Page 21 - BusinessWest February 6, 2023

It’s Not Simply Academic
Amid Enrollment Challenges, Colleges Stress Culture, Support
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
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“The return- on-investment case has been made over and over again. The economics have been quite clear for a long time: people with a college degree earn over a million dollars more over their lifetime than those who don’t have one.”
With high-school graduation num- bers down in the U.S. and college enrollments following suit, Hubert Benitez says higher-education institutions must take a multi-pronged approach to enrollment management and their “overarch- ing value proposition.”
“The academic portfolio of all our institu- tions across the region are very strong. So the students have options: wherever they will go, they will receive a sound education,” said Benitez, who began his tenure as president of American International College (AIC) last spring. “So, having said that, what truly dif- ferentiates one college from another?”
To answer that question, he pointed to a report called “AIC Reimagined 2022-2027,” which considers how to rethink strategies in six different pillars, including academ- ics; student life, engagement, and support; fiscal growth; internal and external com- munity engagement and development; diver- sity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and athletics.
Take the first pillar, academics. “We real- ized, post-pandemic, that we have to reimag- ine our academic enterprise and what the
collegiate experience is all about,” Benitez told BusinessWest. “We have to rethink how we offer education. Students learn differ- ently, and they want to attend college in a dif- ferent way. We have a lot of non-traditional students coming back to education, people who, post-pandemic, want to retool them- selves for a career change — adult learners, students who have family commitments.
If we are to address their needs, we really have to rethink how we offer our academic portfolio.”
Colleges and universities everywhere are having similar conversations about how to attract, and then shepherd to graduation, a smaller pool of potential college students than in past decades, due largely to changing demographics.
According to the National Student Clear- inghouse Research Center, undergraduate enrollment at U.S. colleges fell by 1.1%
in fall 2022 compared to 2021, a pace of decline that’s nearly returned to pre-pandem- ic rates. In between was a year, 2020, when enrollment dropped 3.4%, followed by 2.1% in 2021. The net effect of those years is an enrollment total that’s down close to 7%
Hubert Benitez says AIC strives to create a sense of belonging for students.
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