Applications keep climbing while the class comes up short. The gap sits in the phase most institutions treat as the finish line: what happens after the acceptance letter goes out.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Mike McGetrick, Vice President of Spark451, which he co-founded. Spark451 is a Jenzabar company. The conversation covers why enrollment falls short when admissions and marketing are both performing.
Drawing on twenty-five years in university marketing, branding, and enrollment marketing, McGetrick explains what Spark451's focus groups revealed about when families actually begin their due diligence, how summer melt stopped being passive attrition, and why a communication architecture addressed to the seventeen-year-old may be reaching nobody at all.
This conversation is part two of two and is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and enrollment executives evaluating whether their shortfall is an execution problem or a misallocation problem.
Topics Covered
- Why the yield phase, not the top of the funnel, determines the class
- The mechanism now driving melt rates up across institutions
- How parents have moved from influencers to operators of the enrollment process
- Why marketing fifty-five graduate programs is a different job than marketing one university
- The four Ds behind a branding engagement: discover, define, design, develop
- Where agentic AI belongs in admissions and why retention may be the bigger opportunity
Real-World Examples Discussed
- A parent whose student opened nothing until the admission letter arrived
- Waitlist offers in June pulling students who deposited elsewhere in May
- NYU issuing a common brand while expecting each school to hold its own voice
- Admissions calls arriving after seven in the evening with no one to take them
Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership
- Enrollment is institutional strategy, not a departmental assignment; portfolio, pricing, experience, retention, and reputation all shape demand
- Defining your value is the easy half; building and maintaining the evidence that proves it is the work
- Students experience one institution even when it operates as twenty departments, so the promise has to run as a single operating system
Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/enrollment-falling-short-admissions-and-marketing/
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