Key Takeaways Your advancement office doesn’t need to be told that alumni are central to its future. By almost any measure, institutions have gotten good at the alumni relationship they’ve chosen to optimize—giving. And it shows. In FY2025, alumni accounted for 23.2% of all funds raised by colleges and universities,...
What evolutionary biology can teach us about the ruthless competition for rankings position Jason Cohen, PhD, Director of Research + Insights at Frankel In 1871, Lewis Carroll wrote an absurd race scene in which the Red Queen tells Alice: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in...
The institutions achieving dramatic rankings gains aren’t just marketing better. They’re synchronizing operational excellence with strategic communication. Jason Cohen, PhD, Director of Research+Insights at Frankel Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most university rankings strategies fail. Not because institutions lack ambition or resources, but because they’re solving the wrong problem. Over the...
Key Takeaways Say what you will about the humble diploma, but students aren’t enrolling in college simply to display a credential for everyone to see (though it does look spiffy on the wall). Students are buying what that credential makes possible, which could show itself as a career, mobility, or...
Key Takeaways Alumni fundraising didn’t always start as a transaction but as a response to a need. It can be traced back to Yale in the late 1800s, when one of the country’s leading institutions found itself under incredible financial strain, to the point that the university president donated his...
For enrollment leaders, few challenges are more frustrating than watching a promising incoming class take shape on paper, only to see students opt out before move-in day. Applications remain an important enrollment metric, but they do not guarantee enrollment outcomes. Across higher education, institutions are facing a growing challenge: admitted...
Learn how social media influences higher ed reputation and why peer-led narratives now play a central role in university credibility.
Leadership transitions have a way of exposing what was never fully systematized. When a senior leader steps down, inconsistent messaging, half‑built brand narratives, and campaign‑only thinking suddenly become visible and costly because the institution no longer has a single, authoritative voice to carry them forward. Instead, the messaging strategy is...
Advancement teams are in constant motion, working to build and sustain meaningful alumni engagement. Institutions invest heavily in newsletters, events, campaigns, and platforms, yet often find that participation levels off over time. It’s not for lack of effort, or even access. More often, it’s a question of alignment: how closely...
Only 29% of rural young adults are enrolled in higher education, 19 percentage points lower than their urban peers. That’s not a pipeline problem. It’s an opportunity your institution is almost certainly missing. For enrollment leaders watching demographic projections with growing concern, rural students represent one of the largest underserved...
