It’s that time of year again, students and professors are getting settled in to a new semester of college, and administrators are coming up with solutions to help their institution stay ahead of the competitive curve. Standing out among the crowd is a constant struggle for many institutions that are grappling with recent trends – Read more

Attrition is a growing concern among higher education institutions. Students are no longer starting and completing their college education at one institution, and competition is on the rise to keep them engaged.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 33% of first-time college freshmen will not return to the same institution for the following academic year.1 Read more

Post-secondary online academic offerings are certainly not a new concept. The topic has, however, crossed our radar more frequently over the last year than in the past. With college enrollment numbers on the decline, administrators are angling for ways to combat rising costs and garner renewed interest among prospective populations. It’s no secret that the Read more

This blog post provides an updated look on a previous blog post stating how market research can help address higher education enrollment challenges. Institutions are still trudging through slower growth in enrollment than they have experienced in the past. As projected in the previous blog post, the National Center for Education Statistics has again reported Read more

The education industry has faced its fair share of hurtles since the economic downturn. It’s clear that a prosperous economy requires an improved educational system (among other things), but the kinks in the rope have yet to be worked out to figure out exactly how to achieve improvement. Thoughts differ on how to achieve a Read more

In some ways, feasibility studies are like football-you can go wide or deep with the research, but you often cannot do both at the same time. We often find that many clients will have a couple of concepts they would like to test, but also want to know “what else” they can offer. As a Read more

  As budgets become increasingly strained with every passing year, higher education institutions are turning to market research firms to investigate the viability of their current and potential academic programs. Many institutions require feasibility research as part of the program approval process, and for good reason. At RMS, we routinely conduct these studies, and have Read more

One of the most basic and most commonly used types of survey instruments among higher education institutions is the graduate survey. A graduate survey is a quantitative tool that is administered to recent graduates of the college or university to better understand career progression and understand how the college or university met his or her needs. Read more

Over the past few years, there has been a growing concern that high education costs combined with uncertain employment prospects for recent graduates have created a situation where a college degree is no longer worth the cost. The Research Bunker Blog addressed this topic in a post last year about fiscal challenges in higher education. Read more

Over the past year or so, The Research Bunker Blog has been tracking the development of massive online open courses (MOOCs) and their impact on higher education. Much has been written about the ups and downs of the course format during that time, and the future at this point is still very uncertain. In the Read more