Published by Inside Higher Ed
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Rick Hesel, a principal at Art & Science Group, a rival consulting firm to EAB, agreed with EAB that affinity building is important.
“You need to engage students that you admit so that they have a good experience at your institution and feel engaged with faculty, with other students, with staff,” he said. “So that if somebody approaches them, they’ll say, ‘Well, I’m attached to this place. Why would I leave?’”
But Hesel said that the data should be taken with a grain of salt. Without knowing the full sampling, he said, there’s no way to guarantee there wasn’t a preponderance of respondents from colleges with enrollment struggles.
Royall said that the survey sample was diverse in terms of institution size, selectivity and geography. The breakdown of respondents by selectivity, she said, was about even between less selective, selective and most selective institutions. Forty-five percent of respondents were from suburban colleges, 40 percent were from urban colleges and 15 percent were from rural colleges.
Ultimately, Hesel and Smith agreed that right now, nothing is certain.
“Come fall,” Hesel said, “we’ll see what the consequences of all this are.”