When I began exercising with a trainer over a decade ago, the trainer asked me what my goals for improved health were. I explained to her that I was at the high end of my historical weight and wanted to lose at least 15 lbs. She replied that this would be fairly easy to achieve. All I had to do was cut my food intake by one-third, eliminate bread and all sugary foods, only eat between the hours of 8 am and 8 pm, and exercise at a gym at least three times a week.
“Wow, that’s so simple,” I replied sarcastically. As anyone who has tried to lose weight will tell you, losing weight and maintaining weight loss involves a variety of behavioral and lifestyle changes. Sustaining that lower level of weight is anything but simple.
The same can be said about sustaining and growing day school enrollment. There is really no single tool, initiative or intervention that can be employed to successfully and sustainably grow a school’s enrollment. There are, in fact, a rather wide variety of factors and variables that are likely to impact student enrollment and retention. While the price of tuition is often one of these variables, parents weigh many other considerations when making enrollment decisions for their child in a Jewish day school. These may include perceptions of academic excellence, school leadership, class sizes, the socio-religious composition of students and families, and school location. The interplay of tuition pricing with these myriad other variables is what we term the value proposition. The key to increased student enrollment is improvement in a school’s value proposition.
Back in the early 2000s, many Jewish day schools with declining enrollments believed that they could increase and sustain their student populations simply by lowering tuition for some or all their students. They erroneously believed that lowering their tuition prices was a cure-all for the enrollment challenges they were facing. Most of these day schools were disappointed and perplexed when tuition reductions failed to lead to material growth in student enrollment or retention.
With improvements in data collection and analysis, the day school field has come to understand that it is the interplay between tuition price and school excellence (or perceptions of excellence) that drives improvements in value perception among existing and potential parents. Simply put, efforts to use a lower tuition price will not succeed in sustainably raising enrollment numbers unless a school’s academic reputation is already strong or poised for improvement.
There is abundant evidence to support this assertion. For starters, nearly every successful community-based affordability initiative contains funding for school excellence. These include well-established affordability initiatives in Montreal, Toronto and Greater Metrowest, New Jersey. These also include newer community-based efforts currently underway in Chicago, Seattle and Atlanta.
All three of these latter communities mandate that schools use some of the funding provided to them for affordability to reinvest in school programs that build on school excellence. These might include investments in STEM or STEAM labs, funding for arts or theater programs, or hiring of additional teachers or other staff. Each of the three communities noted above has reported gains in both new student enrollment and student retention, to varying degrees.
The same can be said for individual school efforts as well. New tuition models at Toronto’s Tannenbaum CHAT High School and San Diego Jewish Academy were all preceded or accompanied by significant investments in school excellence. Both schools have seen meaningful increases in enrollment since the inception of these programs. So has Los Angeles’s Pressman Academy, thanks to a recently introduced tuition discount program for the children of Jewish communal professionals.
The picture in the Orthodox world is a bit more nuanced. Because day school enrollment among Orthodox families is already high, lowering tuition prices doesn’t always result in enrollment growth. One prominent Orthodox school in the Southeast introduced a middle- income cap program several years ago in an effort to spur enrollment. The effort failed to achieve its objective and was discontinued a year or two after its introduction. At the same time, low-cost, blended-learning schools that serve the Orthodox community appear to be successfully growing their enrollments. Yeshivat He’atid, in Bergen County, New Jersey, has seen a rapid increase in its enrollment since it opened in 2012; over 600 students now attend the school, with forecasts for continued growth.
Based on all the evidence we’ve seen, affordability is clearly an important factor impacting enrollment growth. It simply isn’t the only factor. Schools with stable professional leadership tend to exhibit stronger enrollment trends than schools without this leadership stability. Schools that respond to parental concerns with timeliness and sensitivity tend to exhibit stronger enrollment trends than schools that do not. Schools that offer a vision of Judaism and Jewishness that aligns with the lifestyles of its families are more likely to exhibit stronger enrollment trends than ones that do not.
As with weight loss programs, efforts to increase enrollment require much more than quick fixes, such as tuition reduction or a great advertisement campaign. In the long run, a whole-of-school approach that aims to strengthen educational excellence and leadership alongside tuition initiatives stands the best chance of recruiting and retaining students and their families.
