Higher
Education
We are a data-focused strategy consulting firm focused on helping post-secondary institutions meaningfully improve student enrollment, student and alumni outcomes, and operational functions.
EXPERTISE
Sustainable Growth
Develop brand and program marketing strategies for institutions that accurately reflect and leverage student and market demand, ensuring strong ROI and sustainable growth, by employing sophisticated research and analytic techniques.
Enrollment Operations
Identify high-priority prospective students and enhance organizational capacities/processes to increase conversion/yield rates through proprietary market research, segmentation, operational analysis, process mapping, and predictive modeling techniques.
Student Success
Build and maintain effective internal processes that help institutions identify students who are at greatest risk for attrition and ensure that interventions are appropriately aligned with needs and risk factors, ultimately improving institutions’ capacity to increase student success.
Alumni Engagement
Help institutions better understand opportunities for engagement with alumni populations, including preferred forums and mediums for engagement, and donor capacity and willingness to give derived through best-in-class research techniques that distill highly actionable demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics.
Recent Results
Inquiry to Enrollment Process Optimization
Working with a large higher education institution, Cicero developed and implemented an inquiry to enrollment process optimization strategy, increasing the institution’s enrollment conversion by 260-bps year-over-year, equating to an increase of over $60MM in annual revenue.
Enrollment Process Improvement
Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative primary research, Cicero mapped the complexities of the recruiting and enrollment process for a large community college, developing key recommendations for process improvement throughout the course of the engagement. The college used the findings to create a comprehensive enrollment process improvement plan focused on increasing student access to the institution.
Prospect Attrition Mapping
Through internal data analysis, Cicero helped a large online higher education provider to understand common points of attrition during the student enrollment process, helping the client to substantially improve its inquiry to enrollment conversion rate, while also helping them to ensure the most qualified prospects enrolled in the most pain-free way possible.
Admissions Department Operational Improvement
Cicero implemented an operational improvement plan within the admissions department of a small liberal arts college. The plan and its implementation were praised for breaking down cultural silos that had previously inhibited the college’s ability to fully leverage resources, while ensuring the admissions department appropriately prioritized and executed on key strategic initiatives.
Student Persistence Improvement through Change Management
Partnering with a cutting-edge provider of enterprise software, Cicero has worked with a range of higher education institutions in an organizational change management assessment, evaluating each institution in four main categories: cultural agility, data utilization, intervention effectiveness, and data systems readiness. Each institution has used their change management assessment to develop and implement new initiatives and change management strategies to focus on improving capacity to align resources around the most successful strategies for student success.
Student Experience Strategy
Through qualitative and quantitative research and analysis, Cicero developed a student experience strategy to increase student satisfaction and retention for an industry-leading online education provider. Cicero’s analysis allowed the client to better position itself within the online education market and grow its competitive advantage over top competitors through a student-focused online experience strategy.
Predictive Modeling to Increase Student Enrollment
Working with a private, healthcare-focused university, Cicero developed a robust predictive enrollment model to forecast aggressive, medium and mild enrollment rates for the university for the next 5 years. In addition, Cicero created a realizable marketing strategy to attract new enrollees, allowing the institution to outperform goals for online enrollment expectations.
Financial Aid Strategy and Innovation
Through focus groups and in-depth interviews with prospective students and high school guidance counselors, Cicero developed an enhanced financial aid marketing strategy for a liberal arts institution, allowing college leadership to develop and execute a successful roll-out strategy for the new financial aid packages.
Institutional Rebranding Assessment and Impact
Through six months of research involving extensive market research and analysis, Cicero helped a large national higher education institution understand the effects of institutional rebranding through the addition of multiple master’s programs to its program offering, allowing the institution to confidently rebrand and add additional master’s programs to its current program offering without adverse enrollment effects.
OUR INSIGHTS
Does Your College or University Need a Strategy? Three Comprehensive Examples to Guide College Administrators
Supporting Enrollment and Student Growth
Reduce Pain Points in Enrollment Operations
Strategic Growth is Critical for Higher Ed Success
Preparing for Fall Semester in the Time of COVID-19
Enrollment Trends During the Great Recession
MANAGEMENT CONSULTING
Cicero® Group is a premier management consulting firm focused on implementing data-driven strategies for a broad mix of private, public, and social sector organizations across the globe. We work with top management to assess needs and provide data-driven decision support to capture and build value in a variety of industries and across a full range of organization structures.
We bring deep functional expertise in advanced research and analytics, strategy, operational excellence and trajectory transformation to identify and capture value for our clients. These are the pillars of Cicero Group’s overarching purpose: Help clients create and continuously deliver extraordinary results.
Start a Conversation
Thank you for your interest in Cicero® Group. Please select from the options below to get in touch with us.