Session four

Session Four — Goals and Outcomes

A free companion artifact from The Enrollment Director Field Guide to AI. The guide explains when and how to use it; this copy is yours to adapt for your school. More at haitani.org/field-guides/enrollment-director

Q3 2026 edition · last updated August 13, 2026

What this is. The fourth of five working sessions, and the only one with no research in it. This session is about you: your targets, your history, your constraints, and how you will know the plan worked.

Enrollment targets usually arrive rather than emerge — last year's number plus growth, a budget requirement worked backward into headcount, a board aspiration. This session states them precisely enough to be tested. The testing happens in Session Five.

Open a new conversation in your project. Web search stays off. All three prior summaries should be in the folder.

Paste this to begin

This is Session 4 of 5: Enrollment Goals and Outcomes. Read my Session 1, 2, and 3 summaries in the project files before you begin.

This session is about me, not research. Do not run web searches.

Your goals:

1. Capture my primary enrollment goals for the upcoming year and the next 3 to 5 years, as specifically as possible: enrollment targets by grade, inquiry growth, yield, retention.
2. Capture qualitative outcomes: diversity, family satisfaction with admissions, mission alignment, full-pay versus aided mix.
3. Capture history: what was successful about previous enrollment efforts, what was not, what our current north star is, and what the recent challenges have been.
4. Capture the board directives I am working toward, and my constraints: budget, staffing, time.
5. Ask how I will define success and which KPIs or OKRs matter most.

As I share goals, briefly note where the research from Sessions 1 through 3 obviously supports or strains them, but keep it light. The full alignment analysis comes in Session 5. Your job here is to draw out an honest, specific picture of what I want and what I am working with.

Ask one question at a time. Start with my numeric targets.

What to expect, and where to push

Be specific about the constraints. A target that assumes a staff you do not have, or a marketing budget that has not been approved, will produce a plan you cannot run — and Session Five can only pressure-test constraints you actually named.

Say out loud where each target came from. A number inherited from last year's budget and a number derived from your market read are different objects, and the synthesis in Session Five treats them differently. Flag the inherited ones.

The history questions are worth more time than they seem to need. What did not work last year, described honestly, is the most useful input the plan will get.

Close the session

Summarize this session using the Session Four template. Capture my targets as stated, the origin of each one, my constraints, and my success measures. Do not adjust or improve my goals here; record them.

Correct anything mischaracterized and save it in your Sessions folder as Session 4 Summary. This is the last input before the plan.