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How to Reverse Declining Enrollment at Your School
Five steps to help private, independent, and faith-based schools understand enrollment challenges and develop a strategy for sustainable growth.
One of the most difficult challenges a private, independent, or faith-based school can face is declining enrollment, especially when the decline continues for several consecutive years.
I often receive phone calls and emails from school heads about their declining enrollment. Over the years, I have partnered with many schools in this situation and have helped them turnaround their decline.
I’ve seen it all from ineffective leadership, abrupt head of school firings, changing demographics, unwillingness to adapt over the years, retention issues, team members in the wrong seats, no enrollment marketing plan, and much more.
At some point, the financial implications become difficult to ignore. Revenue declines, expenses continue to increase, and school leaders face difficult decisions about staffing, programs, and budgets.
The board wants to know what can be done to reverse the trend. The Head of School feels the pressure to produce results, and the admissions and marketing team is working hard to recruit more students.
When this happens, the natural response is often to increase marketing efforts. Schools may invest more money in digital advertising, redesign their website, schedule additional open houses, or launch new recruitment campaigns.
While these strategies may be helpful, I believe schools need to be careful about jumping to solutions before they fully understand the problem.
Before you can grow enrollment, you may need to stop the decline. And before you can stop the decline, you need to understand what’s causing it.
Over the years, I’ve worked with hundreds of private, independent, and faith-based schools, including schools experiencing significant enrollment challenges. One thing I’ve learned is that declining enrollment rarely has a single cause. More often, several factors are contributing to the problem, and the reasons aren’t always what school leaders initially assume.
That’s why I encourage schools to take a thoughtful, research-based approach to enrollment turnaround.
Here are five steps I recommend.
1. Understand What’s Happening with Your Enrollment
The first step is to take a close look at your enrollment data.
This may sound obvious, but I’m often surprised by how many schools focus primarily on their total enrollment number without fully examining what’s happening beneath the surface.
Start by reviewing at least three to five years of enrollment history. Look at enrollment by grade level, the number of new students entering each year, the number of students returning, and the number of students withdrawing.
I also encourage schools to examine their enrollment trends at key transition points, such as preschool to kindergarten, elementary to middle school, and middle school to high school.
For example, a school may discover that enrollment is relatively stable in the elementary grades but consistently declines when students reach middle school. Another school may find that retention is strong, but the number of new families entering kindergarten has steadily decreased.
These are two very different problems, and they require different strategies.
It’s also important to understand how graduating classes affect overall enrollment. A school graduating 45 seniors but enrolling only 25 kindergarten students begins the next year with a significant gap to fill, even if retention in every other grade remains strong.
I like to help school leaders separate enrollment into its major components: new student enrollment and returning student retention. When you examine these numbers individually, you begin to see where the greatest challenges exist.
The goal of this first step isn’t simply to confirm that enrollment is declining. It’s to understand how and where the decline is happening.
2. Listen to Your Families and Understand Your Market
Enrollment data tells you what’s happening, but it doesn’t always explain why.
That’s where research becomes so important.
When I work with schools, one of the first things I want to understand is how current parents perceive their experience and what influences their decisions to enroll and remain at the school.
I often use parent satisfaction and marketing surveys, along with focus groups and conversations with school leaders, to better understand the experiences and expectations of families as well as discussing the issues causing the enrollment decline.
What do parents value most about the school? Where are they satisfied, and where do they believe improvements are needed? What concerns might cause them to consider another educational option?
It’s also important to learn from families who recently enrolled. Why did they choose your school? What other schools did they consider? Which factors had the greatest influence on their decision?
And when possible, I encourage schools to gather feedback from families who have left.
I recognize that these conversations aren’t always easy. However, they can reveal important information that school leaders may not otherwise hear.
Sometimes the issue involves tuition affordability. In other situations, families may have concerns about academic programs, communication, school culture, student experience, or the value they believe they’re receiving for their investment.
We also need to look beyond the school itself.
Has the surrounding community changed? Are there fewer school-age children living nearby? Have family demographics shifted? Has a competing school expanded its programs or strengthened its position in the market?
I believe it’s especially important for independent, private, and faith-based schools to recognize that the families they are trying to reach today may not be the same as those they successfully recruited ten or fifteen years ago.
A school can have a strong mission, dedicated teachers, and a wonderful history while still needing to rethink how it communicates its value to today’s parents.
The most effective enrollment strategies are built on an accurate understanding of families and the market, not assumptions about what parents want.
3. Identify Where Your Admissions Process Is Breaking Down
Once you understand your enrollment trends and what families are telling you, the next step is to evaluate your admissions process.
I often describe enrollment as a journey that begins when a prospective family first becomes aware of your school and continues through inquiry, campus visit, application, acceptance, enrollment, and ultimately retention.
At each phase, families make decisions about whether to move forward.
The question is whether your school is successfully helping them take the next step.
Consider a school that generates a healthy number of inquiries but struggles to convert those inquiries into campus visits. That school may need to improve its admissions follow-up process, communication, or approach to scheduling visits.
Another school may attract plenty of families to campus but see relatively few applications. In that situation, I would want to understand what families are experiencing during their visits, how the school’s value is being communicated, and whether concerns are going unanswered.
A third school may be doing a good job recruiting new students but losing too many current families each year.
In that case, increasing advertising may produce more inquiries, but it won’t necessarily solve the underlying enrollment problem.
This is why I believe schools need to pay close attention to both recruitment and retention.
Let’s say your school enrolls 40 new students for the coming year but loses 45 students who otherwise could have returned. You’ve worked hard to recruit those new families, yet you’re still five students behind before accounting for graduation.
That is a difficult way to build enrollment.
I encourage schools to track the number of inquiries, campus visits, applications, acceptances, and enrollments, along with the conversion rates between each stage. Just as importantly, schools should monitor retention by grade level and understand the reasons families choose not to return.
When you examine the entire enrollment process, you can begin identifying where improvements will make the greatest difference.
Not every school needs more inquiries. Some schools need to do a better job converting the inquiries they already have, while others need to focus on keeping the families they’ve worked so hard to enroll.
4. Develop a Focused Plan to Stop the Decline
After completing the assessment, it’s time to develop a plan.
This is where I encourage school leaders to resist the temptation to do everything at once.
When enrollment is declining, it’s understandable to feel that every problem needs immediate attention. However, launching too many initiatives can overwhelm the admissions and marketing team, stretch limited resources, and make it difficult to determine what’s actually working.
Instead, I believe schools should identify the few strategies most likely to address the causes of their enrollment decline.
For one school, that may mean strengthening parent satisfaction and retention, particularly at a key transition grade.
For another, it may mean improving the admissions process so more prospective families move from inquiry to campus visit and ultimately enrollment.
For another, the priority may be strengthening the school’s positioning and marketing message so prospective parents better understand what makes the school distinctive and why it’s worth the investment.
In some cases, a school may need to increase awareness and generate more qualified inquiries through digital marketing, word of mouth campaigns, community partnerships, and other recruitment initiatives.
The right priorities depend on what the research reveals.
This is also where realistic enrollment goals become important.
If a school has experienced declining enrollment for five consecutive years, I would be cautious about developing a plan that assumes a dramatic increase in enrollment the following year.
This is where it is easy to put together a spreadsheet that shows growth. However, this is too aggressive and inflated. Last year, I worked with a school in which a board member took this approach. I cautioned him that this was not achievable in year one.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue growth. It means we need to establish goals that are both ambitious and realistic.
Sometimes the first significant achievement is simply stopping the decline.
Think about what that would mean for a school that has lost 20 or 30 students or more annually for several years. Stabilizing enrollment would represent an important change in direction and provide a stronger foundation for future growth.
Of course, enrollment stabilization doesn’t automatically resolve every financial challenge. Schools still need to examine their budgets, staffing, tuition, and overall financial model.
But from an enrollment perspective, stopping the decline is often the first step toward rebuilding momentum.
I would much rather help a school develop a realistic plan it can successfully implement than an impressive-looking plan that never produces meaningful change.
5. Implement the Plan, Measure Progress, and Build Toward Growth
One of the things I’ve learned in my consulting work is that developing a strategic enrollment marketing plan is only part of the process.
The real challenge is implementation.
I’ve seen schools invest considerable time and resources in strategic planning, only to struggle with putting their recommendations into practice.
That’s why I believe a successful enrollment turnaround requires more than a report or a list of marketing ideas.
School leaders need a clear understanding of what must be accomplished, who is responsible, when each initiative will be implemented, and how progress will be measured.
For example, if improving inquiry conversion is a priority, the admissions team should establish specific goals and monitor whether more inquiries are resulting in campus visits and applications.
If retention is a concern, leadership should develop strategies for strengthening the parent experience, addressing areas of dissatisfaction, and identifying families who may be considering other options.
If the school needs more qualified inquiries, the marketing plan should include measurable goals for generating prospective-family interest and evaluating which activities are producing results.
I also believe regular accountability is essential.
Rather than waiting until the end of the recruiting season to evaluate results, school leaders should review enrollment indicators throughout the year. That allows them to recognize progress, identify concerns, and make adjustments before valuable time is lost.
This is an important part of how I approach my work with schools.
My goal isn’t simply to conduct an assessment and deliver a strategic enrollment and marketing plan. I want to help school leaders understand their challenges, establish the right priorities, and implement strategies that strengthen enrollment over time.
That often means working alongside the Head of School and admissions and marketing team as they put the plan into action.
Enrollment improvement rarely happens because of one new initiative. More often, it comes from consistently doing the right things, measuring the results, and making thoughtful adjustments along the way.
Don’t Wait Until Enrollment Becomes a Crisis
One final point I want to emphasize is the importance of addressing enrollment concerns early.
If your school has experienced one year of declining enrollment, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re facing a long-term problem. There may be circumstances that explain the change.
But if enrollment has declined for two or three consecutive years, I would encourage you to investigate the reasons rather than assume things will eventually improve.
And if your school has experienced five or more years of decline, I believe it’s time for a comprehensive assessment and a focused turnaround strategy.
Waiting another year can make the situation more difficult, particularly when declining enrollment begins affecting staffing, programs, and the overall experience families receive.
The encouraging reality is that enrollment trends can change. But meaningful improvement requires school leaders to understand what’s happening, make informed decisions, and remain committed to implementing the right strategies.
Where Should Your School Begin?
If your school is experiencing declining enrollment, I would encourage you to begin with a few important questions.
Do you know exactly where you’re losing students? Do you understand why families are leaving and why prospective families aren’t enrolling? Have you evaluated your admissions process and your retention trends? And do you have a focused plan with clear priorities and measurable goals?
If you can’t confidently answer these questions, I would start there before investing more money in marketing or launching another recruitment initiative.
Throughout my years of working with independent, private, and faith-based schools, I’ve found that school leaders often have a good sense that something needs to change. What they need is an objective assessment to help them understand the underlying challenges and determine the best path forward.
That’s the work I enjoy most.
Through Enrollment Catalyst, I partner with schools to assess their enrollment and marketing efforts, listen to families, identify opportunities for improvement, and develop practical strategies for recruitment and retention. I also provide ongoing coaching to help leadership teams implement their plans and measure progress.
If your school is experiencing declining enrollment and you’re uncertain where to begin, I’d welcome the opportunity to have a conversation.
Because before you can grow enrollment, you may need to stop the decline. And understanding why it’s happening is where the turnaround begins.
For another perspective on this topic, listen to my conversation with Andy Lynch on The Enrollment Marketing Geeks Podcast: Our Enrollment Is Declining. How Do We Turn It Around?.
