Today is the last day for Vice President of Enrollment Management Ellen Johnson, who has led enrollment, retention, branding and marketing for Allegheny College since Spring 2021.
“Most of the things that you see out in the world about Allegheny kind of ultimately fall under my umbrella,” Johnson said in an interview earlier this week.
Her departure is the third from the president’s cabinet in less than two years. In April 2022, then-Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Kristin Dukes left for a position at Chatham University, while then-Provost and Dean of the College Ron Cole, ’87, stepped down at the end of his seven-year tenure in the summer of 2022. Cole was then appointed Allegheny’s president in September 2022 when former President Hilary Link suddenly resigned.
A year and a half later, Johnson said her departure is another step in her career.
“I’m not leaving because of anything particular at the college,” Johnson said. “Really, it was about the opportunity for me to pursue a role that — it was a great fit for my skill set and my interests.”
Johnson declined to identify her new institution to allow them the opportunity to announce the new position.
The college expects to have a permanent vice president for enrollment management by spring or early summer, according to Johnson.
The position will be filled in the interim by Scott Friedhoff. Friedhoff spent 11 years managing enrollment at the College of Wooster in central Ohio before retiring in the summer of 2021.
The turnover at the top of Enrollment Management comes as Allegheny faces a shrinking student body and the college as a whole faces a steep “demographic cliff.”

Enrollment stats
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Allegheny’s overall student body has shrunk by almost a third, from 1,820 in the fall of 2019 to 1,233 in the fall of 2023. The largest drops came just after Johnson joined the college — enrollment fell from 1,605 in fall 2021 to 1,381 in fall 2022, a drop of 224 or just under 14%.
Allegheny’s goal, according to Johnson, is “ethical recruitment and retention,” and is something she has been working on with Cole, Provost and Dean of the College Angela Haddad and Dean for the Student Experience Ian Binnington.
“Even if that number might be a little smaller at the top end, is it all students who are excited to be at Allegheny, prepared to be at Allegheny and going to be successful at Allegheny?” Johnson said. “That doesn’t mean every student stays but that is really our goal.”
And the idea that Allegheny will get smaller in the future is not new; Johnson pointed to the campus’ 2017 master plan as evidence of this. Cole, then serving has provost, told Inside Higher Ed in early 2019 that the plan called for Allegheny to “strategically recruit fewer students.” At the time, Cole declined to set an enrollment target, though he said the college’s goal was to be “several hundred” students smaller than its peak of 2,100 by 2029.
In a follow-up email, Johnson wrote that this strategy is still unfolding, and that the college graduated its last “large class” in the spring 2023.
Additionally, Johnson pointed to other numbers within the student body that are good signs for the college — namely new sources of students, higher application numbers and more.
“Our transfer student numbers have doubled each year over the last couple years that I’ve been here, and that’s been a really concerted effort from the enrollment office and the institution,” Johnson said. “Actually, looking forward to our fall ’24 class, our applications are the highest they’ve been over the last six or seven years. And we already have 64 students who’ve committed to coming to Allegheny in the fall, which is the highest number of commits at this point in the last six years as well.”
Retention rates fell between fall 2018 and fall 2021 before jumping back up in the fall of 2023, according to data posted to the college’s website. That data does not extend beyond 2022.
Johnson also said that there has not been a noticeable change in application trends due to the warning on Allegheny’s accreditation status, which was issued in June 2023 following the college’s regular accreditation process. College officials submitted a follow-up response to resolve the warning last week, with further action expected this coming June.

Demographic cliff jumping
All of this comes as the United States as a whole faces the “demographic cliff” — a term coined by economist Nathan Grawe to refer to an impending drop in the number of high school graduates, born from declining birth rates in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.
The Northeast and Midwest have started to see a downturn in the number of high school graduates during 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years, according to projections from the National Center for Education Statistics, and will see a brief peak in 2024-25 before steadily declining for at least the next six years.
To counterbalance this, Johnson said the college has shifted to focus more on transfer students and other non-high-school sources of enrollment. This includes adding more coursework, microcredentials and workforce development.
“We’ve seen a growth in students who maybe have been in the military, a little bit older, as well as people who are just ready to come back to school,” Johnson said. “We’ve worked hard to make sure that they know Allegheny is a great option for them, even if they are maybe not what they have in their mind as a typical Allegheny student — which, ‘typical’ is never a great word anyway.”
Graduation numbers are also not uniform: The NCES projects that states on the opposite coast will see the number of high school graduates stay the same or increase.
“Historically, the population of people that Allegheny has attracted — there’s just fewer of whether that means regionally or that sort of thing,” Johnson said. “The largest growth is in areas of the country where we are recruiting more in: California, in the southwest and the southeast.”

Johnson’s final thoughts
Beyond the enrollment numbers, Johnson said she is proud of the work the college has done in branding and marketing efforts — and in particular the people that she said will continue managing enrollment after she leaves.
“It’s exciting, and it’s hard to leave the people that you love working with,” Johnson said.
In addition to the position change, Johnson is also finishing up a doctorate in Higher Education Leadership from Colorado State University. Her dissertation is focused on the impact of enrollment marketing on retention in higher education.
“That obviously affects me professionally but it will be a huge personal accomplishment, and as an undergrad, I never thought that would be something that I would pursue,” Johnson said.
At the end of the day, she said that her favorite part of working at Allegheny was seeing prospective students work through the college search process.
“There’s just something about having those conversations with students, being able to see their joy when they’re accepted,” Johnson said. “Having that student find their right fit, be really excited about it, show up on campus in the fall — there’s a real joy to that.”