The (Only) Equation That Matters: What You Deliver vs. What Families Need
Independent schools facing enrollment pressure or financial strain often reach for tactical solutions—better marketing, facility upgrades, tuition discounting—without understanding the systemic dynamics at play. What's needed is a diagnostic lens that reveals the relationship between a school's design and its families' needs, a framework for understanding how that relationship shapes institutional health, and practical tools for honest assessment that lead to strategic rather than reactive decisions.
Where Schools Begin: A Diagnostic Lens After 35 Years
A school facing years of declining enrollment convenes its leadership team. The admissions director points to the website—it needs a refresh. The marketing coordinator argues the budget is too small to compete. A board member observes that the school across town just built a new athletics complex. "If we had those facilities," someone says, "our funnel would be healthier."
What no one says—what may be too difficult to say—is that declining enrollment over multiple years probably signals something more fundamental: a misalignment between what the school delivers and what families in its market need and want. The website, the marketing budget, the competitor's soccer program—these are misdiagnoses that let the room avoid naming the real problem.
After 35 years working in independent schools—as development director, finance guy, division leader, summer programs director, classroom teacher, program designer, admission and financial aid director, board member, and twice as head of school—I've learned that the most reliable entry point for understanding a school's stability and opportunity starts in the same place: the relationship between the school's essential design and the hopes, fears, and dreams of the families it serves.
This insight crystallized for me recently in an unexpected place: teaching applied economics to a group of high school students at Putney School. When we built our first extended simulation using real data from a real school, students immediately began asking questions not about the finances or the curriculum design, but about whether families would actually want what the school was offering. “Would parents pay for this?” “Does this match what families are looking for?” Their instinct—without any of my professional training—was to start with the relationship between what the school delivered and what families needed. It was the same entry point I'd been using for years without fully naming it.
The Program as Experienced
Schools operate with a stated program—the one described in marketing materials, strategic plans, and accreditation documents. But the only program that matters is the program as experienced by students and families. If a school doesn't achieve its stated intentions, what it actually achieves becomes the message communicated to the wider marketplace. And because we work in a sector where word-of-mouth carries more weight than any marketing campaign could hope to generate, the stories current families tell prospective families shape a school's market position more powerfully than anything else. (This is why I've always believed that narrative feedback reports are among a school's most important marketing efforts. They should have integrity, courage, and demonstrate that families hired us for our educational judgment—and that we trust that judgment enough to be honest.)
When the System Weakens
Think of a school's health like the human body. The operations—how revenue flows against expenses—function like cardiac health. The enrollment of mission-appropriate students, especially those who represent what the school aspires to become, constitutes the circulatory system. Healthy blood chemistry means students who raise the bar are arriving, connecting with faculty, and experiencing the school as it intends. Over time, as the body grows healthy and strong, the skeletal and muscular systems—the balance sheet, built from operating surpluses shifted into reserves, then savings, then endowment, and augmented by advancement relationships that produce philanthropic investment—provide structural stability.
But when enrollment declines, schools face cascading pressures that test every system. Revenue shrinks. Yet many schools, reluctant to face the reality of reduced scale, maintain staffing levels they can no longer afford. This structures a deficit. Simultaneously, anxious about enrollment, schools often increase tuition discounting—operating from the mistaken belief that lower prices will attract families more quickly. This overlooks a fundamental reality: independent schools are premium-priced products serving families in upper socioeconomic segments. Lack of confidence in our value proposition shows up immediately in pricing flexibility. But unless pricing structures were dramatically overhauled, we're still aiming for the same market segment to make our business model work.
The combination of overstaffing and over-discounting sets up the conditions for institutional decline. If these patterns persist, they eventually weaken the balance sheet—depleting reserves, limiting strategic capacity, and constraining the school's ability to invest in the very improvements that might reverse enrollment trends.
A Framework for Honest Assessment
In Seattle later this month, Mike Peller and I will be leading a session at the NAIS Annual Conference titled "Dancing Near the Precipice." Mike has lived both stories—he helped launch a high school expansion that soared, and he led a boarding school that closed despite everything the community tried. Between us, we've made decisions that worked and decisions that didn't. We're sharing diagnostic frameworks grounded in lived experience, not theory. We'll guide school leaders through specific questions and measurable metrics: Are you in stable or unstable equilibrium? Can necessary decisions get made? Who are you dangerously over-reliant on? Does your board know what it needs to know? Each question comes with indicators you can measure—yield rates, discount trends, market penetration, budget variance, enrollment projection accuracy.
The work matters because our schools matter. When schools clarify their value proposition, align their capacity with the students they serve best, and face their reality with honesty and courage, they don't just survive—they create the conditions for students to thrive. That's the work we're in this for.
If you'll be in Seattle, I hope you'll join us. And if you're wrestling with these questions at your own school, let's talk. The healthiest path forward often begins with a conversation we've been avoiding—and those conversations are easier when we're not having them alone.