Drops in higher education enrollment and retention are happening across the country. Undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022 with declines even after a return to in-person courses. The decline in the national college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
However, there are some colleges — such as Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia — that are using new strategies and technologies to boost enrollment, to lower college costs, and to find well-paying career opportunities for graduating students. Berry is a small, private, regional college, ranked 3 out of 136 regional Southern colleges by U.S. News and World Report, and it is in the top 17% of all colleges and universities nationally according to Forbes’ rankings.
Despite increased competition and demographic changes, Berry has seen significant success in increasing both the quality and size of its student body. Working closely with the tech and marketing teams, the enrollment division re-imagined the institution’s Customer Relationship Management database to ensure the best possible user experience for student applicants, to automate as many processes as possible, and to ensure Berry had accurate and robust analytics to make data-informed decisions throughout the recruitment process. These are the types of changes that students are saying they want as they represent the way students use technology in their everyday lives. According to Andrew Bressette, Vice President of Enrollment Management at Berry College, “Our marketing team honed the Berry brand, focusing on the distinctive elements of a Berry education, including our LifeWorks program, and how these features lead to strong outcomes for our graduates.” Through the LifeWorks program, students fill more than 1,000 jobs across the College’s 180 departments. With access to as many as eight semesters of paid experience, students connect classroom studies to hands-on learning, gaining invaluable skills and taking ownership of their own lives.
Commenting on the major changes, Bressette added, “Equipped with data, authentic student stories, and an entrepreneurial mindset, our admission counselors have been able to focus their time engaging and encouraging the best fit students to help us meet institutional goals and those that would benefit from our unique educational experiences.”
The type of work that Berry College is doing is hard and can require institutions to invest time and energy into building or re-building teams, and breaking down barriers (including siloed data). It also means, according to Bressette, challenging “some tried-and-true admissions processes such as traveling to every high school and sitting in cafeterias waiting for students to find us. Has it worked, absolutely.”
More recently, Berry College staff have been implementing Jenzabar Analytics, creating a “data lake” for strategic storage and analysis of the institution’s data. According to Penny Evans-Plants, Chief Information Officer at the College, “To be strategic in all areas, it is critical that we continue to remove the silos that often prevent the institution from using data it already has. For example, while retention is critical, factors that cause a student to leave the institution are typically siloed with no easy feedback loop to the admissions office.”
Over the last five years, Berry College has doubled the size of its lead pool and its applications have grown from 3,000 to 6,500. Moreover, in the same period the College’s first-year enrollment has increased 48% with three record breaking freshmen classes, net revenue has increased, the diversity of the entering class has doubled and the high school GPA of the entering class has increased every year for the last four years. Bressette shared, “We’ve done this without compromising our mission, which highlights access and opportunity.”
As a longstanding partner to Berry College (dating back to the 1980s), Jenzabar, a higher education-focused tech company, plays an important role in supporting the institution’s recruitment and retention endeavors. With Jenzabar’s support, Berry College has been able to automate processes so staff can work more efficiently, analyze and make use of real student data to better attract learners who will succeed on their campus, and accelerate and simplify the entire enrollment process. According to Jenzabar CEO Ling Chai, “Berry College’s continued growth in the face of higher education’s decade-long enrollment decline demonstrates that opportunity is everywhere, especially when you bring together the right combination of technology, strategy, and partnership.”
Berry College’s story, transformation, and enrollment increases are an important lesson because the nation’s small, private, regional colleges are the most likely to face enrollment challenges and even closure. Threats of low enrollment and closure were an issue even prior to the 2019 Covid pandemic, but they are exacerbated today.
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