Dear AACRAO Consultants,
I am new to the practice of strategic enrollment management, and I was wondering: What is the history behind SEM?
Signed,
Curious and Committed
Dear Curious and Committed,
That’s a great question because 2026 is the 50th anniversary of “Enrollment Management.” It originated at Boston College when Jack Maguire implemented what he called the “Grand Design,” a response to a dramatic enrollment decline. He said it was about having “the right people, the right information, and the right organization,” and it sparked a major shift in how colleges and universities did enrollment.
In the 1980s, Don Hossler, a professor at Indiana University, was one of the first scholars to write about enrollment management in two books, based on his research on college choice. He argued for an integrated approach that brought multiple offices together rather than working in silos and described three change models that could make colleges more responsive. His work drove increased national interest in enrollment management.
By 1990, AACRAO was becoming very involved in this new field. As the association’s first vice president for enrollment management, I chaired a committee that developed a new national conference that aimed at a campus-wide audience, including senior officers and faculty. It became the first SEM conference, now in its 36th year. This is the period when enrollment management became strategic enrollment management, or SEM. Michael Dolence (1993), a strategic planner, wrote a primer about SEM for campus administrators and created the classic definition of SEM:
SEM is a comprehensive process designed to help an institution achieve and maintain the optimum recruitment, retention, and graduation rates, where ‘optimum’ is defined within the academic context of the institution. As such, SEM is an institution-wide process that embraces virtually every aspect of an institution’s function and culture.
With pioneers like Maguire, Hossler, and Dolence, SEM has grown from a group of administrative offices focused mainly on recruitment to be an enterprise-wide professional discipline that tracks the learner lifecycle from “cradle to endowment.” Today we recognize that retention starts with recruitment, and SEM connects learners to the campus to create a sense of belonging that helps them build engagement in the classroom and outside of it, leading to ultimate success.
Christopher Tremblay and I are writing a history of SEM at 50 to be published in SEM Quarterly in October, and a session on that article will be featured at the SEM Conference in Baltimore in November. Check out both for more information on SEM’s development over the years!
Sincerely,
Stanley Henderson
AACRAO Consultant
AACRAO members, do you have a question for our team of higher education consultants? Send your “Ask a Consultant” question to consulting@aacrao.org.
For more information on how AACRAO Consulting can assist your campus, visit our website or contact us via email at consulting@aacrao.org.
Also, visit the AACRAO SEM Resources page and the AACRAO Bookstore to order the SEM trilogy of books:
“SEM in Action: Implementing and Sustaining Your Plan” ↗
“SEM Core Concepts: Leading Toward Learner Success and Campus Enrollment Health” ↗
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