If you’re leading enrollment right now, you’re likely feeling it. Demographic headwinds. Discount pressure. Market erosion. Presidential urgency. Board questions. Faculty anxiety.
You seem to have responsibility for institutional sustainability without authority over most factors determining it. You didn’t create demographic decline. You can’t single-handedly reverse market position erosion built over years. You can’t unilaterally transform programs, rebuild services, or reshape culture.
You can’t control institutional decision making, cabinet collaboration, or whether boards ask strategic questions. You can’t force faculty engagement.
But enrollment leaders have more leverage than we often recognize. Not control—leverage. Understanding that distinction matters for where you invest energy.
Accepting these limitations isn’t defeatism. It’s strategic clarity about where leverage exists.
Where Your Leverage Lives
You control the story data tells. Not spinning—translating enrollment dynamics into strategic insights presidents and boards can act on.
You control operational excellence. Recruitment processes, communications, yield tactics, prospective student experience—these are yours. Excellence creates conditions where strategic improvements can gain traction.
You control partnerships you build. Faculty relationships, student affairs collaboration, finance partnerships—these take intention, but they’re within reach.
You control questions you raise. In cabinets, planning sessions, board presentations—the questions you surface shape institutional attention. When you ask what it would take to improve graduation rates by 10 points, you redirect focus from enrollment tactics to institutional strategy.
The Strategic Power of No
Three years into the VP role, the Vice President is exhausted. Every request accommodated. President wants higher enrollment? Adjust standards. CFO needs revenue? Increase projections. Faculty want stronger students? Accept anyone who can pay. Recruit smarter and harder. It is an unsustainable model.
Each accommodation seemed reasonable. But collectively, something troubling emerged: enrollment strategy built on accommodation rather than direction.
When crisis arrives—declining quality, collapsing retention, unsustainable discounting—there is no strategy to execute. No strategy beyond “more” had ever been established.
Real strategy requires real choices. When everything becomes priority, nothing is.
The enrollment leaders navigating this successfully have learned: strategic boundaries aren’t barriers to collaboration. They’re prerequisites.
Clarity means defining what you’re actually trying to accomplish. It means establishing non-negotiables and defending them when pressures mount.
This isn’t stubbornness. It’s leadership.
The key is building this clarity requires presidential support and cabinet understanding before crises emerge. When everyone agrees on strategic priorities in advance, declining conflicting requests becomes possible.
Strategic Moves That Matter
Invest in data about market position. Actual data about who competes for your students, what they offer, why students choose them.
Build cross-functional strategy. Enrollment challenges cannot be solved by the VP for Enrollment alone. Create structures where faculty, student affairs, and finance engage enrollment questions together.
Focus on leading indicators. The Vice President must focus on the future…hard to do when the immediate seems overwhelming. Inquiry trends 18 months forward matter more than current applications. The composition of your deposits can predict retention 12 and 24 months in the future.
Make retention your enrollment strategy. Students you keep create more value than students you recruit.
Know when to escalate. Some challenges require presidential or board action. Your responsibility includes making clear when enrollment tactics can’t solve institutional strategy problems.
Using Your Leverage
These headwinds aren’t temporary. But institutions with strategic enrollment leadership navigate them more effectively than those trying to recruit their way out of structural problems.
Your leverage isn’t controlling everything. It’s using what you can control to shape what you can’t.
J. Carey Thompson is the founder of CVET Enrollment Strategies, bringing 35+ years of senior enrollment leadership experience across admission, financial aid, career services, communications, athletics, and institutional research. CVET partners with private colleges and universities to develop comprehensive, evidence-based enrollment strategies. Learn more at cvetconsulting.com.