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Purpose – This chapter aims to provide an overview of the use of strategic enrolment management at DePaul University in Chicago.

Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach is used to provide an analysis of strategic enrolment management (SEM) and its particular use at DePaul University in the context of the university's long-standing commitment to student access.

Findings – As the United Kingdom moves to a more market-based system of higher education, universities may need to pay closer attention to strategic enrolment management concepts and practices. While enrolment management has been criticised for reflecting a wider movement toward ‘marketisation’ in higher education, the experience at DePaul University in Chicago indicates that SEM has played an important role in clarifying the university's commitment to student access during a period of environmental and institutional change.

Originality/value – This chapter sets DePaul's experience within the wider development of SEM in the United States and illustrates some of the ways in which enrolment managers at the university have been able to balance a mission-based commitment to student access with other institutional goals and priorities.

University rankings and metrics have become an increasingly prominent basis of student decisions, generalized university reputation, and the resources university’s attract. We review the history of metrics in higher education and scholarship about the influence of ranking on the position and strategic behavior of universities and students. Most quantitative analyses on this topic estimate the influence of change in university rank on performance. These studies consistently identify a small, short-lived influence of rank shift on selectivity (e.g., one rank position corresponds to ≤1% more student applicants), comparable to ranking effects documented in other domains. This understates the larger system-level impact of metrification on universities, students, and the professions that surround them. We explore one system-level transformation likely influenced by the rise of rankings. Recent years have witnessed the rise of enrollment management and independent educational consultation. We illustrate a plausible pathway from ranking to this transformation: In an effort to improve rankings, universities solicit more applications from students to reduce their acceptance rate. Lower acceptance rates lead to more uncertainty for students about acceptance, leading them to apply to more schools, which decreases the probability that accepted students will attend. This leads to greater uncertainty about enrollment for students and universities and generates demand for new services to manage it. Because these and other system-level transformations are not as cleanly measured as rank position and performance, they have not received the same treatment or modeling attention in higher education scholarship, despite their importance for understanding and influencing education policy.

The United States has been at the forefront of a global shift away from direct state funding of higher education and toward student loans, and student debt has become an issue of growing social concern. Why did student loans expand so much in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s? And how does organization theory suggest their expansion, and the growth of federal student aid more generally, might affect higher education as a field? In the 1960s and 1970s, policy actors worked to solve what was then a central problem around student loans: banks’ disinterest in lending to students. They did this so well that by 1990, a new field of financial aid policy emerged, in which all major actors had an interest in expanding loans. This, along with a favorable environment outside the field, set the stage for two decades of rapid growth. Organization theory suggests two likely consequences of this expansion of federal student loans and financial aid more generally. First, while (public) colleges have become less dependent on state governments and more dependent on tuition, the expansion of aid means colleges are simultaneously becoming more dependent on the federal government, which should make them more susceptible to federal demands for accountability. Second, the expansion of federal student aid should encourage the spread of forms and practices grounded in a logic focused on students’ financial value to the organization, such as publicly traded for-profit colleges and enrollment management practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of data analytics in addressing contemporary challenges and opportunities facing institutions of higher education, with a special emphasis on enrollment management for the example of a college of business administration in a Hispanic-serving four-year institution of higher education.

After reviewing previous research on this subject, the authors propose adding a new stratum to higher education analytics, enrollment management analytics, which uniquely identifies the actions associated with attracting and recruiting students, accounts for institutional differences and leads to students’ successful matriculation at institutions.

The authors demonstrate on the example of a professional college in a four-year institution of higher education how the utilization of modern analytical tools and techniques develop actionable decisions in the students’ recruitment process, which leads to their matriculation.

A definition and a new stratum in higher education analytics are proposed for enrollment management analytics.

International Education is worth billions of dollars to the world economy, and many countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia have government initiatives that look to stimulate and guide international student mobility, research and technology transfer. The involvement of the state into student mobility does not come without risk. Government foreign policy and international relations between sending countries and English-speaking study destinations threatens to upset the historical norms of international mobility. What is more, world events such as the global pandemic of 2020, will have a profound impact on the future of international education, and may change the international landscape altogether. This chapter will frame the challenges facing institutions who benefit from international mobility in the context of geopolitics and world events. It will explore how institutions can leverage strategic enrolment management tactics to help mitigate enrolment risks posed by global disruption.

Higher education institutions, particularly in the case of public universities, face the challenge of creating more value in an environment of increasing requirements and limitations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relation of internal marketing (IM) with employees’ attitudinal outcomes, which aim to stimulate and retain motivated and customer-conscious contact employees.

Survey data of 94 customer-contact employees in a public higher education institution were analysed using partial least squares path modelling to explore and predict key target constructs.

The results demonstrate the relationship between customer-contact employees’ service empathy (SE), institutional IM initiatives and employees’ attitudinal outcomes in the public sector, specifically higher education institutions.

The current study relies on self-reported data and a small sample of customer-contact employees working only on enrolment-related areas. Further studies should be designed for theory confirmation and generalizability of the results.

Top managers in public higher education institutions must encourage organizational identification through IM initiatives, such as well-established internal communication procedures. Academic management should continuously train and retain customer-contact employees that have developed SE and a sense of belonging to the organization. SE must be incorporated in the job descriptions and training of customer-contact employees.

The study contributes to the limited literature on the use of IM and SE in the public sector, specifically higher education institutions.

Las instituciones de educación superior, en particular en el caso de las universidades públicas, se enfrentan al reto de crear más valor en un entorno de necesidades y limitaciones en aumento. El propósito de este estudio es explorar la relación entre el marketing interno y las resultantes actitudes laborales de los empleados. El objetivo del marketing interno es estimular y retener empleados de contacto que estén motivados y sean conscientes de la importancia de los clientes.

Se analizaron datos de 94 empleados de contacto de una institución pública de educación superior utilizando modelos de regresión de cuadrados mínimos parciales para explorar y predecir constructos claves.

Los resultados demuestran la relación entre los siguientes constructos: niveles de empatía de los empleados de contacto, iniciativas institucionales de marketing interno, y las resultantes actitudes de los empleados del sector público, en particular organizaciones en el sector de la educación superior.

El presente estudio se basa en los datos auto informados de una pequeña muestra de empleados de contacto que trabajan sólo en áreas relacionadas con matrícula. Nuevos estudios deberían ser diseñados para la confirmación de la teoría y la generalización de los resultados.

Los altos directivos de las instituciones públicas de educación superior deben fomentar la identificación con la organización a través de iniciativas de marketing interno, tales como procedimientos establecidos de comunicación interna. Los directivos académicos deben continuamente adiestrar y retener a los empleados de contacto que han desarrollado la capacidad de proveer servicios de manera empática y que tienen sentido de pertenencia a la organización. Proveer servicio de manera empática debe ser incorporado en las descripciones de empleo y formación de los empleados de contacto.

El estudio contribuye a la literatura limitada sobre el uso de marketing interno y empatía en los servicios en el sector público, específicamente en las instituciones de educación superior.

The purpose of this study was to apply social exchange and organizational support theories to examine the relationship between mid-level strategic enrollment managers’ perceptions of managerial coaching behaviors enacted by their senior managers and their own reported job engagement, as mediated by perceived organizational support (POS) within the US higher education context.

A quantitative survey-based half-longitudinal design, which used the latent marker variable technique, was conducted with a sponsoring professional organization in the strategic enrollment management (SEM) field in the USA. A total of 301 usable surveys were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results of this study indicate that SEM managers’ job engagement and the perceived managerial coaching behaviors provided to them by their senior managers were positively correlated, and that POS fully mediated this relationship. These findings highlight how coaching behaviors may allow managers to elicit positive emotional responses and, by fostering enhanced POS, ultimately enhance job engagement among their team members.

This study addresses several calls for research on managerial coaching, job engagement and POS in an under-examined higher education context within the human resource development field.

The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which “library value” may be communicated in a university setting through more effective engagement with strategic planning and a broader array of campus partners.

This paper presents a case study of an academic library in which alignment with the university mission and strategic plan and alignment of library assessment efforts with the broader culture of assessment at the university have resulted in positive gains for the library in terms of campus engagement and recognition of library value.

This paper provides insights into successful strategies for improved communication of library value to senior leadership, new investment in library facilities, and enhanced opportunities for collaboration across the university on strategic initiatives including student success, innovation in teaching and scholarship, and community engagement.

This paper provides library leaders with new approaches to engagement with campus partners and senior academic leadership in promoting the library as a strategic resource worthy of investment in the twenty-first century.

As the number of international students increases globally, non-traditional destinations have emerged in the global higher education arena, despite the long-lasting dominance of traditional destinations, such as the United States, the UK, Australia, France, or Germany. In search of the causes of the change in the number of international students favoring non-traditional destinations, this study focuses on the Turkish case and identifies the macro-level efforts to increase the enrollment of international students in Turkish higher education institutions by utilizing the theory of new institutionalism and theories regarding the college choices of international students. As an upper-middle-income, developing country and an emerging non-traditional destination, constituting a regional hub for international students in the last decade at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe, the case of Turkey would give unique examples of macro-level strategies for increasing the enrollment of international students in other higher education systems.