Deans and Graduate Program Directors from all three campuses met Nov. 29 at the Alex and Jeri Vereschagin Alumni House to lay the foundation for a shared understanding of graduate program enrollment trends, tuition revenue and institutional support, as well as current marketing and recruitment efforts.

The summit was a first step toward an effort to broadly share data collected by the Graduate School on Pacific's graduate program portfolio, leading to a better understanding of the state of our graduate programs as we consider graduate program models and tuition price points relative to market conditions. 

While overall enrollment in Pacific's graduate programs has increased by almost 25% since 2013, much of this growth is attributed to the launch of new graduate programs. At the same time, enrollment in several established programs has been flat or declining. Marketing and recruitment efforts underway to address lower-than-expected enrollments and best practices in the area of new student recruitment were discussed at the summit. The Graduate School provided an overview of its recruitment efforts and discussed the use of Pacific's Customer Relationship Management platform (TargetX) for effective graduate student recruitment.  

One of the anticipated outcomes of the summit was to take a detailed look at our graduate programs' tuition price point relative to our peers, aspirant peers and regional—and in some cases national—competitors. Of course, the revenue generated by these programs has positive implications for Pacific. Based on the data discussed during the summit, the provost has asked all graduate program directors to propose future graduate tuition price structures for their respective programs. Any changes will go into effect for the 2019–20 academic year.  

More conversations will be held as data collection progresses to keep Pacific's community informed about continuing efforts to create a strong and sustainable graduate program portfolio.