Ask a group of heads of school what changed in admissions over the last five years, and the conversation lands in the same place. Families are more transactional. They shop harder. They ask for proof before they commit. Institutional loyalty isn’t what it used to be.
Then someone names the cause: millennial parents.
That diagnosis is understandable, and it is a dead end. You cannot build strategy around when your families were born.
I keep returning to a conversation I had with Megan Gerhardt, professor of management and leadership at Miami University and co-author of Gentelligence, on the Independent School Moonshot Podcast, Why Generational Conflict Is the Wrong Diagnosis. When the episode first aired, I framed it around hiring and retention, because that was what school leaders were raising with me at the time. Now my conversations are more often about admissions, re-enrollment, and uncertainty. The framework holds up better in that context than it did in the original one.
The story schools are telling themselves about millennial parents
Millennial parents now make up a significant percentage of the applicant pool at independent schools and a growing share of current families. The story attached to them is familiar: they are more transactional than the generation before them, they do not extend loyalty to institutions by default, and they want to see what they are buying before they buy it.
Nobody claims every millennial parent behaves this way, and Megan is careful about that distinction. She describes generational norms as frequency rather than traits. A norm is something a generation holds more often than the one before it, which is different from a stereotype that sorts every person by birth year.
Read that way, the signals are worth paying attention to. They are showing up in inquiry conversations, campus visits, and re-enrollment decisions.
The behavior is real. The diagnosis is where it goes wrong.
Parents are comparing tuition against options that did not exist in the same form ten years ago. A family can now assemble something that resembles an independent school experience out of a strong public school, club sports, an arts or theater program, private tutoring, and summer enrichment. The pieces are available separately, and the total cost usually lands below tuition.
That is not a generational attitude. That is an unbundled market putting real pressure on a bundled product.
Blaming a generation leaves a school with no move to make. Understanding what is driving the behavior gives leadership something to plan around, because expectations can be anticipated, tested, and answered.
What families want has not changed. What counts as proof has.
Megan’s research was done on workplaces rather than admissions offices, and it points to needs that hold steady across age groups. People want respect, agency, and connection at 22 and at 62. What shifts between generations is the evidence each one expects before it believes those needs are being met.
Applied to enrollment, that reframes the whole conversation.
What families want from an independent school has been remarkably stable. They want their child known, stretched, prepared, and part of a community that means something.
What has changed is what parents accept as proof of it.
An earlier generation of parents was more likely to treat reputation and longevity as evidence enough. The name, the campus, the alumni list, the sense that the school had been doing this well for a long time. If the signals are correct, a large share of millennial parents have already priced out the alternatives, and they want to know what a specific school delivers that they cannot assemble any other way.
That is not a loyalty problem. It is a different standard of proof, and meeting it is the school’s job, not the family’s.
Why this shows up twice in your enrollment funnel
School outcomes are usually already there. Faculty know them. Long-tenured families feel them. The harder part is helping a family see them quickly, in the language they use, inside a decision window that is shorter than it used to be.
When a parent cannot explain what a school delivers, the cost shows up in two places.
It shows up in admissions, where the school looks like one credible option among several and the decision defaults to price or convenience.
Then it shows up again in re-enrollment, usually around a transition year, when a family reassesses and cannot articulate what they would lose by leaving.
Retention is the more expensive of the two, and it is the one leadership teams tend to notice last.
Two things worth doing before inquiry season
Run the assumption test on your own language
Megan’s core practical move is to stop assuming shared meaning. Applied to admissions:
- Pull the five words that appear most often in your admissions materials. They are probably some version of community, individualized attention, character, whole child, and belonging.
- Ask a small group of current parents what each word means to them.
- Ask what would count as evidence that your school is delivering it.
- When an answer is vague, borrow her question: “Can you help me understand what that means to you?”
You may find that the school and its families have been having two different conversations using the same vocabulary for years.
Build an evidence inventory
For each of those five words, write down the specific, checkable thing a family could point to. Not the aspiration. The proof.
If the claim is that students are known, the evidence is the advisory structure, the frequency of contact, the name of the adult responsible when something goes wrong at 9pm. If the claim is preparation, the evidence is what graduates do in their first two years after leaving, not just where they enrolled.
Anything on the list without evidence behind it is either a program gap or a communication gap. Both are fixable. They are fixed differently, and knowing which one you have is the point of the exercise.
This is also where enrollment work stops being a marketing project and becomes a strategy question. If a school’s distinctive value cannot be stated plainly and backed with evidence, the pricing conversation gets harder every year. That connection between what a school delivers, what it charges, and what it can sustain is the work I do with schools through Strategy + The School Operating System, because articulating value and funding it are the same problem approached from two directions.
What this means for boards
Boards tend to hear the enrollment story as a marketing performance issue. Softening yield, more aggressive financial aid, a competitor that keeps showing up in the same decisions.
The more useful board-level question is different. What does this school deliver that a family cannot assemble from the alternatives available in this market, and what evidence do we have that we are delivering it?
That question sits upstream of the admissions budget. It touches program, staffing, pricing, and the strategic plan. It is a governance conversation, not a departmental one.
FAQ
Are millennial parents actually less loyal to independent schools?
The behavior driving that impression is real, but loyalty is the wrong frame. These parents are applying a different standard of evidence before committing, largely because credible alternatives can now be assembled piece by piece. Schools that can demonstrate distinctive value tend to hold these families well.
What is the difference between a generational norm and a stereotype?
A norm describes something a generation holds more often than the one before it. A stereotype assigns a trait to every individual based on birth year. The first is useful for planning. The second is not.
Where does this show up first in the enrollment funnel?
Usually in inquiry and campus visit conversations, where families ask more specific outcome questions than they did a decade ago. The same dynamic reappears at re-enrollment, particularly at division transitions.
Is this a marketing problem or a strategy problem?
Both, in sequence. If the outcomes exist and families cannot see them, it is a communication problem. If the outcomes cannot be evidenced, it is a strategy problem, and better messaging will not solve it.
The four practices
Megan and her co-authors built four practices for working across generational differences, and the episode walks through all of them. They were written for managing a workforce. They translate to admissions and retention more directly than you would expect.
Visit the episode page to listen to the full conversation.
I would like to hear what resonates and what questions it raises.