State of the Independent School Enrollment Industry, Part I [S5.E3]

We know that enrollment and student capacity at a school can be defined in different ways, whether it's space, regulations, or internal limits.

But with 63% of schools who responded to the SODI expecting to be below capacity and just over half of schools looking to increase enrollment, Ari, how should they factor that into enrollment and net tuition revenue planning?

Well, I want to give a shout out to our mutual friend, Laurel Baker, too.

When we did the last state of the enrollment industry report, Laurel is on the Data Advisory Board, and she raised this point that schools have this habit of revising their enrollment targets and revising their net tuition revenue targets.

And so if you ask a school, which we have done and we did in a recent flash survey with you all you know are you on track to hit your enrollment and intuition revenue targets and those targets are possibly moving it it creates it creates a little bit of of gray area as a result one of the enhancements in this state of the industry report we tried to to ask those historic questions but then also layer on this question about capacity And capacity tends to be formed in one of a few ways.

So 29% of schools, almost a third of them, have a maximum enrollment that is set by an external governing body.

This is most often a conditional use permit.

We see them in California, although we see them in other regions as well, and most often in urban areas.

So about 29% of those that have external conditional use permits.

So an outside cap being put on.

41% of those schools are expected to reach that capacity in the current 25, 26 school year.

The rest of the schools, so the other 71%, are setting their own capacity limit.

That might be a capacity limit because of space, so current facilities.

Those could be seats, those could be beds and dorms.

That's about 85% of the remaining schools.

And then about 15% of the remaining schools have a lower capacity that is set either by the leadership or the board of the school.

So those are the ways in which schools can set the capacity.

But what is really interesting is when you dig further into how many are actually at their maximum capacity.

And the answer is not nearly as many as would like to be.

So only about 36% of those schools that set their own maximum capacity are at it or above it.

Interestingly, there are schools that are above their maximum capacity, which is itself a little bit complicated, but about 36% are.

63% are below it.

And somehow 1% don't know.

And that itself is also interesting.

So when we think about that, there's only about a 5% swing between the schools that have an external limit at 41% that are at that number and the 36% that are at their own self-imposed maximum.