By Wendy Kilgore
AACRAO research initiatives document current practices and anticipate future trends, providing actionable recommendations for institutions seeking to enhance learner success while maintaining institutional sustainability.
As higher education continues to navigate the complexities of credit mobility, evolving admissions landscapes, and transformative technologies, AACRAO’s 2025 research initiatives serve as essential guideposts for institutional leaders. The research outlines pathways to more equitable, efficient, learner-centered educational models, from examining the expansion of high school dual enrollment to exploring the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in credit evaluation.
In 2025, AACRAO completed nine projects: one comprehensive benchmarking report on high school dual enrollment and one career-profile survey, four 60-second surveys, two green papers, and one capstone white paper. Each project addresses pressing challenges facing enrollment management and academic services professionals.
This year-in-review article synthesizes key data from the 2025 research initiatives. It highlights noteworthy data points and practice recommendations to inform strategic decision-making at an institution. Complete reports and papers are available on the AACRAO Research webpage and the AACRAO LEARN Commission webpage for those seeking more in-depth analyses.
Comprehensive Reports
High-School Dual Enrollment: Bridging Two Worlds
The comprehensive 2025 report, Bridging Two Worlds: High-School Dual Enrollment Institutional Practices, was jointly conducted by AACRAO and the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships (NACEP), with input from the Community College Research Center (CCRC). The report provides an extensive examination of high school dual-enrollment (HSDE) practices across institutions in the United States. The report builds upon AACRAO’s 2016 dual-enrollment research and represents the most comprehensive analysis of HSDE implementation to date.
Key data include the following.
Program Prevalence: 82 percent of public-school learners attend a high school that offers dual enrollment; 34 percent of high school graduates have taken at least one dual-enrollment college course.
Enrollment Growth: The number of dual-enrollment learners has doubled since 2015 and tripled since 2005; 16 percent of high school learners (nearly 2.5 million) took a dual-enrollment course during the 2022–23 academic year.
Community-College Partnership: 70 percent of dual-enrollment learners are associated with community college partnerships.
Learner-Onboarding Scope: 90 percent of chief admissions officers oversee recruiting and applicant-to-matriculation operations for HSDE learners.
Quality Assurance: Institutions employ various quality-assurance measures, including faculty-credentialing requirements, course-content alignment reviews, and regular program assessments.
Survey data point to several practices for enhancing HSDE programs and opportunities for improvement:
Survey data reveal widespread adoption of quality-assurance practices. Eighty-eight percent of institutions maintain regular communication with high school partners, and 88 percent utilize formal written agreements outlining roles and responsibilities. Similarly, 85 percent ensure high school instructors meet institutional teaching qualifications, and 81 percent maintain curriculum consistency between high school and college courses through standardized syllabi and grading standards. These high implementation rates suggest established best practices that other institutions may benefit from adopting.
Support services remain a priority, with 78 percent of institutions providing access to learning resources and 78 percent verifying course prerequisites for HSDE learners. However, the relatively low rate of NACEP accreditation, combined with limited familiarity with NACEP’s National Standards for Program Quality, points to opportunities for greater standardization and alignment of practices around time-tested quality-assurance approaches across the field.
Survey responses identify equity and learner support as areas requiring continued attention. Less than 50 percent of institutions analyze HSDE demographics to identify underrepresented groups, and about one-third have programs specifically designed for underrepresented learners. These findings suggest significant room for growth in ensuring equitable access to HSDE opportunities.
Advising practices show similar variation. While 85 percent of institutions provide HSDE advising on an as-requested basis, structured approaches are less common. About a third assign learners to specific advisors through caseload advising, and 28 percent require mandatory advising before the first term. More intensive advising interventions—such as mandatory annual meetings, milestone checkpoints, and end-of-first-term requirements—are implemented by fewer than 15 percent of institutions, indicating opportunities to enhance advising support structures.
The report reveals complex relationships between high schools and postsecondary institutions, highlighting the need for standardized terminology, clear credit-mobility pathways, and equitable access to HSDE opportunities. Institutions report balancing multiple priorities, including workforce development, enrollment management, community impact, and learner success in their efforts to offer and support HSDE.
Career Profile: Chief Admissions Officers Navigate Change
The 2025 Summary of U.S. Chief Admissions Officers Survey marks the fifth in AACRAO’s career-profile series. The report offers insights into the evolving chief admissions officer (CAdO) profession, based on responses from U.S. admissions leaders. The report series, which began in 2016, continues to track the career path and responsibilities of the admissions profession amid changes in higher education.
The survey reveals several trends shaping the admissions profession.
Organizational Structure: Most CAdOs report to senior administrators, with significant representation in enrollment management divisions.
Administrative Scope: 90 percent oversee recruiting and applicant-to-matriculation operations.
Team Management: 50 percent supervise one to five direct reports; 39 percent supervise six to ten direct reports; 11percent supervise more than ten direct reports.
Committee Participation: CAdOs serve on various institutional committees, including admissions, enrollment management, academic planning, and strategic initiatives.
Career Mobility: The field continues to experience turnover as professionals navigate career advancement and evolving institutional needs.
Demographics: Overall diversity metrics indicate an ongoing need for more inclusive pathways into the profession.
Chief admissions officers’ comprehensive view of the learner journey positions them uniquely to influence recruitment strategies, admission policies, and enrollment outcomes.
Recommendations for Current and Aspiring CAdOs
For Current Chief Admissions Officers
Manage work-life balance proactively by establishing clear boundaries during off-peak recruitment seasons and leveraging job autonomy to create flexible scheduling arrangements.
Broaden functional expertise beyond admissions to include financial aid, retention initiatives, institutional research, and budget management to prepare for chief enrollment management positions.
Pursue advanced education in higher-education leadership, particularly doctoral programs, when aligned with career goals and institutional expectations.
Develop strategic leadership skills, including SEM plan development, data-analytics capabilities, and comprehensive enrollment-management experience.
Build external networks and maintain professional relationships with executive search firms to facilitate career transitions.
For Aspiring Chief Admissions Officers
Gain comprehensive experience in admissions offices, as 59 percent of internally hired CAdOs come from admissions roles.
Prepare for significant responsibilities, including budget development, committee participation, and supervision of staff teams.
Consider geographic flexibility, as willingness to relocate may expand career opportunities.
60-Second Surveys
AACRAO’s 60-second survey series provides rapid-response insights into emerging challenges facing enrollment professionals.
Community-College Enrollment Management Reality Check
The April 2025 60-Second Survey, Enrollment-Management Reality Check: How Community and Technical Colleges Actually Handle It, examines how community and technical colleges approach strategic enrollment management (SEM). Conducted in partnership with John M. Braxton, D.Ed., and Michael Sparrow, Ed.D., the survey reveals significant gaps between SEM ideals and operational realities.
Key findings include the following.
SEM-Plan Existence: A significant portion of respondents report lacking formal strategic enrollment management plans and instead rely on ad hoc approaches.
Environmental Scanning: 42 percent of SEM plans include comprehensive environmental scanning, a critical component of strategic planning.
Research Requests: 67 percent of respondents express a desire for more enrollment management research to inform their practice.
The benchmark highlights the disconnect between theoretical SEM frameworks and practical implementation at community and technical colleges. These institutions face unique challenges, including open-access missions, diverse learner populations, limited resources and workforce-development responsibilities.
Annual Scheduling: Beyond Next Semester
The June 2025 60-Second Survey, Beyond Next Semester: The Advantages of Annual Scheduling, was conducted in partnership with Ad Astra. The survey explores institutional experiences with annual academic scheduling as an alternative to traditional semester-by-semester approaches. The results show that successful institutions view annual scheduling as a multi-year transformation that requires significant stakeholder engagement, with early adopters reporting improved learner satisfaction despite initial implementation challenges.
Key findings include the following.
Implementation Status: A growing number of institutions are experimenting with, or have fully implemented, annual scheduling to enhance course predictability for learners and to optimize resource use.
Learner Benefits: Annual scheduling enables better academic planning, improves course access, facilitates timely degree completion, and reduces registration stress.
Success Factors: Successful implementation requires cross-functional collaboration, robust technology infrastructure, comprehensive training, and phased rollout approaches.
The data show that successful institutions view annual scheduling as a multi-year transformation that requires significant stakeholder engagement, with early adopters reporting improved learner satisfaction despite initial implementation challenges.
AI in Academic Operations: Between Promise and Practice
The September 2025 60-Second Survey, AI in Academic Operations: Between Promise and Practice, was conducted in collaboration with Coursedog. The survey examines how institutions are approaching artificial intelligence (AI) to support functions such as curriculum management, catalog administration, classroom and course scheduling, faculty workload, learner-demand forecasting, and data analysis. With 167 institutional responses, the data reveal a notable gap between widespread confidence in AI’s potential and limited implementation to date.
Key findings include the following.
Confidence in AI’s Potential: Eighty-five percent of respondents agree (strongly or somewhat) that AI can make academic operations more efficient and improve outcomes, mirroring the 94 percent confidence reported in AACRAO’s parallel research on AI-supported credit mobility.
Current State of Implementation: Only 11 percent of institutions currently use AI to support academic operations, and another 11 percent are actively implementing. The largest group, 38 percent, is exploring solutions, while 19 percent report no current plans.
Early-Adopter Patterns: Among the 38 institutions currently using or implementing AI, generative AI for content creation (25 institutions) and AI-powered chatbots (22 institutions) lead adoption. Applications most often support data analysis and reporting, learner-demand forecasting, and curriculum management. Most implementations are less than two years old.
Barriers to Adoption: Nonusers cite budget and resource constraints (18 percent), lack of technical expertise (17 percent), data-privacy and security concerns (16 percent), and questions about AI accuracy and reliability (15 percent) as the leading barriers.
Future Plans: Of the 117 institutions not yet using AI, 55 percent plan to implement within three years—21 percent within the next six months—while only 11 percent report no current plans for adoption.
The data point to a field in an early, exploratory phase, where enthusiasm for AI’s potential outpaces operational readiness. Respondents call for practical, peer-grounded support: case studies from early adopters, FERPA and compliance guidance, vendor-evaluation help to navigate a “flooded marketplace” of AI products, and educational programming on prompt design and implementation. The report concludes with a readiness self-assessment that helps institutions weigh use case, data quality, process standardization, governance, and resource capacity before committing to adoption.
Office of Admissions Staffing: Navigating Skills Gaps
The October 2025 60-Second Survey, The State of Staffing, Skills Gaps and Succession Planning, examines critical workforce challenges facing admissions offices. With 270 respondents from diverse institutional types, the survey reveals pressing concerns about staffing adequacy, professional development needs, and succession planning.
Key findings include the following.
Staffing Levels by Institution Size: Full-time staff devoted to undergraduate admissions range from a mean of eight staff members at institutions with fewer than 1,000 learners to 38 at institutions with 20,000+ learners.
Staff Skills-Gap Priorities: Respondents identify data analysis, technology proficiency, strategic enrollment-management expertise, and communication skills as critical areas requiring professional development.
Succession-Planning Concerns: Many admissions offices lack formal succession-planning frameworks, creating vulnerabilities during staff transitions.
Responses underscore the importance of investing in professional development, implementing robust succession planning, and ensuring adequate staffing levels to support increasingly complex admissions operations.
Building the Pipeline: Pre-College Programs in Higher Education
The December 2025 60- Second Survey, Building the Pipeline: Pre-College Programs in Higher Education, examines institution-sponsored programs and activities organized for K–12 participants who are typically not yet enrolled as degree-seeking learners. With 161 institutional responses, the data provide insights into how institutions use pre-college programs to build enrollment pipelines and serve their communities. The survey explicitly excluded high school dual enrollment, early- and middle-college high schools, P-TECH, and similar programs benchmarked in AACRAO’s 2024 dual enrollment report.
Key findings include the following.
Program Prevalence: 77 percent of undergraduate-serving institutions offer pre-college programs, with 63 percent strongly or somewhat agreeing that these programs are important to their enrollment pipeline.
Program Growth: 36 percent of institutions have increased the number of pre-college programs offered in the last three years, while 58 percent maintained the same number and 6 percent decreased offerings.
Diverse Program Types: The most common offerings include summer bridge programs for incoming first-year learners (54 percent), for-credit summer programs where high-school learners take college courses (48 percent), academic subject intensives such as STEM camps (41 percent), and federally funded TRIO programs (37 percent).
Administrative Structure: 54 percent of programs are administered by Academic Affairs, 34 percent by Enrollment Management, and 27 percent by Student Affairs, with some institutions reporting oversight by multiple divisions.
Integration with Admissions: 63 percent provide recruitment materials to pre-college participants, 51 percent share participant lists with admissions and recruitment staff, and 46 percent include an admissions presentation in their programs; however, 21 percent report that admissions is not integrated with pre-college programs.
The data reveal considerable variation in how programs are structured, funded, and connected to institutional recruitment goals. Program selectivity and funding models also vary considerably across programs and institutions. While most institutions provide recruitment materials and share participant information with admissions, the 21 percent reporting no integration between admissions and pre-college programs represent missed opportunities to convert program participants into enrolled learners. Most programs have dedicated leadership—typically, a director is responsible for day-to-day operations.
Green Papers
High-School Dual-Enrollment Credit Mobility
In partnership with the Community College Research Center (CCRC), AACRAO released High-School Dual-Enrollment Credit: An Expanding Sector of Traditional-Credit Transfer as the third Green Paper in the LEARN Commission series. The first two were released in 2024 and covered traditional transfer credit and credit for prior learning. This paper examines high-school dual enrollment from a credit-mobility perspective. It should be viewed as a complement to the earlier paper, Bridging Two Worlds: High-School Dual Enrollment Institutional Practices.
This green paper highlights a few challenges associated with HDSE credit mobility.
Terminology Inconsistency: Different terms are used to describe program types, creating challenges for policy discussions and data analysis.
Credit-Mobility Challenges: Some institutions treat HSDE credit differently from traditional transfer credit, creating barriers for learners seeking to continue their education.
Equity Considerations: Access to HSDE programs and subsequent credit mobility varies significantly, based on geographic location, school-district resources, and institutional partnerships.
The paper emphasizes that improving HSDE credit mobility requires standardizing terminology, addressing misconceptions about credit acceptance, and leveraging existing transfer infrastructure while accounting for HSDE-specific considerations.
AI-Supported Credit Mobility
AACRAO released AI-Supported Credit Mobility: Opportunities and Challenges in Higher Education Transfer Systems, the fourth, and final, green paper in the LEARN Commission series. Co-authored with Jesse Boeding, Ed.D., this paper examines the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and credit mobility.
The research reveals a significant paradox in higher education: while 94 percent of professionals recognize AI’s transformative potential for credit mobility, only 15 percent of institutions have implemented these technologies. This gap between confidence and action reflects the complex challenges facing institutions as they consider AI adoption.
Key data points include the following.
Limited Implementation: Of 119 institutions surveyed, only seventeen (15%) report currently using AI for credit-mobility-related processes; 97 institutions (85%) have not yet implemented AI technologies.
Early-Stage Adoption: Among the small number of early adopters, thirteen institutions report using AI capabilities for domestic postsecondary electronic-transcript processing, primarily to read incoming transcripts, build articulation rules, and prepare transcripts for human review.
Institutional Readiness: Among institutions not yet using AI, significant barriers include financial constraints (82 percent), staff training needs (90 percent), technical expertise requirements (70 percent), policy and governance concerns (77 percent), and knowledge gaps about available AI products and applications.
Cautious Approach: Most institutions remain in exploratory or wait-and-see phases, reflecting concerns about accuracy, cost, data privacy, and the need to maintain human judgment in complex credit-evaluation decisions.
Equity Potential: Despite implementation challenges, AI offers opportunities to democratize access to credit-mobility information, enabling learners to explore and compare programs across multiple institutions before making enrollment decisions.
The green paper served as foundational documentation for the LEARN Commission’s fourth and final meeting, examining how AI might enhance credit mobility while addressing concerns about implementation, equity, and the need to maintain essential human oversight.
Capstone White Paper
A Blueprint Toward Learner-Centered Credit Mobility
In June 2025, AACRAO released A Blueprint toward Learner-Centered Credit Mobility: From Research to Vision to Reality, co-authored by Wendy Kilgore, Ph.D., and Ken Sharp, Ph.D. This comprehensive white paper synthesizes findings from more than a decade of AACRAO benchmark data, institutional observational data, and related research on credit mobility in U.S. higher education. The analysis reveals that core challenges are not technological gaps but fundamental operational deficiencies: institutions often manually process electronic transcripts despite automation capabilities, lack comprehensive articulation rules, have complex and opaque transferability-versus-applicability policies, and struggle to operate fragmented technology systems built over time.
To reinforce findings from the decade-plus meta-analysis, the paper examines survey data from 36 Texas public institutions as a contemporary microcosm of the credit-mobility ecosystem.
Fundamental Barriers Identified through Meta-Analysis
Analysis across multiple years of AACRAO research reveals several persistent structural and operational issues.
Incomplete Implementation of Existing Technologies: Institutions continue manual processing despite available automation tools.
Complex, Variable Credit-Evaluation Standards: Credential-applicability rules create navigational barriers for learners.
Policy Inconsistencies: Catalog-of-record requirements may force transfer learners to adapt to new academic plans rather than honoring original pathways.
Credit-for-Prior-Learning Barriers: CPL awarded at one institution is not accepted in transfer at most institutions.
Limited Transparency: Inadequate communication to learners about why credits do or do not transfer and how they apply toward credential requirements.
Texas Case Study Findings
The 36 Texas institutions surveyed exemplify national challenges.
Manual Processing Persists: Despite electronic-transcript capabilities, 44 percent of EDX transcripts, 53 percent of standard PDFs, 36 percent of machine-readable PDFs and 65 percent of paper transcripts require all manual processing for transfer-credit decisions.
Staffing Constraints: Institutions report operating with extremely limited resources, with some having a single employee who evaluates all transcripts manually.
System Fragmentation: The 36 institutions use six different student-information systems, creating integration challenges.
Processing Delays: 29 percent of EDX transcripts, 34 percent of machine-readable PDFs, 36 percent of standard PDFs and 53 percent of paper transcripts require five or more business days for credit decisions.
Solution Framework: Four Strategic Priorities
The white paper presents a comprehensive framework organized around four strategic priorities to create a learner-centered credit-mobility ecosystem.
Strategic Priority 1: Establish Strong Foundations
Strategic Priority 2: Foster Collaborative Ecosystems
Strategic Priority 3: Create Inclusive Implementation Framework
Strategic Priority 4: Prepare for Future Technology Integration
This white paper emphasizes that without fixing foundational “nuts and bolts” issues, the credit-mobility ecosystem cannot achieve holistic improvement. Expected transformation outcomes include reduced time-to-degree completion, decreased educational costs for transfer learners, increased enrollment yield, improved transparency in credit-evaluation processes, enhanced equity across institutional-resource levels, and increased institutional readiness for emerging educational technologies.
Summing Up 2025: Impact and Future Directions
As we reflect on AACRAO’s research accomplishments in 2025, the initiatives have advanced our strategic goals, which include:
advance the knowledge and understanding of various professions in enrollment and academic services, which are key components of institutional and learner success
foster a culture of innovation and scholarship through research that produces best practices for institutional and learner success
By examining high school dual-enrollment expansion, chief admissions officer career profiles, admissions-staffing challenges, community college enrollment management, annual scheduling innovations, pre-college programs, and the transformative potential of credit-mobility reform, AACRAO Research provides enrollment-management and academic-services professionals with evidence-based insights to inform their practices during rapidly changing times.
The interconnected nature of this year’s research portfolio is particularly noteworthy. The LEARN Commission work represents an unprecedented collaborative effort to transform credit mobility from multiple perspectives—traditional transfer, credit for prior learning, high-school dual enrollment, and artificial intelligence applications. These initiatives collectively support a more accessible, equitable higher education landscape that serves learners from all backgrounds and educational pathways.
AACRAO remains committed to producing practical, actionable research to help institutions balance innovation with sustainability while prioritizing learner success. These achievements would not be possible without the participation and support of dedicated AACRAO members who share their expertise and experiences through surveys, interviews, and collaborative discussions. With your continued engagement, AACRAO will build upon this foundation to address tomorrow’s challenges with insight and foresight.
About the Author
Wendy Kilgore, Ph.D., serves as the Senior Director of Research for AACRAO, where she spearheads the organization’s research initiatives. With more than 25 years in higher education, Dr. Kilgore’s experience includes serving as state dean of enrollment services for the Colorado Community College System, director of admissions and registrar for the Pima County Community College District, and roles at Arizona State University in academic advising and admissions. Prior to her current role, Dr. Kilgore served as a consultant for AACRAO, providing services to a diverse range of higher education institutions, including large public universities, small private colleges, faith-based institutions, for-profit institutions, technical colleges, and community-college systems. This consulting work broadened her expertise across various institutional types and challenges in higher education. In her current position at AACRAO, she designs and conducts research projects, analyzes data, and disseminates findings to the higher education community. Her broad-based higher education experience, research expertise, and familiarity with emerging trends make her a respected voice in shaping higher education practices and policies.
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