Expanding the Student Pipeline

How colleges are modernizing their strategies to boost enrollment.

Higher education’s decade of disquiet lurches forward as campus leaders grapple with budget woes, AI fallout, demographic shifts, and public skepticism. At the center of this multiverse of crises sits college enrollment, a leading indicator of institutional financial health. 

A smaller pool of 18-year-olds means that higher ed, already reeling from a collapse in the enrollment of international students, will have to search more deeply and compete harder for students of traditional college age and work smarter to draw in those 25 and older. 

In this issue brief, you will find details on five enrollment strategies that work: direct admissions, career readiness, interinstitutional partnerships, dual enrollment, and online education. Through examples from colleges and universities that have successfully implemented these approaches, you'll learn practical lessons and concrete steps to help protect and grow enrollment on your own campus.

With this report, readers will:

• Learn how direct-admission programs have created a low-cost path to a college degree for new types of enrollees.
• Understand why more small liberal-arts institutions are reorganizing academic programs around career readiness.
• See why campus leaders are embracing interinstitutional partnerships to expand work-force-education offerings and boost enrollment.
• Show how private and regional public campuses are taking a page from community colleges by expanding dual-enrollment programs to turn high-school students earning college credit into full-time enrollees.
• Explore programs that are pursuing a higher quality of online courses to attract ever larger numbers of students.

Date: July 2026
Pages: 40
Digital file size:15.5 MB

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