ABSTRACT
Honors administrators and campus enrollment management leadership might seem to be in conflict: One must deliver promises of transformational academic experiences for the school’s best students, and the other is charged with filling classrooms and residence halls with paying customers. Honors deans often exchange quick anecdotes about an uncomfortable conversation with their institution’s enrollment leaders, often focused on (1) the current size of the honors college and (2) how changing a specific honors enrollment goal could help support larger institutional goals. Honors college leaders at public research universities face the difficult balancing act of trying to achieve the “small college, intellectual experience” while keeping an upper administration focused on increasing undergraduate populations and satisfying them. To add to these institutional concerns, one cannot escape the term “enrollment cliff” when discussing higher education and student enrollment today. Although changes in US population demographics have seemed to do more harm to non-research universities in the past several years, the bulk of the “enrollment cliff” that Nathan Grawe detailed in Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education is expected to start during the second half of the 2020s. The demographic changes, along with higher education policy changes on the federal and state levels, cannot be ignored.
