EnlightenEd

How To Combat the Coming College Enrollment Crisis

by | Jan 13, 2020

How To Combat the Coming College Enrollment Crisis

Ever watched one of those TV shows about doomsday preppers?

You know, the ones where people stockpile food supplies, build underground bunkers, and practice what they’d do to survive in a post-apocalyptic world?

Well, there may not be a killer asteroid or a zombie apocalypse coming anytime soon, but there is one doomsday scenario that everyone working in higher education today is trying to prepare for – and that’s the enrollment crisis.

With the perfect storm of falling birthrates, increasing skepticism about the value of an expensive degree, and the ongoing financial challenges common to most colleges and universities, colleges are bracing themselves to deal with the effects of massive drops in enrollment predicted for the coming years.  

A recent report put together by The Chronicle of Higher Education details the issues that are at play here, and describes the strategies that academic institutions can use to remain competitive and combat a decline in enrollment.

Two key strategies mentioned in the report are:

  1. Agility: Adapting your institution’s offerings, marketing plan, campus environment…really, the entire college experience you offer…to the needs and desires of this new generation of students.
  2. Affordability: Cutting costs wherever possible so that you can pass on those savings in the form of lowered tuition rates to students.

At a glance, it might look like these two strategies are incompatible. After all, most of the changes mentioned require an IT overhaul, or at least a huge investment of time and money into integrating new apps with your existing systems. And true agility is even more expensive – can you imagine significantly changing a large part of your IT ecosystem every year or two to remain competitive? How does cutting costs fit into this picture at all?! 

That’s where N2N’s Illuminate comes into play.

Illuminate is an API Management Platform that removes the need for custom coding by seamlessly integratingnew apps with your existing platforms, databases, and systems, by leveraging existing APIs or by easily creating new ones. 

For an affordable monthly fee, Illuminate makes agility not just possible, but easy. 

Need to test out a few different apps to see which one works best? No problem. Snap each one into Illuminate quickly, try them out, and see which one truly fits your needs. You don’t have to worry about having to stick with a bad choice just because the cost to integrate another new app in its place is prohibitive.

Want a big IT shake-up every year? Go for it! There’s no reason not to, when you can add and remove apps, programs, and platforms in minutes, at no cost to you except the price of the apps themselves.

With this kind of radical, affordable agility in place, you can’t help but be competitively positioned for success in the coming years.  Cutting tuition while upping your offerings and providing a cutting-edge campus? Illuminate makes it a snap.

Contact us today for a free demo of the platform that can help you stay agile, affordable, and competitive.


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