Most enrollment problems start outside the admissions office.
I’ve spent twenty years running enrollment at community colleges, private and public universities, and global EdTech companies, including Pearson and Coursera. The fixes that mattered most were usually somewhere else: financial aid, the registrar’s office, the programs themselves, and how the cabinet made decisions.
Request the bookcsm@cesarsmendoza.com
About me
For more than twenty years I’ve built and led enrollment teams at community colleges, private and public universities, and global EdTech companies, including Pearson and Coursera. My roles have included chief enrollment officer at St. Augustine College and head of enrollment services at Pearson and at Coursera. The work has ranged from rebuilding recruitment funnels and replacing CRM and technology stacks to training advising teams that worked across four continents.
At St. Augustine College I became chief enrollment officer after six straight years of declining enrollment. At Pearson and Coursera I ran enrollment services across national brands and global markets. The lesson that carried across all of them is the one my book is built on: enrollment is the result of how the whole institution works, and admissions only sees the end of it.
- Chief Enrollment OfficerSt. Augustine College
- Head of Global Enrollment ServicesCoursera
- Head of Enrollment ServicesPearson
- MBA, Global ManagementWestwood College
- BA, Applied Cultural AnthropologyDePaul University
A few results
- St. Augustine CollegeChief Enrollment Officer
Finished $1.1 million above the FY2020 tuition revenue target, eight months after I took over, following six consecutive years of enrollment decline.
- PearsonHead of Enrollment Services
Reached 106% of the Q1 2018 enrollment goal, adding $1.24 million in revenue across twelve national academic brands.
- CourseraHead of Global Enrollment Services
Improved conversion by more than 20% year over year, on average, across recruitment teams in APAC, North America, Latin America and EMEA.
The Enrollment Resilience Playbook
The book is a working guide for presidents, provosts and cabinets. It covers what I’ve seen separate the colleges that recover from a bad enrollment year from the ones that don’t, organized into nine areas I call the RESILIENT™ Framework. Each chapter includes a tool meant to be filled in during an actual cabinet meeting.
- RReimagine institutional strategy
- EEngage new student markets
- SStrengthen academic value
- IInnovate enrollment operations
- LLeverage data and AI
- IImprove student success
- EExpand revenue streams
- NNavigate organizational change
- TTransform for long-term growth
I share the book directly with leadership teams rather than through bookstores. If you’d like a copy, tell me a little about your institution and I’ll be in touch.
Try one of the tools first
The Enrollment Ecosystem Map is the first exercise I run with a new cabinet. It takes one meeting: list every office that touches a student, score the friction each one creates, and name who owns fixing it. The PDF is fillable and free.
I may follow up once to ask whether you’d like the full book. That’s all.
Get in touch
If you’re working through an enrollment problem at your institution, or you’d like me to speak with your leadership team, email me.