A tale of data-driven turnaround
In a time of declining enrollment, Western Kentucky University went to school on AI and analytics.
THE ENROLLMENT
CLIFF WAS JUST UP
AHEAD. COULD THEY
REVERSE COURSE?
The Situation
It isn’t news that we live in turbulent times, and higher education―traditionally an important stop on the road to the American Dream―hasn’t been spared the disruption. Economic, cultural, and demographic forces have been affecting college enrollment for years; competing institutions have aggressive practices and offerings; a modern American generation that sees less value in earned degrees than their forebears; and the coming enrollment cliff—the downstream result of a great recession birth rate contraction. (The “cliff” refers to the year 2025, when the slowly shrinking number of college-age students will suddenly plummet by an average of 100,000 per year over the next four years).
Fewer prospective students, fewer of those prospects applying to college, and greater competition among institutions for those students: all this makes for a big squeeze on higher education, particularly regional comprehensive institutions.
Institutions like Western Kentucky University (WKU) in Bowling Green. By 2021, WKU found itself facing challenges: the COVID-19 pandemic was taking a sharp bite at enrollment numbers, but the hard(er) truth was that those numbers were already down some 20% since 2013.
At risk for WKU: Maintaining financial commitments to both tenured faculty and capital campaigns, as well as the real, existential prospect of an overall doom loop—lower enrollment = lower revenue = reduced student offerings = weaker recruitment = lower enrollment. So WKU leaders chose Deloitte.
In so doing, WKU unlocked access to the full breadth of the organization’s thinking, experience, technology, and ecosystems. Deloitte professionals are well versed in the unique challenges and opportunities in higher education and have the hands-on experience to target solutions accordingly.
The project brief: Realign WKU’s undergraduate enrollment and financial aid strategy with the university’s overall strategic priorities. The plan: Identify―then matriculate, then retain―prospective students using big data, insights, and individualized, predictive analytics―all part of the Deloitte IndustryAdvantage™ framework.
THE SOLVE
HOMEGROWN KNOWLEDGE +
PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS =
ENROLLMENT
GROWTH
The Impact
Success. A year into deploying Candidate360, WKU was logging remarkable, concrete enrollment results. On the strength of its new analytics, WKU teams launched and executed a multipronged recruitment strategy that identified more than 20,000 new, high-fit, likely-to-apply high school students. This strategy resulted in a 4% pre-Census enrollment increase of 100+ net new students, with a $2.3 million boost in expected net tuition revenue.
“Candidate360™ analytics are the real deal,” says Ethan Logan, PhD, and then-Vice President of Enrollment & Student Experience at Western Kentucky. “[Candidate360] really accelerated the individualized insights available to our enrollment team, helped us optimize the full enrollment life cycle, deliver results to key university stakeholders, and—more importantly—set our student applicants up for success.”
To that end (and beyond the numbers), the ongoing effort has helped WKU make quicker decisions about scholarship eligibility, understand the relative financial need of each incoming class, identify the personal barriers that impact student yield, enable personalized outreach proactively to build a unique and diverse incoming class, and—among other things—support first-generation enrollment throughout the enrollment process.
A happy ending, if only for a first chapter; with WKU’s speed and quality of insights should only increase, compounding both enrollment and net tuition revenue, and setting the stage for a promising story to come.