Landing the Class

Delonte Leflore,Everrett Smith,Aleque Novesl

doi:10.18060/25627

Abstract

The devastation of COVID-19 substantively impacted enrollment opportunities for colleges and universities in the United States. Many higher education institutions responded to the crises by moving students off campus, enacting furloughs, increasing tuition, and appealing to their state and federal legislators for financial resources. At the University of Cincinnati (UC), critical considerations for campus leadership were how to best stabilize enrollment and resources and what needed to take place to ensure that underrepresented students were not lost in the process. Disparities exist in how the pandemic affects people of color and people from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. That, undoubtedly, was true for many of UC’s students and their families from historically underserved backgrounds. UC launched a strategic initiative called Landing the Class to address enrollment concerns. The effort, which this article features, discusses how UC used innovative strategy and planning to address its enrollment challenges during the pandemic. Using a variety of institutional and national data, we provide an analysis of the extent to which the Landing the Class initiative was influential in helping the university reach its enrollment goals and implications for higher education leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic had a distressing impact on colleges and universities (Pollikoff et al, 2020)
Institutional level, University of Cincinnati (UC) put into place several strategies that relied on frequently updated data to guide decisions for enrollment
Based on SimpsonScarborough (2020) data, 24% of study participants who were high school seniors believed that they might change their minds about attending college because of COVID-19. These findings suggested that UC could engage its urban core and enroll students locally who were still undecided

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic had a distressing impact on colleges and universities (Pollikoff et al, 2020). Faculty and academic colleges had to identify how to stabilize enrollment growth to remain the same as in 2019 before the pandemic, 46,388 students across all three campuses. This required highly sought majors that had limited growth because of resources, thinking creatively about accommodating more students and course offerings, and recognizing that some majors will experience a decrease in enrollment. UC’s LTC initiative focused on these vulnerable populations During this time, prospective international students, while interested in enrolling at UC, could not enter the United States due to the travel restrictions. Each assessment concluded that UC needed to employ innovative and strategic enrollment strategies to stabilize and grow enrollment during the global pandemic and a period when high school graduation rates are negatively impacting college attendance among traditional college-age students. Some of these examples included flexibility in determining completed applications, extending deadlines, waiving test requirements, forgoing application and confirmation fees, increasing student support throughout the admission cycle, tuition discounting, and increasing access to financial aid

Analysis and Findings

Movement of program start dates to allow for the most convenient start date

Implications for Practice and Conclusion