Collaboration and Competition Don’t Need to Be Mortal Enemies in Graduate Admissions

For most higher education enrollment management and admissions leaders, the last year and a half has been a season of profound uncertainty, anxiety and anomaly as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on enrollment. In defiance of higher education's historic countercyclical patterns, enrollments sank at many colleges, leading to the largest single-year decline in nearly a generation.

Graduate programs, however, have largely been shielded by the effects, benefiting from older and part-time students more inclined to enroll in online programs and already motivated to change careers before the pandemic. According to research from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, graduate enrollment grew across all sectors and types of institutions during the spring 2021 term -- jumping by 4.6 percent or a net increase of 124,000 students.

While the short-term numerical success may give us a temporary feeling of achievement, a return to competition may not be far off with international enrollments once again on the rise and the resurgence of "faster and cheaper alternatives" to college gaining in popularity. But as higher education emerges from the effects of a pandemic that exposed so many deep-rooted challenges, we have an opportunity to rethink long-held assumptions -- and push back against this reversion to relentless competition.

Rather than view it as a zero-sum game, graduate admissions leaders should consider how increased collaboration may offer a more compelling path forward. For decades, undergraduate programs have reaped the benefits of allowing prospective students to use the Common Application, and there's much that graduate schools can learn from this approach.

While universities often decentralize their admissions and enrollment functions based on the needs of individual schools and programs, there may be a reason to take a more cooperative approach -- both within our institutions and with other programs.

Students have well-founded questions and concerns about the cost and value of a degree. They often have to compare complex application requirements as they toggle between institutional websites. The process of applying to a graduate program -- let alone enrolling -- can be daunting.

From the complexities of test score submissions across multiple institutions to paying multiple transcript and application fees, there are still aspects of our graduate admissions that bear the hallmarks of a system oriented toward competition, selectivity and elitism. And the national reckoning on systemic racism and social inequality has only further added a sense of urgency to at last creating a system of graduate education far more focused on equity and access.

At Santa Clara University where I work, we made the choice to simplify the admissions process for prospective students to our business school by using a Centralized Application Service -- helping to streamline what can be an arduous and (sometimes expensive) process of applying to multiple programs.

Opting into a system in which students can so easily also apply to competitor institutions may seem counterintuitive in the historically cutthroat landscape of graduate admissions, but there are real benefits to this more collaborative approach.

As we expand this collaborative approach to strategic enrollment management to other programs beyond the business school, we're also seeing how it can create a new level of visibility for leaders around applicant pools spanning multiple programs.

For example, a prospective student -- in our region, often vying for promotion at a Silicon Valley tech firm and considering a master's in science of engineering -- may actually be more of a right-fit applicant for a part-time MBA. Armed with these insights, admissions professionals might instead recommend a dual degree or a concentration more tightly aligned with their professional goals. This can lead to healthier career outcomes for the student -- key at a time when students are rightfully sensitive about the return on their graduate education investments.

The launch of the centralized service has helped us make strides in increasing the diversity of our applicant pool, in terms of race, ethnicity, income-level and country of origin. And diversifying our enrollments has also led to increased yield and revenue -- further proof that supporting diversity, equity and inclusion in admissions is not only a social and ethical imperative, but also key to the financial health of the institution.

As central as access, inclusion and equity are to the mission of higher education, for too long, those values seemed to be largely confined to undergraduate programs. And the preoccupation with selectivity and competition in graduate education may help to explain why.

As Bridget Burns of the University Innovation Alliance has written: "Too many institutions, in focusing on competition, rankings and prestige, have given short shrift to their role in growing the middle class and helping less advantaged Americans move up."

While rethinking our approach to enrollment and breaking free of our fixation on competition is in some ways a scary proposition, it is also paramount to creating a more equitable and sustainable system of graduate education.