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A Brief History of Enrollment Management

"Enrollment Management" is a term that is very difficult to define, but simple to understand. Every college or university seeks to provide a valuable academic service to students, within an economically viable framework: Enrollment Management is simply a name that has been given to the evaluation of data, and implementation of planning that will result in a more efficient academic institution.

In the early to mid-90's colleges and universities began to implement internal enrollment management offices. Although the function of the Enrollment Management office varies greatly from school to school, the Enrollment Management office is typically tasked with things like:

* Increasing efficiency

* Increasing application pools

* Increasing the number of student enrollments

* Increasing student retention

* Increasing ethnic diversity among student body

* Assisting students with finding financial aid solutions

Enrollment Management businesses began to flourish around the same time colleges and universities began creating similarly-named internal departments. The existing demand for streamlined process management within higher education gave birth to different companies that seek to add value to colleges and universities by improving the Enrollment Management process. Originally, the business of Enrollment Management was primarily based on consulting: colleges and universities contracted outside vendors to evaluate and offer suggestions on how to improve current enrollment management processes.

Enrollment Management Consultants are typically engaged by a college or university offer advice on a specific problem, for instance: "how do I increase application pools?" or "how do I improve retention?" The benefit of outsourcing to an enrollment management consultant is the vast amount of experience that a consultant brings: colleges and universities gain access to a knowledge-base that is comprised of results that have worked at other universities. One downfall of the Enrollment Management consultant is the fact that the cost of contracting a consultant usually includes only the advice: the college or university is responsible for implementing and executing any suggestions that the Enrollment Management consultant offers.

To address this problem, Innovation Ads created the Enrollment Solutions Platform; a solution that successfully combines the expertise of the Enrollment Management consultant, with a multi-channel direct response Enrollment Marketing network of over 200 affiliate and proprietary websites, and the second-largest media buying capacities in the Direct Response Television industry. In addition to our robust Lead Generation capacities, Innovation Ads has created The Academic Advising Center--a contact center that initiates and fields phone calls to and from prospective students--to improve follow up marketing, and ensure that each lead becomes an application or enrollment.

To better serve our clients, we've developed and refined a business model that provides each college and university with access to the Enrollment Solutions Platform via an a unique team that works with clients on an individual basis.

About the Author

Patrick Sutton is an experienced content writer for Innovation Ads and the companies various websites. He holds his M.A. in Spanish Literature and taught high school Spanish and English prior to working at Innovation Ads.