Strategic Enrollment

Across the nation and region, demographic and other macro factors, including fewer community college students, are impacting enrollment trends. We are seeing slight dips in the transfer and out-of-state and international graduate populations, but we are also seeing a stabilization in first-time first-year students, as well as an increase in international first-time first-year students. Despite these trends, we have multi-faceted enrollment strategies that include an aggressive recruitment push, workshops and trainings to assist yield, increased focus on enrollment operations and financial aid, international recruitment plans by target market, and a strategic marketing effort. 

For the spring term, we will have a clearer picture of our enrollment in mid- to late-February when census is taken. 

We do not think of enrollment as just a point in time. The enrollment cycle is always on for CU Denver, and we continue to see significant increases in interest in our campus, applications, and admissions. For us, we need to enhance our operational excellence to ensure that we yield more students whom we have accepted. We also made the strategic decision to bring international graduate credential evaluations in-house as of February 1, 2024 to reduce the barrier to entry for this vital population. 

CU Denver saw a recent drop in new international graduate enrollment and in the transfer category, which is in part due to the smaller number of community college students in our region. Drops in new international graduate enrollment are likely due to campus’ shift to requiring external credential evaluations in response to industry-wide increased scrutiny of foreign credentials. To address this issue, we moved our credential evaluations to in-house as of Feb. 1, 2024.

Absolutely. While many colleges and universities across the nation are experiencing enrollment challenges, we have strategies to guide us and move us forward. While we don’t expect enrollment to rebound to pre-pandemic levels overnight, we do aim to have a better enrollment picture in fall 2024 compared to fall 2023.

In close collaboration with units across campus, SESS has a strong focus on enrollment marketing for high-growth programs, recruitment, retention, support services, and digital strategies, which all contribute to enrollment. Our SESS division also continues to prioritize financial aid and student mental health, which we know are critical areas for our students’ well-being and academic success. We have established a Financial Aid and Scholarships Advisory Committee—composed of more than 25 representatives from units across the university —to provide updates to the community and collect feedback about student experiences. We are also assembling a Student Health, Wellness, and Advocacy Working Group to improve mental health and academic supports for students. We are also prioritizing more opportunities for engagement on campus, including trainings and workshops. To this end, on Feb. 9, more than 80 faculty and staff attended a graduate education enrollment workshop hosted by SESS leaders. 

We are already seeing increases in our undergraduate applications compared to last year and we have many different strategies in place that have already improved our trend data.  

• We now have a full admissions staff and have been able to visit more high schools to increase our first-year student and Colorado resident applications. We are also sending more recruiters to community colleges to support our goal of becoming a transfer destination.  
• We are leveraging our relationship with our marketing and enrollment strategy partner Carnegie to help ensure we are increasing application generation and yield activities.   
• We are prioritizing applications from countries that have long visa wait times. Our Office of International Affairs is also working on several different yield and outreach activities both at the undergraduate and graduate level to help bring more international students to our community.  
• We anticipate that bringing the international graduate credential evaluation process back in house as of Feb. 1, 2024 will help build back our international graduate applicant pool. 
• Admissions for new masters students are trending higher than last year. 
• University Communications launched a new brand, which is a promotional tactic that can help drive applications.  
• We have implemented comprehensive communication strategies to ensure that we're reaching out to students on time, when they need to take action, and making the process very seamless for them to either register for their classes or address an issue that might be preventing registration. 
• We're coordinating efforts across student success, academic achievement, and advising units to streamline and optimize our advising operations.  
• We are making significant improvements in our financial aid and scholarships area. The team of 15 is expected to be fully staffed this spring (it is at 13 currently). 

This is a collaborative process between SESS and the deans, with input from program directors and program leaders. We look at historic and projected enrollment trends, market intelligence, and other academic planning factors.

CU Denver has historically taken a diversified approach to international recruitment. Its top core markets are China, India, and Kuwait, as well as international students living in the U.S. The International Enrollment strategy continues to include recruitment plans for these core markets. What's challenging is that India and China are such huge markets, which means the International Admissions team needs to develop multiple relatively smaller markets to continually to build up CU Denver’s international student enrollment.  

For the past few years, the International Admissions team has identified growth, emerging and exploratory markets. The team is continually evaluating the viability of these markets and how they can use international recruitment dollars in the most efficacious way to build the brand of CU Denver and highlight the positive international student experience that we offer. 

Our staff are essential to providing a quality education to our students and to helping them navigate CU Denver from admission to graduation. When we experience staff turnover, we see impacts on our ability to provide timely, adequate services to our students. That noted, we have made significant progress in restaffing and shoring up our operations. This past spring, our wait times were markedly improved compared to the previous spring and fall; we experienced fewer calls, indicating that students had what they needed in terms of services and information; and spring financial aid packages were on time and in keeping with industry standards. We will continue to look at ways to improve our operations even more.

The central enrollment team serves as a resource for our schools and colleges. They can provide guidance on processes and procedures, roles and responsibilities, best practices, program interests for international audiences, and help answer questions. At CU Denver, our enrollment processes are not fully centralized, so collaboration and coordination are essential for a high-quality, seamless experience for prospective and continuing students. Faculty and staff from our schools and colleges can reach the central enrollment team by contacting admissions@ucdenver.edu or intladmissions@ucdenver.edu.

Every population on our campus has a call to action for the different ways that they can be part of strategic enrollment and engage our students. Faculty play a critical role in our enrollment and in retaining our current students since they work so closely with our students on a daily basis.  

Moving forward, as we get deeper into the concept of setting enrollment targets, we want to explore how to better involve our faculty and academic leaders at all levels. We also need to consider resources, the capacity of different units, what's possible within different programs, and the strategic goals of a program. Those are all very faculty-centered conversations. One resource we encourage our faculty to use is our market intelligence office, which can help answer questions that are specific to their disciplines and trends of what they're seeing in their programs.  

Further, faculty and other staff members can help with retention efforts by ensuring that all interactions with our students are done so with care and support for students. A simple outreach to a student who didn’t show up to class, or reaching out to a student who is not doing well in the class to help or a referral to learning resources can make a significant difference for that student. 

Decisions about course modality are made at the school/college, department, and faculty levels, and we don't dictate as an institution what modality should look like in any given program. We have been looking at the mix of modalities and we are seeing from the data that there is an increase in students taking exclusively online courses, and that students want flexibility. This is important information for our faculty and program leaders to have as we think about our strategic enrollment. 

These conversations to date have primarily been on a school or college level. There is an inherent tension in that there is a large portion of the student body who are requesting online and virtual options, yet international students have physical presence requirements in order to maintain their visa status in the U.S. Veterans have similar requirements for in-person classes. As we become aware of programs that have limited in-person or hybrid classes, we engage with those school and college colleagues to explore options for international and veteran students. But this cannot always be accommodated. As such, there are some programs we don't recruit internationally because international students can't maintain their status if they are in that program. 

Constructive conversations are ongoing, and we are working creatively with those programs on solutions 

The responsibility for choosing the modality of a course or program sits locally within schools, colleges, and departments in collaboration with their academic leadership (associate deans and deans). Right now, student preference for modality can be seen through their choice of sections that might differ in modality. That data is available at the school/college level and can be accessed through the Course Management module of the Decision Support Toolkit (DSTk).

Students and families have stated cost is a concern of theirs, however we have not been told directly they do not feel it is not worth it. Our strategies for students and their families to overcome the concern of cost is to help them understand the affordability of CU Denver. We do this through our recruitment materials and meetings with students and their families.

Students can commit to the university on a rolling basis until the semester starts. While we do not have a formal commitment date the Admissions Team does work to secure commitments early and engage students in campus events to help support their decisions. Admitted Students’ Day is a large event that brings admitted students to campus with unique programming to increase their interest and gain commitment to CU Denver.

We are currently evaluating our transfer processes across campus to create a cohesive strategy that will better align and streamline the transfer experience for our students.

The program offerings are determined by the schools and colleges.

After census takes place in the spring and fall, in February and September, respectively, CU Denver’s enrollment numbers become public information and are available on the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness (OIRE) website. Click here to view the spring 2024 enrollment dashboard. Throughout the enrollment cycle, information is updated twice a week on dashboards hosted on the campus Tableau server. All CU Denver faculty and staff members have access to these dashboards, though you must be connected to the campus network or VPN. The OIRE is available to answer questions related to the dashboard or data.

We know the number of new students who entered the university as a transfer student. Census information on transfer students is available on the CU Denver Headcount Enrollment Dashboard. The Admissions Trends Dashboard also tracks the type of student that is entering the university, and you can see the percentage of transfer students as a part of the incoming classes.  

For spring, 36.4% of the incoming class were transfer students, comparatively, fall 2023 saw 29%. Our strategic enrollment goal is to increase transfer enrollments to 50% of the incoming class by 2030.

Faculty and staff information can be found in the Faculty and Staff folder of University Dashboards. The available demographic data can be viewed and filtered by various categories to help provide an overall profile or by college/school, department or type.

Student retention is available through the University’s Retention Rate Trends Dashboard. We have also surveyed the students who did not re-enroll to better understand their reasons. This information can be found on the Continuing, Not Enrolled Student Survey dashboard created by OIRE.

Incoming student data is tracked on the Admissions Trends Dashboard, which shows how students are progressing through admissions funnel (application, admissions decisions, intents to enroll, and enrollment). While this is not retention data by admissions acceptance, it allows us to track student behavior and engage with students throughout the funnel.  

Persistence (term-to-term) and Retention (year-to-year) data is tracked by student cohorts, specifically for first-time full-time and transfer students to allow us to know how they persist or retain after starting at the university.

According to student surveys distributed between 2012 and 2022, the top five reasons students leave CU Denver and do not return are tuition, fees, conflict between job and education demands, wanting a break, and health-related problems. We continue to track this data and use it as we strategize ways to attract and retain students. 

It is difficult to calculate operational impacts on students’ decisions to enroll; however, we can always improve in this area—and we are—to better serve our students. In the past year, we hired a director of financial aid and have a staff of 11, and we expect this unit to be fully staffed to 15 by March 2024.

The Board of Regents February presentation outlines our budgeted enrollment, which is meant to be a realistic outlook of what is needed to meet our basic budget needs. Budgeted enrollment is not meant to be what we're expecting or aiming for, it's meant to be a number we are sure we can meet. 

Our enrollment targets are separate from our budget and are based on trends at the program level, population trends, and demographic trends. One of the current indicators for our fall 2024 enrollment is our application numbers, and those numbers look very healthy. As we get closer to the fall and have a better understanding of how many students are accepted and have committed to CU Denver, we'll start to be able to update our numbers in our dashboards.

Students across the country are experiencing similar challenges with the 2024-2025 FAFSA. Our Financial Aid Office has plans in place to ensure prompt review of FAFSAs once they are sent from the U.S. Department of Education, which is expected to take place in the first half of March. We will be working with external organizations to assist with our reviews.  

The Department of Education has also stated that it plans to reduce the verification requirements for schools to help reduce the burden on students and parents. This will allow for a quicker review process and result in awards being added for students sooner. We anticipate initial award letters to be available to students who have completed their 2024-2025 FAFSA by May 1. (Unless there are further delays by the Department of Education). 

SESS’ enrollment area was protected and was not affected by budget cuts. 

CU Denver participates in the CU Promise program which offers students a package of $14,000 in federal, state, and institutional grants. This covers tuition, fees, plus additional costs for students who are Colorado Residents who have demonstrated need determined by the FAFSA application. 

When international graduate applications spiked a couple of years ago and were short on staffing resources, the institution made the decision to outsource this step in the process. We are pleased to report that as of Feb. 1, we have two new staff members and graduate credential evaluation has been brought back in-house. Undergraduate credential evaluation has always been done in-house. We are in the process of communicating this change to applicants.