On March 7, University Marketing and Communication announced a partnership with Carnegie Higher Education to redefine SRU’s branding strategy.
The project seeks to analyze SRU’s standing in the collegiate marketplace and reorient its branding strategy by the fall semester.
“Working with Carnegie Higher Education, we are conducting an important market research and consensus-building project to clarify and define ‘who we are’ as we plan to grow enrollment, awareness and the reputation of SRU,” a March 7 Campus Bulletin update said.
This move reflects a larger effort to continue bolstering SRU’s enrollment mentioned by President Karen Riley during the first spring 2025 Town Hall.
“We’ve never had the kind of synergy that we have right now between marketing communication and admissions,” the president said. “We have to be more savvy because we know the enrollment cliff is coming our way.”
The move to redefine SRU’s branding aligns with nationwide preparation ahead of the looming “enrollment cliff.”
The “enrollment cliff” mentioned by Riley refers to the declining college attendance due a stagnating American population and declining pool of high school graduates.
What to expect
Carnegie Higher Education is an enrollment marketing and strategy firm based in Westford, Massachusetts. Part of their mission statement reads, “We connect colleges with students through the power of human connection by measuring and then marketing to a student’s unique behaviors and motivators.”
The timeline of the assessment began in February of this year and runs through September. The delivery framework is split into five categories of brand research, brand strategy, creative concept, marketing analyses and web strategy for final implementation.
Since the announcement, SRU has hosted workshops and administered surveys to the SRU community throughout March. Personality and messaging workshops focused on one overarching question: “Who is Slippery Rock University at its best?”
The final creative concept will include a culmination of brand research, marketing analysis and web strategy research set to wrap up by June. The brand creative concept will begin in July and run through September, when findings are expected to be implemented. The overarching theme for the new branding will focus on “storytelling” and “human connection,” according to Carnegie.
The “enrollment cliff”
Enrollment in United States universities is set to peak in 2025 at 3.9 million, slowly declining to an estimated 13% decrease by 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission of Higher Education.
According to National Center for Education Statistics, college enrollment has decreased at an average of 1.4%, each year since 2012 after peaking at 68.1% in 2010, with the exception of a short resurgence after a pandemic-era plummet. Prior to 2010, enrollment increased 2.2% per year since 1985, according to the same data.
In addition to the shrinking pool of high school graduates, young Americans are also choosing to skip college altogether, especially following the COVID-10 pandemic. In fact, 40% of all enrollment losses occurred during the pandemic, with 2025 being the first year showing enrollment surpassing pre-pandemic levels.
Considering these trends, SRU, and all universities, will be competing for an ever-shrinking market share of incoming students, forcing a reliance on attracting international and non-traditional students.
Although national trends show an overall decrease in enrollment, SRU appears to be thriving at the moment.
Both undergraduate and graduate persistence is up 2.1% and 2.2% respectively compared to spring of 2024. The total number of students increased 2.1% or 166, totaling 7,961. The 2022 junior cohort is up 1.9%, 2023 sophomore up 2.5%, and 2024 freshman up 1.5% compared to spring of 2024. This is a continuation of fall 2024 which saw an all-time record for the twenty years of modern record keeping.
Although universities are seeing a rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, as did birth rates, with new waves of immigration crackdowns and scrutiny of international students from the Trump administration, questions remain as to if or how numbers will rebound.
This is especially true considering immigration trends in the United States. According to the Pew Research Center, 82% of population increase in the United States is due to immigration or births from immigrants. By 2050, it is expected that recent immigrants and their descendants will make up 36% percent of the population, up from around one quarter today.
Trump’s policies are in stark contrast to countries aging almost twice as fast as the United States, like Spain and Japan, which are championing international student visas to combat their enrollment and population declines.
Nathan Grawe, Carleton economics professor and author of “Demographics and Demand for Higher Education,” was one of the first academics to analyze the future impact of the “enrollment cliff.”
“If we choose to continue as if it’s just business as usual, I don’t know how colleges could expect to not see major enrollment declines,” Nathan Grawe told Insider Higher Education in a December 2024 interview.
“The good thing about higher education is we have an enormous lead time to try doing things differently—it’s not as if birth rates dropped 17 percent in one year. We just have to choose to put ourselves on a new path.”
