Over the last year we’ve partnered with nearly 100 colleges and universities on growing and sustaining enrollment. Since the start of 2024, we’ve provided an estimated $3.3 million worth of enrollment marketing services and saved partners a total of 3,800 hours. The feedback from partners about our initial support has been positive:
“I feel very well equipped again to your credit. Setting this up was a piece of cake. It really was for a small team like ours.” - Morningside University
“It’s been such a joy working with you all. This is how it’s done.”- Missouri Valley College
“I know my social media manager will do cartwheels across campus when I show her all the things you’ve created” - Belmont Abbey College
It’s been incredible to watch our partners grow by adding career-ready degree programs and providing tailored marketing assets to help empower programmatic growth. But what we learned is that small colleges and universities could benefit from more enrollment support across the entire admissions funnel, not just when a student has a specific major in mind. To address those needs, we’re expanding our enrollment services to include best-in-class enrollment consulting from initial strategy through tactical execution.
One of the strengths of partnering with a consortium of similar institutions is the opportunity to quickly learn what’s working, what’s not working, then apply those shared learnings effectively. In the early days of Rize, we thought creating in-demand programs and making them available via the consortium through program sharing was enough to drive enrollment. We quickly learned that shared support services, including enrollment marketing, were needed for institutions to realize the maximum impact of new programs. Partner institutions who worked closely with our enrollment marketing team saw 2x more enrollments on average than those who did not.
Through this work, we identified three enrollment truths:
And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we learned that enrollment teams are stretched thin with competing priorities and because of that, there’s limited internal capacity to develop and deploy new campaigns and funnel optimizations. Institutions were spending millions of dollars on vendors to help meet their enrollment goals, which was further cutting into already razor thin margins and growing discount rates.
As part of this enrollment expansion and our ongoing efforts to make it more affordable for institutions to grow and maintain their academic program portfolio, we’ve hired an all-star enrollment team led by Bob Stewart, a former consultant for RNL and VP of Enrollment at multiple institutions across the country, to help address the broader enrollment truths that make it challenging for institutions to succeed alone.
These new shared services are included at no additional cost with our program bundle subscriptions to help institutions keep their enrollment costs in check. Like our program bundles, our enrollment services are tiered to align with your goals when adding new programs whether that’s dramatically transforming your campus and enrollment operations to become the College of the Future or enhancing your catalog with a few trending programs like AI and essential enrollment support.
For existing partners, your Partner Success Lead will soon introduce you to your new enrollment consultant (if they haven’t already) to share more about what you can expect and explore how we can further support you and your team based on your enrollment priorities.
If you don’t currently partner with Rize and want to learn more about our enhanced enrollment services, schedule a discovery call with our Academic Partnerships team.
