Episode 102: Overcoming the Enrollment Cliff with Ellen Johnson, Vice President for Enrollment Management at Allegheny College

Ellen Johnson is a Vice President for enrollment management at Allegheny College. She’s a wealth of knowledge on enrollment management, Gen Z, and the whole nine yards.

How does Ellen see Allegheny College when compared to the fall or spring of 2190 to the fall and spring of 2023

Allegheny College was shut down for a short time in the spring of 2020, but they brought almost all of their students back in the fall of 2020 and have been a fully open campus for the entire pandemic. There are some changes in the students and faculty for the most part. They had the opportunity to start a health agency on their campus to allow the students to have as normal of an existence as they could for their two years of college. This was also seen in their enrollment works when hosting campus visitors. Now they have gotten back to large campus visits as well. The new normal, in some ways, is the old normal, but they also had some time to reflect on who they are as an institution and where they are going moving forward.

How big is the Enrollment Cliff? Are we seeing some kind of stabilization?

Allegheny College has been discussing the enrollment cliff for 10 to 20 years. Ellen has been working with the enrollment cliff for a long time, and there has also been conservation for a long time. Still, it is coming a little bit to a head now when it is combined with the pandemic, where traditionally, they are seeing fewer students coming through the pipeline and have been born 18 to 20 years ago but also considering 4-year institutions. It combines many factors, including the largest growth in students looking for colleges from historically underrepresented populations on our campuses. As an enrollment manager, we must ensure that we are not only recruiting students but also thinking about how the institution is prepared to serve the students of today. This is a combination of what Gen Z is looking for and students really thinking about their approach to education. The students coming to the institution do not look like those we had 5,10, and 15 years ago.

Is Allegheny College seeing any big changes to take on and support the Gen Z Students who are really tuned to learn things in a completely different format?

It starts with the curriculum and how the staff approaches talking to students. A presentation was given to the director orientation program of Allegheny College for some of the faculty preparing to teach the first-year students this year. They were talking about ways to connect with the students. If you send out a syllabus and say, “ hey, read these ten pages of really academic language.” First, the students will probably not read it and then will not understand it. Doing a short video on walking through things, which is something on the enrollment side they have seen been helpful at Allegheny. They also started doing financial aid packages where they send out your financial aid information. Still, they did not expect the students to understand it, so they created a short video for each individual student. That is a way that Gen Z really responds to understanding. Five years ago, it would be put into an email, or they would have to pick up the phone and call the students. It is all about meeting Gen Z where they are, and from a curricular perspective, what is really been seen is an alligatie kind of interdisciplinary work. So the idea of bringing many different passions and interests together for each student into their own major-minor combination really seems to resonate with Gen Z, who do not want to be put in the box. These students are interested, and they want to know all the things. For higher education to continue to be relevant to Gen Z, it is finding those opportunities for the students and changing the career path that the industry expects.

Contact Ellen Johnson

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellenvjohnson/

Learn more about Allegheny College

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/allegheny-college/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/alleghenycol

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alleghenycollege/

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