.

Eric Grindley, CEO at Esquire Advertising, joins the podcast to talk about geo framing, a more accurate and targeted form of geofencing that can help universities increase their application and enrollment rates.

Lawrence Levy, Founder and President at EnrollmentRX, joins the podcast to talk about getting beyond the tick box of we “have” a CRM to running the advanced operational strategies to make sure you’re fully maximizing its student data value.

Peter Shafer, EVP of Sales and Marketing at Everest Communications, joins the podcast to talk about the hidden value higher ed is sitting on because too many of us haven’t structured our unstructured data yet.

Dr. Judith Wilde, Research Professor and Chief Operating Officer of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, discusses the trend line for presidential tenure in higher education and what institutions are and should be looking for in their presidential searches.

Dr. Robert Talbert, Author, Professor, and Presidential Fellow for the Advancement of Learning at Grand Valley State University, returns to the show to talk about the concept of radical simplification and the start/stop/continue exercises we should use at the institutional level.

Dr. David Clark, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University, joins the podcast to discuss the findings from his recent ungrading experiment and why he believes this may be a better way for higher ed to teach.

Joann Kozyrev, Vice President of Design and Development at Western Governors University, joins the podcast to talk about taking a skills-based approach to program development.

Matt Diteljan, Co-Founder and CEO at Glacier, joins the podcast to talk about identifying and partnering with university influencers and content creators who are still in high school.

Michael Bodekaer Jensen, Founder and CEO at Labster, joins the podcast to talk about virtual lab simulations and the academic outcomes of bringing the metaverse to the higher ed classroom.

Kim Dancy, Associate Director of Research and Policy, and Piper Hendricks, J.D., Vice President of Communications and External Affairs at the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), join the podcast to discuss the Equitable Value Explorer and a new way for institutions and policymakers to compare college outcomes.

Dr. Perry LaRoque, Founder and President at Mansfield Hall and author of Taking Flight: The Guide to College for Diverse Learners and Non-Traditional Students, joins the podcast to discuss the demographic reality that, for many institutions, future enrollment growth necessitates increasing access for more types of students than we’ve historically taught.

Faton Sopa, Co-founder and CEO of Manaferra, joins the podcast to discuss whether or not SEO still matters in 2022 and the advanced strategies that higher ed should utilize to increase the organic search rankings of their program pages.

Nicolas Chu, Founder and CEO at Sinorbis, joins the podcast to discuss how the pandemic has impacted international recruiting, specifically in China, as well as new digital recruitment strategies for increasing your international enrollments.

Ellen Johnson, VP of Enrollment Management at Allegheny College, joins the podcast to talk about population growth no longer being in higher ed’s favor and how to position your institution for success in alignment with how Gen Z is conducting their college searches.

Ethan Braden, Senior VP of Marketing and Communications at Purdue University, joins the podcast to talk about why a university marcomms teams’ primary role is Chief Storyteller and how critical storytelling has been during the pandemic.

Jason Fiorotto, CMO at Modern Campus, and Eric Hazen, Web Marketing Manager at Ferris State University, join the podcast to talk about the technical requirements and privacy questions involved in turning our higher ed websites into best practice ecommerce destinations.

Dr. Mathew Isaac, Professor of Marketing at Seattle University, joins the podcast to discuss the recent research on how the religious language institutions use does in fact impact prospective students’ academic perceptions.

Stephanie Mullins, Associate Director at BlueSky Education, joins the podcast to discuss the value of high-impact media relations as an enrollment growth strategy — even in a social world where institutions can control their own storytelling channels.

Dr. Phyllis Robinson, Professor of Biological Sciences at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, joins the podcast to discuss UMBC’s intentional and industry-leading success in retaining diverse students within STEM programs and how other institutions can do the same. Take a look at this research backing the Meyerhoff Scholars Program.

Dr. Andrew Gillen, Senior Policy Analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, joins the podcast to discuss why the College Scorecard might start making program reputation an even stronger signal for students than the overall brand reputation of a university.

Dr. Paul Hanstedt, Director of the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington and Lee University and author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses For a Complex World, joins the podcast to discuss the current expectations students have of our grad programs and how to make sure they are as missionally exciting as the start-up options our prospective students may have right now instead.

Dr. Robert Talbert, Professor at Grand Valley State University and author of the book Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty, returns to the show to talk about the current distance between MOOC course design and most universities’ online programs — and how to make sure our programs stack up well.

Dr. Tanya Spilovoy, Director of Open Policy at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), joins the podcast to talk about institutional strategies for retaining our student mothers.

Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at both University of Illinois Springfield and UPCEA, returns to the show to remind us of higher ed’s previous toe-dips into the metaverse back in the early 2000s and how institutions might start positioning themselves for the metaverse future that so many tech companies seem bent on bringing us to.

Peter Samuelson, President at Ardeo Education Solutions, joins the podcast to walk through the economics and enrollment impact of loan repayment assistance programs (LRAPs).

Chelsea Waite, Senior Researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, joins the podcast to discuss the research and student outcomes benefits of peer tutoring initiatives.

Joseph Master, Assistant Vice President, Marketing & Digital Strategy at Drexel University, joins the podcast to discuss the pros and cons of a shared services approach to social media management and why social media manager is the most misunderstood role in higher ed marcom.

Dr. Nicole Barbaro, Research Scientist at WGU Labs, joins the podcast to discuss their recent College Innovation Network EdTech student survey and the surprising takeaways regarding our students’ digital struggles in navigating pandemic-related EdTech.

Dr. Kathleen Ives, Senior Vice President for Engagement at UPCEA, joins the podcast to discuss why faculty perception of online learning hasn’t really improved since the start of the pandemic and the institutional support differences where she’s seeing some exceptions to that rule.

Dr. Jeremy Roschelle, Executive Director of Learning Sciences Research at Digital Promise, joined the po dcast to discuss the next generation of artificial intelligence for educational storytelling and what they’re hoping to build with their $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Nicolò Bates, Founder and CEO at TEDU, and Jessica Brooks, Director at the International Center for Supplemental Instructional, joined the podcast to discuss the student outcomes and technological strategies for launching and scaling supplemental instruction.