Ithaca College and many colleges and universities across the U.S. are amid a higher education enrollment cliff. However, while undergraduate enrollment is down at the college — outpacing the national dip — graduate enrollment is growing despite a national decline.

According to a report by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the consensus view about the enrollment cliff was that the nation would peak at approximately 3.5 million high school graduates around 2025. This would cause the college-age population to shrink by as much as 15% over the following five to 10 years.

Enrollment patterns at graduate and undergraduate levels

Excluding The School of Health Sciences and Human Performance, graduate programs at the college have low enrollment. Graduate programs in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the School of Business have 22 students each and the continued education program has three students, according to the Office of Analytics and Institutional Research.

Margaret Shackell, associate professor and director in the Department of Accounting and Business Law of Graduate Business programs, said she has seen a steady fall in students from when she started the Masters Program for Accounting, going from 35 to 7. Shackell made it clear that this decline is not exclusive to the college.

“This is a national trend, so it’s nothing about Ithaca College,” Shackell said. “We are certainly concerned here, but students [in general] aren’t majoring in accounting.”

Suzanne Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, oversees the only U.S. organization that exclusively focuses on the development and research of advanced degrees. Ortega said the national decline in graduate students can be attributed to the job market.

“Traditionally, graduate enrollment has been counter-cyclical to the economy,” Ortega said. “If there are good jobs, then enrollments are lower. If there aren’t jobs, people return to school, either trying to anticipate an upturn or because getting additional education positions them for whatever comes after the current lull in employment.”

The National Center for Education Statistics is the primary federal entity for collection and analysis of education data. According to its 2023 findings, higher education enrollment has decreased nationally at a rate of 1.5% each year since 2011, with enrollment reaching its lowest point since 2006 in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 15.4 million students enrolled in undergraduate programs in the U.S.

College’s recruitment strategy

Graduate students make up 11.69% of the school’s student population, but excluding The School of HS&HP students, graduate students make up only approximately 1%.

To address low enrollment in both graduate and undergraduate programs, the college has modernized its marketing strategies by focusing on social media and online advertisements.

Mark Eyerly, vice president for marketing and communications, said the college’s new focus on recruiting students through social media and online advertisements represents a departure from theme-driven campaigns. The school entered its sixth year of the ‘Ithaca Forever’ campaign in Fall 2024, which began in Fall 2019 and replaced the ‘Imagining Ithaca’ campaign, which began in Fall 2018.

“[Themes] don’t necessarily generate good content for social media, which needs to be current and in the moment,” Eyerly said. “The strategic change we’re undertaking is to put more emphasis on storytelling. Instead of seeing campaigns, we’re going to try to tell stories that people want to be a part of and do that in an ongoing, continuous way.”

Lisa Searle, associate director of visit coordination and operations in the Office of Admissions, has been working to boost engagement with the school from prospective students and families through visits to campus, as well as virtual programming.

Searle said this engagement dives deeper than using mainstream social media platforms by using programs like Naviance and Sage Scholars, which are specifically tailored to prospective college students.

“We are trying to be in the spaces that students are in,” Searle said. “That’s not just Instagram and Tiktok. We’re also trying to be in the spaces where a college student may be using a platform to search and learn more about colleges.”

In November 2023, the college partnered with ZeeMee, a social networking app designed for students applying to colleges and universities. The app enables prospective college students to connect with each other and gives the school another platform to push information.

Graduate enrollment at the college increased by 3.3% between Fall 2021 and Fall 2022 despite a 4.7% decline in graduate enrollment in 2022 nationally. Total enrollment at the college has been falling for several years, with 6,517 students enrolled in Fall 2018 and 4,767 in Fall 2024, a 27% decrease according to the Office of AIR.

The Class of 2024, which enrolled in 2021, had approximately 700 graduates in May, according to an October 2023 report. The school’s target enrollment for Fall 2024 was 1,380 to 1,420, roughly twice the size of the 2024 graduating class.

Shackell said the school needs to reach prospective students early to boost enrollment in graduate programs and emphasized the importance of students gaining practical experience through internships.

“First of all is reaching out to high school students, getting in front of them early before they decide their major,” Shackell said. “Another strategy is changing how we teach the accounting intro classes. … So, trying to change it up and make it more interesting and relevant. [Lastly,] working with companies in the industry [and getting] students to job shadow or intern.”

Plans to increase enrollment

Eyerly said that each year, the school purchases the names and demographic data of approximately 200,000 high school students, primarily from the College Board’s Student Search Service, which gathers this data through administering the PSAT, SAT and AP exams. Ithaca College also purchases student information from Naviance and Sage Scholars.

The College Board’s Student Search Service is voluntary for students. Students can choose to opt in and agree to receive communications from colleges and universities when they take exams administered by the College Board.

Nicole Eversley Bradwell, executive director of admission, said the school reaches out to the purchased names of high school and middle school students to get them thinking about enrolling at the college early.

Because higher education enrollment is down nationally, the pool of prospective students has shrunk. Eversley Bradwell said the college is not intending to boost enrollment back to pre-pandemic levels, but instead stabilize enrollment by focusing on student retention.

“The plan is not to grow back to over 6,000 students,” Eversley Bradwell said. “The plan is to be a little bigger than we are now and sustain that.”

Eversley Bradwell said the college is accepting both students with or without an undergraduate degree from Ithaca College into the Physical Therapy Doctorate level portion. She said students would have to apply to be accepted into the program.

Eyerly said the school is making efforts to determine an ideal and sustainable student population and emphasized the importance of finding the right balance of undergraduate to graduate students.

Rakin “Rock” Hall, vice president of enrollment management, said the college’s graduate program is underutilized. To attract more graduate students, the college needs to make its programs more flexible and more widely known.

“We know that we can’t ask someone to stop their life and come back to Ithaca,” Hall said. “With the hybrid option, [we could] create some online platforms where students could work asynchronously three-fourths of the time, and they come in person for a week-long, or two week-long intensive in-person.”

Beyond adjusting student outreach strategies and modernizing degree programs, the school has increased spending on marketing for both undergraduate and graduate programs to accomplish these aims.

“If we get away from emphasizing campaign slogans and get into a steady drip of great stories that [students] want to be a part of, I think that’s going to help,” Eyerly said. “We’re just launching the storytelling part of this, but it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of an effect it has this year.”

Eversley Bradwell said the school hopes to stabilize enrollment by bringing in and graduating approximately 1,200 students each year. The school brought in 1,140 students this year, falling short of its enrollment target by approximately 240 students.

It will take time to see the results of these new strategies, but the team is confident they can begin reversing the steady decline of enrollment.

“It’ll be about a three year process, but this next year I want to see some gains,” Hall said. “I think we have to make a little bit of noise to remind people that we’re here.”