Enrollment Logics and Discourse: Toward Professionalizing Higher Education Enrollment Management

Abstract

Enrollment management is an organizational phenomenon that emerged in the mid-1970s and has since developed into a pervasive structure and practice at colleges and universities. The purpose of this study is to identify and trace the development of the underlying organizing principles (enrollment logics) that institutionalize enrollment management practices and professionalize the chief enrollment manager position. This study focuses on how discourses among members of a prominent professional association establish, diffuse, and sustain knowledge that promotes certain expertise, assumptions, beliefs, and shared understandings of enrollment management. This is qualitative study that uses first-person accounts of 18 chief enrollment managers, authoethnographic reflections, and historical texts to reveal the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive elements (symbols, relations, routines, and artifacts) that signify enrollment management as an institutionalized and professionalized phenomenon. Crystallization is used as the analytical approach for discourse analysis. Institutional Theory and Structuration Theory form the theoretical and analytical frameworks for this study. Study results suggest that enrollment management is an institutionalized organizational field and an emerging profession.