Sharpening Strategic Focus to Propel Research Aspirations

THE CHALLENGE:

In 2022, with a newly installed president and a dynamic new leadership team in place, Wake Forest University felt it had an important opportunity to take stock of its core distinctions and assets and refocus its institutional strategy in ways that would help propel academic excellence and national reputation over the next decade. University leaders sought to answer two important questions. First, how might Wake Forest evolve more fully into one of America’s great research universities while building on its core distinctions as an undergraduate teaching institution committed to living out its pro humanitate motto? And second, could the University further this mission by restructuring financial aid to make the Wake Forest experience more accessible to a wider range of students, including middle and lower-income families.

OUR SOLUTION:

Drawing on our long experience with Wake Forest, we were able to bring deep institutional understanding as well as critical market-driven guidance, the latter based primarily on quantitative survey research with WFU prospective students. Results confirmed the strength of Wake’s position among prospective students (as well as thought leaders in and adjacent to higher education) and offered important insights into the market thresholds Wake most needed to meet to increase its appeal to prospective students. Results of our Simulated Decision Modeling identified substantive programmatic and financial aid-specific strategies the University could employ to address these thresholds and evolve the student experience in ways authentic to its values and aspirations.

Based on findings from the research it became clear that Wake Forest could frame the student experience explicitly around a re-energized pro humanitate motto that provided a foundation for its research enterprise. In practice, this meant taking substantive steps to ensure that undergraduate teaching and research actively reinforce one another, expand leadership- and character-based programming across the curriculum, and recalibrate financial aid policies to better support middle- and lower-income families while strengthening demand. 

Despite the fact that these changes were implemented during one of the most volatile periods in recent higher education history—marked by sweeping revisions to U.S. News & World Report ranking methodologies, the end of race-conscious admissions, and intensified public scrutiny of higher education’s cost and value—Wake Forest strengthened its position in the market. Its applications for undergraduate admission increased and the University enrolled its largest and most selective class to date. The entering class included record numbers of first-generation college students, and Pell recipients. Socioeconomic diversity also increased,—an explicit institutional objective.

At a moment when many institutions were reacting defensively to external pressures, Wake Forest demonstrated it could strengthen its research trajectory, enhance competitiveness, and expand access simultaneously—aligning mission, market position, and financial sustainability in a cohesive and forward-looking strategy.