One of the program coordinators that I spoke with recently expressed her concerns that a funded degree program was moving forward with multiple course developments and new hires, but the program itself was not bringing in sufficient learners. She was using all the data channels to market the courses. The professors were using their connections to try to bring in learners. However, the enrollments for the existing courses were low, and it was unclear whether even those students might commit to the program for a full degree.

Over the years, I’ve seen how the numbers can be surprising. After all, there was a professor who was a member (and leader) of a major professional organization. She felt that she could bring many learners on board, but her course was only taught a term or two before it got pulled by her administrator. Another course garnered lots of national-level publicity, but the learners in that course were still those who were already recruits on the campus and were taking on-campus courses. People do often conflate renown and recruitment, and I’m learning that those are not necessarily so.

The Challenges of Capturing Enrollments

The challenge isn’t only for that particular degree program. Sometimes only a handful of learners register for a new online course. The general approach is to give the course time to bring in more learners and to build a reputation, but sometimes, additional time does not really make a lot of difference.

There really are limited pools (natural limits) of learners who want to spend their tuition dollars on practical degrees that can lead to jobs when they graduate. The financing of higher education is limited. Students have to maintain particular grades in order to keep their grants and scholarships.

Monetizing the Degree for Learners

I’m guessing that what would be helpful would be to monetize the degree—by having clear throughput of learning-to-a-job. Having companies help in terms of learner recruitment is helpful. Having military students—who are a somewhat sure stream—may also be helpful (although that environment seems quite competitive). Another channel is to tap professionals in a field who need to be credentialed. This may also be another fairly sure stream.

If an administrator decides by fiat that a course is required, that guarantees streams of learners.

However, in most cases, there is a lot of competition to fight for students. Sometimes, that means that there is no return funding stream to justify the funded development of the original course. Curriculums are created, and then courses may run a term or two and then go silent. Adjunct instructors stop their commitment to the degree program.

These issues are in the purviews of administrators, but the concerns do affect instructional designers—whose quality of projects sometimes depend on proper funding…and then feedback from learners who use the curriculums. If anything, it just helps to make sure that one is not going in with outsized expectations of the course enrollments. And it helps to put in the heavy lifting to capture learner attention. And finally, it helps to try to benefit learners all during the learning and once they graduate, so they can be competitive and satisfied in their chosen career fields.