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Yesterday, President Trump issued "Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities" which describes how the executive branch intends to move functions of the department of education elsewhere.  Many Financial Aid professionals still have PTSD as it relates to the rollout of the new FAFSA in 2023 (which contributed to a 9% decline in overall enrollment).  Are we on track for something similar in the next academic year?

With today's focus on compliance and government efficiency, we expect there to be a high level of scrutiny on financial aid processes and personnel costs at public higher education institutions.  As such, we have identified 4 efficiency initiatives that institutions can kick-off to be ready.

One of the impacts expected in the higher education industry as it relates to the Florida DOGE taskforce is a high level of scrutiny on any and all spending at public higher education institutions.  Anything that doesn't support DOGE goals will most likely get cut.

On February 24, 2025, Florida Governor, Ron Desantis, issued an executive order establishing a Florida version of the DOGE task force.  As this is the first DOGE initiative specifically focused on education institutions, and because Mutara works closely with several institutions that fall under it's purview, I thought I'd provide my analysis.

On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Protecting the meaning and value of American Citizenship."  This executive order focused on the issue of the meaning of birthright citizenship as described in the 14th Amendment.  In the future, complying with this policy would have significant impact on the processes of admitting all students at higher education institutions.

Welcome to 2025!  It's a new year with a new administration coming in the next few weeks.  The past several years have seen a dramatic series of changes (and challenges) in the higher education industry.  Here are our 5 predictions for the coming year.

Most enrollment leaders struggle with labor-intensive and error-prone qualification processes.  As the final installment of our residency and qualifications series, we will go into more detail on how our solution addresses these needs.

Determining residency is often the most intensive area where students need to be qualified.  In this article, we will discuss the specifics by which institutions must evaluate and prove in-state residency; and how this drives up admissions processing effort.

In our first article in this series, we described how central the qualification process is to an institutions’ ability to meet enrollment, productivity, and responsiveness goals.  We then provided an overview the general process and approaches.  In this article, we will discuss the systems involved in this process and how they may be limiting an institution’s success in this area.