Before Enrollment Management

In my last post for this series, I wrote about how Syracuse University has used a standard enrollment management playbook over the last decade to raise its profile, substantially reducing both socioeconomic and racial diversity on campus. In this age of enrollment management, Syracuse’s case, unfortunately, is not unusual. Competing fiercely for “the best and the brightest students” and for full-pay students, many selective public and private four-year colleges and universities are devoting fewer institutional aid dollars than they otherwise could and making fewer seats available to students from less privileged backgrounds.

While Syracuse’s story is not unusual, it was not inevitable. To better understand what enrollment management is and what a radical change it represented, it is helpful go back in time before the enrollment management industry existed. In the 1950s, the leaders of selective private colleges made a bold decision to limit competition among their institutions by ensuring that they would devote the bulk of their financial aid to students who could not afford to go to college without the help.

Prior to World War II, such considerations weren’t particularly relevant, as only a small share of high school graduates pursued a higher education, and most students attending private colleges came from upper-class families. As Jerome Karabel wrote in his seminal 2005 book The Chosen, the leaders of the most prestigious private colleges went to extraordinary lengths “to screen out students deemed ‘socially undesirable.’” These leaders, he wrote, “wanted the latitude to admit the dull sons of major donors and to exclude the brilliant but unpolished children of immigrants whose very presence prompted private young Anglo-Saxon men – the probable leaders and donors of the future – to seek their education elsewhere.”

But the federal government changed the equation in 1944 with the passage of the GI Bill of Rights (formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act), which provided World War II veterans with funds to attend the college of their choice. Within a few years, the number of students enrolling in college nearly doubled, with veterans accounting for about half of enrollments. Suddenly selective private colleges were opening their doors to less-advantaged students who had been shut out of their schools previously.

As a more diverse group of students entered higher education, private college leaders recognized that they needed to become more systematic in their use of student aid. To try to prevent schools from getting into a bidding war for the students they most desired, they worked with the newly-created College Scholarship Service (CSS, which was an affiliate of an organization that is now known as the College Board) in 1954 to develop a standard need-based methodology that private colleges were to use to award their institutional aid. The methodology made this determination based largely on a family’s annual income and assets, as well as the number of children in the family. It also took into account how much savings a family would need for retirement and medical expenses.

These selective private college leaders had “a rather powerful and attractive vision of the role of student aid” that was akin to “an ideology,” higher education experts Michael S. McPherson and Morton Owen Shapiro wrote in their 1998 book The Student Aid Game. The vision held that colleges, with the government’s help, should use financial aid to meet the full financial need of their students. At the same time, these colleges would admit the most meritorious students, regardless of where their families fell on the income scale.

“In this way, the claims of need were to be met by eliminating price as a factor in choice of school for needy students and the claims of merit were to be met by matching the most able and promising students with the best educational alternatives,” the authors wrote.

One of the overriding goals of this methodology was to ensure that students with families in similar financial circumstances would receive consistent financial aid packages, no matter which college they attended. To accomplish this aim, CSS needed to make sure that its methodology was being used. “As a means of both enforcing adherence to these principles and improving the accuracy of measurement of families’ ability to pay,” McPherson and Shapiro wrote, the organization supported the creation of “Overlap Groups,” which were made up of selective private colleges that tended to receive applications from the same applicants. Approximately 150 colleges participated in about two dozen groups organized around the country. The colleges in these groups developed common financial aid policies, including, in many cases, banning the use of non-need-based “merit” aid at participating institutions.

The most prominent group, known as the “Ivy Overlap Group,” consisted of the eight Ivy League institutions and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among other things, the Ivy League group agreed on the financial aid offers the schools would make to promising applicants who had been admitted to more than one of the colleges and universities. The leaders of these institutions said that this high level of cooperation was needed to prevent bidding wars and to preserve institutional financial aid for those who truly needed it.

The CSS’s efforts were so successful that Congress used its methodology as a model when it designed the federal student aid programs from the mid-1960s through early 1970s. With the passage of the Higher Education Act in 1965, 1968, and then again in 1972, with the creation of Pell Grants, the federal government made an informal pact with colleges that each would complement the other in using their financial aid resources to open the doors of college to those who otherwise could not afford it. Working together, it was thought, the federal government and colleges could fully cover students’ financial need and guarantee that higher education would be accessible to all students.

Meanwhile, the passage of the GI Bill and later the Higher Education Act led to the professionalization of the field of campus financial aid administrator. Those early campus financial aid professionals took pride in being separate and apart from colleges’ efforts to recruit students. Firewalls were built between colleges’ admissions and financial aid offices to ensure that aid dollars would be devoted to meeting need. While these firewalls may have had some leaks, especially when it came to admitting the offspring of wealthy alumni and donors, many financial aid administrators felt these boundaries were essential for maintaining the integrity of their profession and preserving the sanctity of need-based aid.

All the effort to prevent bidding wars paid off throughout 1950s and the 1960s, as competition among selective colleges for students remained fairly genteel. But this need-based aid consensus would come under heavy strain and begin to crack by the middle of what became known as the “'Me’ Decade.”

Stephen Burd is editing a forthcoming book with Harvard Education Press on the enrollment management industry.

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