Last month, I presented a plenary session to the Board of Trustees at Centre College.
That may not sound unusual — except that Centre is where I served as Vice President for Enrollment from 1998 to 2010. I’m back now as Interim VP, stepping in during a leadership transition. And the experience of returning to a place I love, sixteen years later, after serving two other liberal arts colleges in between, now with a different vantage point, is what prompted me to write something I’d been thinking about for a long time.
My last interaction with the Centre board was a plenary presentation in May 2010. I still have it. To link back to that, the presentation and the white paper behind it carried a title “What I Have Learned Since We Last Spoke.”
What I’ve learned is that the enrollment management profession that exists in 2026 would be barely recognizable to a practitioner who last surveyed the landscape in 2010. And the central argument I made to Centre’s board is one I’d make to any governing board at a private college right now:
“The structural advantages that once sustained private colleges — pricing power, yield, full-pay families, public trust — have all migrated toward a smaller number of similar private institutions and a larger number of state flagships.
The colleges that thrive will not be those that manage enrollment more efficiently. They will be those that reimagine enrollment as institutional strategy.”
Here’s what has actually shifted — and what boards need to understand:
- The demographic cliff has arrived. WICHE projects a 13% decline in high school graduates over the next 15 years, beginning now. More than 120 colleges have closed or merged since 2016. The Northeast and Midwest are already feeling it acutely. I would argue that the cliff really started in the early 2000’s in the white population.
- Full-pay students are concentrating in a flight to perceived prestige. In 2022, the top 50 liberal arts colleges held 89% of the full-pay market among the top 150. A decade earlier, they held 70%. The institutions in the greatest need of full-pay revenue are the ones who have lost the most access to it. Expecting more than 2–3% full-pay enrollment is, for most privates outside the very top of the US News rankings, no longer realistic.
- Discount rates are unsustainable. The average institutional discount rate at private colleges has climbed from 33% in 2010 to an estimated 55%+ today. Many institutions are discounting over 70% and are discounting more while enrolling fewer students. That is a fundamentally untenable model.
- Public trust has eroded dramatically. Gallup measured 57% confidence in higher education in 2015. By 2023, it had fallen to 36%. The traditional value propositions of private liberal arts education — mentorship, small classes, transformative learning — cannot be stated as articles of faith anymore. They have to be demonstrated, documented, and communicated.
- The competitive landscape has been redrawn. Southern public universities are recruiting nationally, offering vibrant campus cultures, and pricing 20–50% below comparable privates. Post-COVID students actively sought campuses with strong community and social life. Many Northeast and Midwest private colleges must recalibrate.
- Students now inhabit a different information environment. Over 68% of high school students use social media to research colleges. TikTok has replaced the college website as a discovery engine for Gen Z and Generation Alpha. Polished institutional marketing doesn’t land the way it once did — authenticity does.
What I told Centre’s board is this:
The institutions that navigate the next decade successfully won’t be those that waited for conditions to improve. They will be those that recognized the magnitude of the transformation underway, invested in leadership and infrastructure, and made the difficult strategic choices the moment demanded. It will require urgency and patience. It will require decisions based on an understanding of their market segment and their competition, good data and research, intuition, and enormous courage.
That’s what I’ve learned since the last time we spoke.
J. Carey Thompson is the founder of CVET Enrollment Strategies, bringing 40+ 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.
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