Outdated Playbooks and Hollywood Dinosaurs: Rethinking Enrollment Strategy

By Elizabeth Kirby

Let me start with a confession: I used to think that if we just had the right data, at the right time, we’d be able to fix everything in enrollment management.

More applications? We’d know where they’re coming from. Higher melt? We’d track engagement. Changing student expectations? We’d run a survey. Don’t get me wrong, data matters. I spent years building outreach plans, training recruiters, mapping travel, and analyzing funnel metrics, all rooted in facts.

But here’s the problem: the more data we collected and attempted to act on, the more I realized we were still clinging to old mental images of how enrollment should work, images that no longer matched the reality in front of us.

I was recently reading (okay fine… it was the audiobook version of) The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green when a particular quote stopped me in my tracks:

“Knowing the facts doesn’t help me picture the truth.”

This line appears in Green’s beautiful and haunting collection of essays that rate various aspects of the human-centered world we now live in: the Anthropocene.

Quick pause: What is the Anthropocene?

The Anthropocene is a term used by scientists and philosophers to describe our current geological age, one in which human activity is the dominant force shaping the planet’s climate, ecosystems, and even the terrain itself. In other words, we’ve rewritten nature with our choices, technologies, and myths.

Green explores this concept through deeply personal essays on everything from air-conditioning to the song You’ll Never Walk Alone. The result is a personal, moving, funny, and mind-expanding meditation on what it means to be human right now.

One of those essays includes a reflection on velociraptors, you know, the dinosaur we think we know, thanks to Jurassic Park.

You remember the one: tall, fast, door-opening, nightmare-inducing.

But in reality? The velociraptor was a small, feathered creature about the size of a turkey. It’s not Spielberg’s fault; he was working off the book by Michael Crichton, who took some artistic liberties (and based the creature more closely on the larger Deinonychus). Still, even though science has evolved and we now know what a real velociraptor likely looked like, most of us still picture the Hollywood version.

And that’s Green’s point: even when we know the facts, we often can’t shake the old images. We keep picturing a truth that no longer exists.

That’s exactly what’s happening in enrollment management.

We have the facts:

• Students want personalization and a direct connection to purpose.

• Students are applying to more and more schools with less and less intent.

• They’re deeply concerned about return on investment.

• Alternative paths (bootcamps, community college, certificates) are growing.

• Gen Z isn’t playing by the old rules.

We know all of this. We live it. We’re buried in dashboards, conversion rates, and strategic plans.

And yet, I still hear conversations shaped by an outdated mental image of what the college search should look like. We celebrate record application numbers in board meetings, but privately, we wondered if we have too many applications? We see the data, thousands of applications that are “soft,” showing no real engagement, and we know our teams are too stretched to build relationships with all of them.

This is our first velociraptor: the myth of "record application numbers" as the primary indicator of a strong funnel.

Then there’s the campus visit. We treat it like our ultimate closing tool, the magical moment that seals the deal. But we all have the data. We see students visit, sometimes multiple times, and still enroll elsewhere.

The problem is we’re focused on the visit as a standalone event, not the story it tells. The visit itself isn't the signal; the signal is in the context. Did they apply right after? Did they start researching a specific major you discussed on the tour? Or was it just a stop on a multi-school road trip with no digital footprint before or after?

This is another velociraptor: the belief that the visit is a single, decisive milestone, rather than a key chapter in a student's larger story of engagement. We keep counting visitors instead of reading their stories.

It’s our own enrollment velociraptor, well-meaning, once grounded in our personal reality, but now a little too fictional.

Here’s the hard truth: we don’t just need new or more data. We need new reasoning.

That means:

• Challenging the stories we tell ourselves about students and their needs, behaviors and actions. 

• Designing strategies for the world as it is, not as we wish it were.

• Using the power of AI and other tools to understand students more deeply.

• Being brave enough to let go of what once worked and ask: “What should this look like now?”

This new reasoning means being prepared to start asking different questions. 

I’ve moved from my own hot seat in enrollment management into educational technology, and here’s what I’ve seen: the institutions that are willing to update the playbook, not just tweak the current picture, are the ones making real progress. They’re not layering new tools onto outdated assumptions. They’re redefining how they see students, how they allocate resources, and how they measure success.

However, you’re not alone if you’re still picturing the velociraptor. But we can, and must, start imagining the turkey-sized, feathered reality. Because once we do, things start to make more sense. And we begin to see possibilities, not just problems.

I give the old enrollment playbook two stars.

P.S. If you haven’t you should really read (or listen to) The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green