The Kairos Difference
Your Partner for Success
The professionals at Kairos Higher Ed Partners are experts in higher education. Collectively, we have over 100 years of experience with numerous institutions.
We have worked with many of the industry’s top enrollment consultants…and we have been consistently dissatisfied. Their advice might work well for large public institutions with the resources and existing market demand to be able to truly leverage their classes, but our experience is that most of the models do not work for non-flagship institutions. They often focus on extremely expensive marketing programs or financial aid leveraging models that promise higher enrollment with more aid, but rarely deliver on that promise. Worse yet…the consultant is often providing similar advice to the institution’s competitor set, which causes a systemic race to the bottom. Along the way to the bottom, many institutions have developed an incremental financial aid model that no longer enables them to be competitive and fails to meet the needs of a large portion of their prospective students.
We understand the complexities of financial aid. We have worked with many of the leading consulting companies to develop traditional financial aid models. We have also developed another model that has exhibited better results. Our founder spent two decades as a CFO for multiple higher education institutions and understands the importance of managing the financial aid budget while maximizing enrollment. Instead of focusing on a failed financial aid leveraging model, we work with all institutional enrollment drivers (faculty, admissions, financial aid, dining, facilities, student life, retention experts, the business office, and more) to develop a coordinated and comprehensive enrollment plan. We have achieved significant improvements in enrollment, including record-setting classes and high-ROI academic programs, using this methodology.
We understand higher education finance. We have extensive experience in higher education, but we also have corporate finance experience before coming to higher education. This experience has enabled our team members to bring best practices to higher education finance. We excel at converting confusing and often contradictory financial statements and internal budgets into consistent information that is easily understood and can be used to make appropriate management decisions. We build long-range financial projection models that empower institutional leadership to make timely decisions that are crucial to the success of the institution.
We bring all these skills together in a holistic manner to help our clients succeed. Together, we partner with our clients to break the downward spiral and achieve great things.
Why Choose Kairos?
Kairos is not another consulting firm delivering boilerplate solutions to any institution they can. We are a different kind of partner, with a different mission:
We provide a unique combination of enrollment management, academic programming, operational efficiencies, and institutional finance experience that focuses on revenue, results, and accountability.
We interview each potential client to confirm that we can help them achieve the outcomes they are seeking
We will not provide Enrollment or Financial Aid support to your competitors. We avoid partnering with your top overlap schools at the same time we are partnering with you to ensure that we are not providing our advantage in these areas to your competition.
We work with only a small group of clients each year to ensure that each partner receives individualized ongoing support.
We specialize in working with institutions that are at pivotal moments and need to make a change. We excel at helping institutions quickly develop and implement changes to achieve strategic goals within their institutional culture.
Kairos Higher Ed Partners
KAIROS means the opportune and decisive moment, or the time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action. This word has a very special meaning to us. We have felt the pain of increased enrollment and financial pressure for years, and there is no doubt that all higher education institutions are facing a decisive moment. But we have found that there are opportunities within this troubled marketplace. Now is the time to take action, and we specialize in helping our partner institutions identify, develop, and successfully implement strategies for success.
HIGHER EDucation is our focus. Our extensive experience in enrollment, financial aid, academic programming, student success, finance, data analysis, faculty relations, strategic initiatives, facilities management, and other key drivers of the higher education business model empowers us to provide a very different perspective than other firms. We use our collective experience and expertise to help our partner institutions succeed.
We are PARTNERS with our clients. Our primary concern is the success of our clients. We work alongside you to help ensure your success. Our client’s success is so important to us that we agree not to provide enrollment management services to any of our client’s top ten cross-app institutions during the term of our agreement with the client. Our process is a differentiating factor, and we do not want to compete against ourselves in the marketplace. We are not trying to become a large company that is sold to one of the mega firms (or private equity)…we are striving to help individual institutions thrive in these challenging times.
At Kairos, our job is not to critique your enrollment team or to provide lofty recommendations that can only be implemented in a perfect world. Our role is to be the resource that your team needs to take their results to the next level.
No one enrollment leader, no matter how talented, can be an expert in everything. Great leaders need a team of experts to complement their strengths, provide additional insight in a rapidly evolving market, and build the skills of their teams. That’s where Kairos’s proven system of building a foundational enrollment culture is key.