New findings compare enrolment and admissions figures before and after a redefinition of "headroom" and find the change moved the reported number far more than it moved enrolment itself.
Redefining "headroom" lets two Schools report under their admissions cap and ahead of their growth target without enrolment moving at all
Two enrolment mandates that looked impossible to satisfy at once have turned out to share the same underlying number. An admissions cap and a growth target read, on their face, as opposite instructions; the University’s research programme on anticipatory capability set out to test whether meeting both required any change to enrolment at all.
Researchers tracked reported “headroom” and actual enrolment across two Schools for six consecutive terms spanning a change to how headroom is calculated: capacity is now read against forecast demand rather than against enrolment directly. Reported headroom rose sharply after the change took effect. Enrolment, and the rate at which offers were made, barely moved.
The University counts the result among the clearer demonstrations of what a well-chosen definition can do for two mandates that looked, on paper, like they couldn’t both be met.
Forecast demand is now the floor we measure headroom against, and that’s a defensible choice on its own terms. It’s a separate question from whether enrolment changed, and we were careful to keep the two apart.
— Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group in the School of Emergent Priorities
“A metric that can absorb a contradiction this cleanly is worth a second look at what else it’s absorbing,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab in the School of Continuous Improvement.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.b1vj6u.