Octane—Adapting to Change: How OCU Revitalized Its Enrollment Strategy
University enrollment growth: For nearly a quarter of a century, my life has centered on attempting to achieve it. When I recall all the prospect communication plans written and tweaked, high schools visited, recruitment events hosted, digital ads displayed, and discount strategies calculated, I could write volumes.
As a chief enrollment officer, the responsibility for achieving growth rests squarely on our shoulders. It’s a role that is constantly under scrutiny, with success or failure often determining our professional fate. I’ve attended countless seminars and read many articles covering potential tactics used to raise the incoming class number. Rarely is any other position or topic at the university watched as closely, celebrated as much in good times, or judged as harshly in bad times.
THE HISTORY
I have been in enrollment management for 23 years and a chief enrollment officer for the past 12. My experience relates to a high school physics class I took three decades ago. In the class, I spent a lot of time agonizing over problems with a calculator and scratch paper, trying every method to figure problems out. One day, the right tutor came along and showed me a method that clicked. I moved forward from there and got an “A” in the class.
The same thing happened in my current position. Initially, I approached achieving enrollment growth as a complex problem where the sole burden of fixing it fell on me. And that “method” would never fix the problem. Then, I finally met the right tutor who showed me what I was missing—and that lesson lies in this reality: If a university charges enrollment management to make the market want what it offers, it will not grow. On the other hand, if a university listens to the market and adapts to market demand, it will grow.
THE SITUATION
To illustrate how I made this discovery, I should probably take you back to the beginning. As mentioned, for 12 years I have been the Vice President for Enrollment Management at Oklahoma City University (OCU). This is a smaller, private, urban, Methodist-affiliated institution located in the heart of Oklahoma City. While this experience has been the most transformative and positively impactful of my career, I have learned that it takes more stamina and courage to stay in a chief enrollment role than to leave it.
When I started at OCU in 2012, the university had around 3,200 students, but that number was already declining. There were several best practices I had learned along the way that I was able to bring to the role that made enrollment management better. The discount rate had been growing before my arrival, and I was able to stabilize it. We enhanced our financial aid education and improved our enrollment tracking reporting methods. Our communication plan became more multi-layered. I was able to slow the decline in total headcount, but I couldn’t completely stop the slide. For the next nine years, I observed each fall census drop until it reached a low point of around 2,500 students in 2021.
Yes, the pandemic played a role, but not a pivotal one because the declines were in motion long before COVID was a common word in conversation. In the summer of 2021, I would have never guessed that in 2022, the slide would reverse, and our new student counts would have risen by 13%. I would not have imagined that by August 2023, OCU would be back up to 2,750 students and on a realistic track to enroll more than 3,000 students by 2025.
What changed? Our university mindset. We began to adapt ourselves to meet the market demand.
THE SOLUTION
President Ken Evans took the helm at OCU in 2021. He was the ‘tutor’ I needed to solve the enrollment problem. Before the arrival of President Evans, I always assumed—and was often told—the enrollment declines resulted from a strategy that I needed to tweak. President Evans helped me recognize that I had indeed learned my trade, my strategies were sound, and my practices were up to date.
The problem was that OCU was trapped in a cycle of trying to force the market to desire what we offered. We were attempting to recruit students with outdated university programs and learning methods that had been effective 15 years ago but were no longer driving growth.
Under OCU’s new leadership, we embraced change and recognized the need to diversify our recruitment strategies—put more eggs in more baskets, you could say—to stay relevant through the 2020s and beyond. We acknowledged that international, transfer, and graduate students were as crucial to our growth as incoming first-year students. Relevant academic programming became the cornerstone of our university strategy. By January 2024, OCU’s total enrollment had increased by 8% compared to August 2021, with over 20% of that growth coming from new programs launched since 2020.
International student enrollment first illustrates the importance of academic programming. Even before 2020, international enrollment at OCU had been on a consistent decade decline, and the pandemic took it even further. In August 2021, a little more than 30 total international students were enrolled. By January 2024, that enrollment shot up to a little more than 250 and shows continued signs of growth. The key: offering STEM-based graduate programming that came on board in 2022 and 2023. Without the investment in these new, revamped programs, OCU would not have seen any benefits in international enrollment once we reached the other side of the pandemic. Again, we listened to what the international market was telling us rather than forcing an unwanted product on uninterested non-U.S. students.
The MBA program also showed a multi-year steep decline. It had traditionally been an in-person general curriculum degree that attracted students well through the mid-2010s before numbers began to erode. We could no longer keep up with the more flexible and detailed competitors coming into play in our market. In 2022, we expanded our online presence, adjusted pricing to be competitive, and expanded the program to include six tracks. This caught the attention of both prospective students in the market as well as potential corporate partners in the Oklahoma City area. Consequently, total MBA enrollment grew by more than 100 students between 2022 and 2023.
While many institutions in recent years have seen a decline in their core colleges of Arts and Sciences, OCU saw a more than 200-student increase in this college between 2021 and 2023. For a school our size, that is significant. This was all about programming, from the onboarding of a health care doctorate degree to a revamped, STEM-based graduate program to Game Design and Animation studies attracting more traditional students.
When I started at OCU in 2012, our School of Nursing was a powerhouse. There was no greater academic revenue generator on campus, not even our law school. While the school continued to maintain an outstanding reputation in our region, enrollment began to fade shortly before the onset of the pandemic and most especially immediately after. The learning preferences of our potential market began to change. We suddenly had a new generation of prospects not only comfortable with virtual learning but several who wanted to learn quickly.
OCU took action. First, programs designed for students who already held a Registered Nursing license were moved completely online, saving headcounts in these areas. Also, an accelerated and market-affordable version of the on-campus BSN program for students new to the nursing profession was implemented. This became so successful that in the second semester, August 2024 cohort, there was so much interest that a waitlist had to be implemented.
For many years, the Performing Arts programs have been the hallmark of traditional undergraduate study at OCU. During the decade of enrollment decline, these programs remained relatively stable until the pandemic. Then, numbers dropped to an unusual low in 2021. Instead of simply blaming the pandemic, our academic leaders took proactive steps to listen to the market and adapt accordingly. Options to audition virtually were permanently implemented. Timelines of auditions were moved up to catch the market earlier. Even a few long-standing but respected rules for current students were adjusted, reflecting methods that were successful in the past but no longer embraced in the current market. With all these adjustments, not only did the performing arts recover from the 2021 low, but the 2024 numbers are even stronger than immediately pre-pandemic.
THE CONCLUSION
Another lesson I learned on this journey is that headcount recovery does not equate to immediate budget recovery. A prolonged enrollment decline is accompanied by a long-term budget decline that won’t fix itself overnight. As enrollment managers, we get the first taste of victory—one of the perks of the job—through initial headcount growth. However, the positive momentum from this growth is felt more universally two to three years later, when we begin to see the first signs of budget recovery.
The last few years at my institution have been a gift I would never have expected to receive. I have been able to witness what happens when people work in their own lanes, maximizing their efforts in these individual areas and bringing the whole university forward piece by piece. I have seen plans on paper materialize and a ship turn to go in the right direction. I have had a role in modernizing a product designed for the 21st-century learner.
I wish this same opportunity for every enrollment manager reading this. You have earned it.
About the Author
Kevin Windholz, MLS, has spent over 20 years working in the higher education sector and currently serves as the Vice President for Enrollment Management at Oklahoma City University, a role he has held since 2012. He has led domestic and international admissions, financial aid, student accounts, and university marketing and communications. Among his proudest achievements in this role have been discount rate management and developing a system to accurately predict net tuition revenue to be generated from future enrollment. Windholz has been a regular presenter at the American Association for Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) SEM Conferences, as well as several other prestigious conferences. His work has also been published in the AACRAO Strategic Management Quarterly Journal.
