Recap: 2026 BPS Enrollment Management Symposium

Bringing Enrollment Leaders Together to Learn, Connect, and Lead

The 2026 Best Practice Solutions Enrollment Management Symposium brought together enrollment leaders and practitioners for an engaging experience centered on learning, collaboration, and the challenges shaping higher education today.

Throughout the Symposium, participants stepped away from the day-to-day demands of enrollment management to exchange ideas, examine emerging opportunities, and learn from colleagues navigating many of the same challenges on their campuses. Conversations explored the full enrollment lifecycle, from recruitment and financial aid to data, operations, retention, institutional alignment, and leadership.

More importantly, the Symposium created space for the kind of candid, peer-to-peer dialogue that can be difficult to find in the midst of a busy enrollment cycle.

Learning Designed for Different Stages of Leadership

Recognizing that leadership development is not one-size-fits-all, the 2026 Symposium featured two distinct learning experiences: the Veteran Leaders Track and the Rising Leaders Track.

Veteran enrollment leaders explored topics including institutional alignment and fiscal health, artificial intelligence in enrollment, using IPEDS data to ask better questions, retention strategy, and leading change across complex organizations.

Rising leaders focused on building a strong foundation across the enrollment enterprise, with sessions addressing today's enrollment funnel, data-informed decision-making, enrollment-cycle management, recruitment and financial aid, systems and operations, and working effectively with teams and campus partners.

While the tracks provided opportunities for participants to learn alongside peers at similar stages of leadership, the Symposium also created intentional opportunities to bring those perspectives together.

Turning Conversation Into Collaboration

The Symposium culminated in a Collaborative Roundtable, where veteran and rising leaders worked together to tackle some of higher education's most pressing enrollment challenges.

Teams brought different experiences, institutional perspectives, and areas of expertise to the table—brainstorming solutions, challenging assumptions, and identifying practical approaches participants could carry back to their institutions.

The Roundtable reinforced one of the central ideas of the Symposium: complex enrollment challenges are rarely solved in isolation. Progress happens when people are willing to share what they know, ask better questions, and work across roles and institutional boundaries.

Continuing the Conversation

The 2026 BPS Enrollment Management Symposium was designed to be more than a series of presentations. It was an opportunity to build relationships, strengthen leadership capacity, and create a community around the shared work of helping institutions and students succeed.

We are grateful to everyone who contributed their experience, questions, ideas, and energy to this year's Symposium and to the presenters and participants who made the conversations so valuable. Thank you for being part of an exceptional gathering of enrollment professionals. We look forward to continuing the conversations, connections, and ideas that began at the 2026 BPS Enrollment Management Symposium.

Learn more about the BPS Enrollment Management Symposium.