Major Innovation(s): Testing Student Interest & Market Impact in Curricular Design

THE CHALLENGE:

Adam Weinberg, Denison’s President, wanted to create new majors that were more career-responsive and professionally oriented, but that were housed within the scope of the liberal arts. He encouraged faculty to develop ideas for such majors. Twenty suggestions were put forward, and two were approved by near-unanimous faculty vote: Global Commerce and Data Analytics. Each of the proposed majors had three substantively different formulations, and determining which formulation might have the greatest impact on enrollment was imperative to our research agenda.

OUR SOLUTION:

Using our proprietary Simulated Decision Modeling methodology, we tested each of the three major formulations for the two prospective majors in the prospective student market. In general, our partnerships with numerous institutions have shown that the simple addition of academic programs does not tend to have a significant effect on the competitive position of an institution. However, in this particular case, we believed that specialized programs, arrayed and executed in specific ways, could speak powerfully to the changing nature of what students expected from the Denison experience. By engaging faculty stakeholders and others, we were able to articulate the formulation options for each major that combined Denison’s strengths in the liberal arts with the burgeoning appeal of industry-aligned data literacy. In our research, we observed impact on student interest across a range of academic divisions.

In each case, only one of the three formulations tested had a major impact on yield; critically, the others had a negative impact, or none at all. The winning formulations were immediately implemented, with results that precisely matched the predictions of the research. Denison’s applications more than doubled between 2016, when the new majors were introduced, and 2024—ultimately, dropping the acceptance rate to below 20% and making Denison one of the most selective private colleges in the country. During the same time, net tuition revenue increased more than 30%; while on campus, the number of students taking humanities and liberal arts courses increased dramatically—an organic interest stimulated by the new programs’ essential links to complex cultural questions and issues.

Denison’s introduction of Data Analytics marked the first such program among liberal arts colleges, distinguishing its career-focused education and strengthening its competitive position. Denison’s culture of innovation has continued with more majors and programs that blend career preparation with a liberal arts foundation. The university has also expanded its commitment to data literacy, recently breaking ground on a pioneering center for data sciences and AI integration, another first of its kind in the liberal art.

Denison recently partnered with Art & Science to conduct an additional study on persistence from the first year through to graduation.