Dear Editor,
TCNJ needs to move forward and find a focused and sustainable place in higher education. However, it continues to fail to understand the market forces that influence its enrollment. This is the responsibility of the entire institution.
The personal goals, motivations, and dreams of students who enroll in an institution are often different from the mission and goals of the institution itself. These two are frequently misconstrued as being the same. For example, TCNJ traditionally describes itself through the language of the liberal arts, but much of its current enrollment is oriented toward professional pathways. This does not mean that TCNJ should abandon its liberal arts mission. For TCNJ to be successful in that mission, it needs to speak to the students it attracts, understand where it sits in the market for students, and differentiate itself from its competitors.
Every year, TCNJ collects data on what students desire, and it is all hidden in plain sight in the admissions report. This report divides student interest among well over one hundred majors, specializations, and pathways. There may be academic meaning in these distinctions, but they obscure the markets in which TCNJ actively competes for students. These markets naturally vary in size. This fact is generally ignored in TCNJ’s have-and-have- not mentality: if you have students, you are good; if you don’t, you better watch out. There is no future in this type of mentality. We need to consider both the size of the applicant pool, represented by the number of applications, and our competitive position within that market, represented by our yield.
Under the current mentality, a program that attracted 972 applications and enrolled 107 freshmen would be considered highly successful by TCNJ’s standards. It would garner academic resources to continue doing what it is doing. However, these numbers need to be considered in the context of the market available to the program. Of the 972 students who applied, 754 were admitted, and only 107 of those admitted students enrolled. In other words, the program enrolled only 14.2% of the students it admitted. TCNJ as a whole enrolled 18.5% of its admitted students. The program’s below-average performance in this large market demands institutional attention. It is important to understand why students enroll elsewhere. Instead of spending the summer pursuing personal, scholarly, and/or creative endeavors without distractions, a department in this position should also be asking what the market is telling it, why so many admitted students choose to go elsewhere, and how it can diffrentiate itself and improve its competitive position. TCNJ’s systems give programs little reason to ask these types of questions as long as their enrollment remains high. In fact, our system rewards absolute enrollment without adequately considering performance within the market.
TCNJ is a primarily undergraduate, tuition-driven institution whose long-term stability is tied to attracting students, understanding what those students want, distinguishing ourselves from our peers, and providing students with strong outcomes. If we can’t do this, TCNJ cannot fulfill its mission or accomplish its goals. Finding a focused and sustainable place in higher education requires every academic program to understand the market in which it operates and critically evaluate its position within that market. Institutional resources need to focus on this simple fact.
Sincerely,
Andrew J. Bechtel Professor of Civil Engineering
