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At the time, Hank DeVincent Field was a venue without a team — and a symbol of La Salle’s mounting struggles. In 2020, the university announced that it would cut baseball and six other varsity sports at the end of the academic year. The rising costs of supporting 25 teams, the athletics department’s financial troubles, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic all contributed to the decision, the institution said.
But that was just one set of concerns. La Salle, a Roman Catholic institution in Philadelphia, had seen its enrollment plummet. In 2012-13, the university enrolled nearly 3,600 full-time undergraduate students; in 2020-21, it enrolled about 2,800. In the fall of 2023, the institution welcomed a first-year class of 465 students, the smallest in recent history; full-time undergraduate enrollment fell to 1,705. Applications were declining, and the university’s yield rate — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — was falling.
Those trends took a toll on La Salle’s financial health. For 2023, the university reported $127 million in revenues, mostly coming from tuition, and $140 million in expenses. An analysis in the fall of 2024 by The Philadelphia Inquirer, which used a financial-viability index created by a chief financial officer at a private college, found that La Salle had seen the biggest drop in net tuition revenue among all Philadelphia colleges from 2015 to 2023. And in fiscal year 2024, the Inquirer’s analysis found, the university’s net tuition revenue had declined to $45 million, half of what it was in 2015.
When it comes to growing and sustaining enrollment, doing a whole bunch of little things well makes a difference.
Like many institutions, La Salle has been navigating rough waters churned by an uncertain economy, intense competition, shifting demographics of high-school graduates, and public skepticism of higher education. But some of La Salle’s challenges were self-inflicted, current and former officials say. For one thing, the university previously lacked something essential: a state-of-the-art enrollment operation.
That changed after Allen took over as president. Three years later, he’s touting an institutional turnaround. In 2024, the university’s incoming class of more than 500 students was 23 percent larger than the prior year, and the average net tuition revenue per student increased. This past summer, La Salle reopened two dorms and welcomed an incoming class of nearly 700 full-time first-year students, about a 40-percent jump from 2024. As of late fall, the number of admission applications is ahead of the amount around the same time last year.
What has La Salle been doing differently? “There’s no magic, shiny new toy out there” that can help reverse a college’s fortunes, Allen says. “My big idea was we’re going to run a really good university, and keep our focus on our mission and how we serve our students.”
That said, La Salle has embraced numerous strategies for boosting enrollment and revenue. Here’s a look at some key changes.
Adding sports teams, enhancing community. Early in his tenure, Allen met with La Salle’s new athletics director, who suggested that adding some sports teams could help bolster enrollment. After months of analysis, the university’s leaders determined that the conditions that led to the elimination of a handful of teams just a few years earlier had changed. In 2024, La Salle announced that it would add three new women’s sports — rugby, triathlon, and acrobatics and tumbling — starting in the 2025-26 academic year.
La Salle also reinstated the baseball team, which had long been a source of pride among students and graduates. “Bringing baseball back was huge,” says Gregory J. Nayor, vice president for enrollment management. “It galvanized our alumni base and brought them back into the fold, and it opened us up to students wanting to play Division I baseball.”
La Salle also decided to expand its dance and cheerleader squads — and start a pep band. The university expects all those additions, plus planned growth in existing rosters, to bring in a total of 225 additional students by the fall of 2026.
In 2024, athletes comprised about a fifth of La Salle’s freshman class; this fall, they made up a third. Since most of the university’s athletic scholarships cover only part of the cost of attendance, that’s a lot of additional revenue.
But Allen sees intangible benefits, too. The sight of a packed ballpark, the sound of a pep band playing at a basketball game: “These are things that build a sense of community.” That’s especially important at an institution seeking to improve the student experience, which, administrators say, took a turn for the worse during the pandemic.
Recently, La Salle renovated two residence halls that had been sitting empty for years. Reopening those facilities for first-year students, Allen says, has brought greater vibrancy to a part of the campus that needed it.
La Salle has also stepped up support for students, aiming to increase its freshman-to-sophomore retention rate to 75 percent. It rose to 73 percent last year but dipped below 70 percent this year.
The university recently hired a new assistant vice president for student success. It overhauled advising. And it now asks faculty members to take attendance for the first few weeks of classes so administrators can reach out to students who’ve missed several classes, which might indicate a problem — homesickness, trouble adjusting, mental-health issues — that early intervention could ease.
La Salle has also been rethinking the role of the library. The university recently turned the second floor of its library into a one-stop student-success hub, offering tutoring in more than 50 subjects, help with writing assignments, and first-year advising, among other services.
“The idea here is to situate our facilities in ways that drive community,” Allen says, “so students feel seen and known.”
A sense of community has implications for an institution’s bottom line: Students who feel connected to their campus are more likely to thrive and stay enrolled.
Retooling enrollment operations, personalizing outreach. The 21st-century admissions office runs on data — tons of it. But without an efficient way to manage, interpret, and act on all the data a college collects about prospective students, it will likely struggle to meet its goals.
Such was the situation at La Salle when Nayor was hired to lead the enrollment division, in 2023. He knew he would have to overhaul the university’s recruitment tactics while simultaneously rebuilding the “infrastructure” behind them.
That meant streamlining internal processes and modernizing the customer-relations-management system the university uses to communicate with high-school students. Nerdy stuff, perhaps, but essential for orchestrating a modern recruitment campaign that can drive enrollment success.
“We had all this data, but we weren’t using it,” Nayor says. “We just weren’t communicating with students enough.”
Nayor has ditched generic messaging and doubled down on personalized communications with prospective students. With the help of Waybetter Marketing, an enrollment-marketing firm based in Maryland, La Salle’s admissions office has built a highly responsive system for gathering information on a given applicant’s specific interests and then tailoring content for them across various channels.
Not all of it is purely high-tech. Early on, Nayor concluded La Salle had been relying too heavily on digital ads and email. “A prospective student’s inbox is flooded with emails — you have to cut through that noise with something that’s a little harder to ignore.”
La Salle now sends mailings that are personalized based on information students have shared with the university. “We’re serving up something to you that has your name on it, that acknowledges you’re interested in history, instead of us just mailing you a general viewbook about the university and hoping for the best.”
Nayor also retooled the campus visit. When a student schedules an individual visit, they now see their name on a parking-spot sign and on a big screen in the main building. They are greeted by an admissions officer who knows their hometown and the major they want. “When it comes to growing and sustaining enrollment,” Nayor says, “doing a whole bunch of little things well makes a difference.”
Rethinking recruitment, switching up financial aid. Most colleges want more applicants. Getting them often starts with increasing the number of high-school students at the top of what’s known as the enrollment funnel. But purchasing the names and addresses of every student in your institution’s state won’t get you that many viable leads.
Nayor has injected more sophistication into La Salle’s outreach, targeting students who’ve expressed an interest in the university’s key majors and in attending a Catholic institution, and who’ve indicated that they have top-notch grades. It’s also targeting students in specific suburban areas just outside Philadelphia, where, Nayor says, the university hasn’t drawn so well in the past.
Some of the states La Salle has long recruited in have yielded little success. “I stopped going to those states,” Nayor says. But the university is recruiting in select cities with demographics similar to those in and around Philadelphia.
La Salle has changed its financial-aid strategy. “We realized we had probably been giving a little too much to some students, and not enough to others,” Nayor says. “We’re trying to be thoughtful in creating a strong aid package.”
Now, La Salle sends financial-aid offers sooner than before. Students who apply for early action by the November 1 deadline get a full aid offer in the first half of December. “The goal here is that, before the holiday season, they are able to talk with their family with a full offer in front of them.”
Another change: La Salle has moved away from a “late aid” strategy, in which a college offers additional funding to families of admitted students in the spring in hopes of convincing them to enroll. “It just never works well,” says Nayor. “A lot of times when colleges use a late-aid strategy, they’re just throwing money at the wall, and it often happens because they haven’t done all the work in terms of communicating effectively with prospective students.”
Adding offerings, expanding access. La Salle recently added a sport-management degree, which two-dozen freshmen are now pursuing, and a cybersecurity major. This year, the university opened the Miguel Campos School, through which it offers a handful of associate-degree programs, including business administration, education, and health studies.
“It’s providing different pathways for students,” Nayor says.
Just two-dozen students are enrolled in the associate-degree program this fall, but Naylor expects that number to grow.
For now, it’s accurate to say La Salle’s enrollment metrics look better than they did just two years ago. But the university still has challenges.
In March, Fitch Ratings, a credit-rating agency, downgraded La Salle’s outlook to BB-, or “negative.” Though the announcement noted promising trends, including an increase in first-year enrollment, it also noted “weak student demand metrics that are influenced by the highly competitive and demographically unfavorable Northeast U.S. market.”
In June, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education warned La Salle that its accreditation “may be in jeopardy.” The university has until February to submit a report to the commission showing it “has achieved and can sustain ongoing compliance with documented financial resources, funding base, and plans for financial development, adequate to support its educational purposes and programs and to ensure financial stability.”
Those are reminders that an enrollment turnaround is difficult to pull off — and that it often takes time. This fall, La Salle’s overall enrollment was 3,263, an increase of about 100 students over last year. That’s a long way from the 4,900 the university enrolled in 2019-20.
Hitting that number again might be an unrealistic goal. Though Allen says he doesn’t have a specific number he would like to reach, the university is committed to becoming a smaller institution.
“We feel great about the progress that we’ve made,” Allen says, “and are clear-sighted about the work that we still have left to do.”
