Most presidents I know can recite their college’s mission from memory. Far fewer can name the three colleges that enrolled the students they admitted and lost last spring, or say what those families ended up paying. In my experience, the later answers predict the next five years better than the first.
You have heard that culture eats strategy for breakfast. The line is usually credited to Peter Drucker, although no one has found it in anything he wrote. Quote Investigator traces its earliest printed use to a 2000 headline from a technology research firm, and Mark Fields later made it a slogan at Ford. Whoever said it first, the point holds. A plan that runs against how people behave will lose to the behavior.
Our sector needs a corollary. The market eats mission for lunch.
Mission is why a college exists. The market decides whether enough families choose it, at a price the college can sustain, to keep that mission funded. For much of my career the second question took care of itself often enough that boards could treat it as a staff matter. That is no longer true, and the numbers are plain.
According to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), the average tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time students at private nonprofit colleges reached a projected 57.1 percent in 2025–26, up from 48 percent in 2015–16. Even with those deeper discounts, net tuition revenue per first-time student fell 2.2 percent after inflation in 2024–25. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) projects that the number of high school graduates peaked in 2025 and will fall about 13 percent by 2041. Robert Kelchen at the University of Tennessee found that nearly a third of private nonprofit colleges ran deficits in 2024, and a projection reported by The Hechinger Report this spring put 442 of roughly 1,700 private four-year institutions at risk of closing or merging within a decade.
Every one of those colleges has a mission statement.
A hypothetical president
Picture a president who arrives at a residential liberal arts college convinced that its academic program, its campus, and its facilities hold up well against the institutions families are weighing. He is hypothetical. His story is drawn from a real presidency, with the identifying details left out.
No one has tested his assumption, and the market has already moved past it. He assumes a few technical fixes will solve the problem. A little more budget here, a staff change there. He lets the campus infrastructure sit because the market shouldn’t be sensitive as the institution’s mission is so striking. The first signals are a softer applicant pool and fewer full-pay families saying yes. He is slow to recognize them. When the budget tightens, he cuts student recruitment and asks the VP for “proof” of return, defined so narrowly that almost no recruitment activity can pass the test. Warnings about real problems in the market are set aside.
The trends he faces are common across his region, and some erosion is likely unavoidable. What turns a regional trend into an institutional problem is a response that comes late and aims at the wrong things. The applicant pool shrinks faster than it needed to, and the full-pay families who make a discount rate affordable keep choosing elsewhere.
Eventually the college launches several new initiatives aimed at the market, and they begin to take hold. Those deserve credit. By then, though, he is nearing the end of his presidency. In enrollment, years are counted in classes, and a class that does not enroll in year two is still missing from the budget in year five.
What works
The presidents I have seen hold mission and market together well do five things consistently.
- They know whom they lose to, and why. Every spring they ask for the list of colleges where admitted students who said no enrolled instead along with the net price those students were offered. They read that list the way a CFO reads a variance report. They visits those campuses and reads their prospective student literature.
- They see the campus the way a family does. They walk a competitor’s tour as a parent would, eat in the other dining hall, and sit through the other information session. A residence hall that looks fine to the people who walk past it every day can look dated next to the one a family toured that morning thirty miles away.
- They understand the recruitment cycle and ask the right return-on-investment question. Admission budgets are “lumpy” and front loaded. Mid year budget cuts likely require bad decisions to be made. Recruitment produces students across several cycles and many contacts, so cost per deposit from a new initiative that takes a couple of years to make impact is not a good measure of whether the initiative is worthwhile. Student recruitment investments take time to mature.
- They treat warnings from enrollment as data. The enrollment vice president is in the room when the budget is set, before the class arrives, and bad news gets the same hearing as good news. A president who punishes the messenger soon either stops getting the message or starts a revolving door of messengers.
- They decide in advance where mission flexes and where it holds. The mission is the filter every new idea passes through. A liberal arts college can add a guaranteed internship, Communication and Data Science, or a 3+2 pathway without surrendering anything it stands for. What it cannot afford is a mission used to wave off every adjustment the market asks for.
The tension between mission and market is real, and I do not want to pretend it is easy. Some of what families ask for, a college should decline. A college that chases every preference ends up with no particular identity, and families notice that too. A president cannot make that call well, though, without knowing the market as precisely as the mission. Declining a market signal you understand is a strategy decision. Ignoring one you never saw is a hope.
The colleges that keep their missions longest will be led by people who know their markets best.
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.