Every week, it seems like another headline tries to describe graduate enrollment like it’s one monolithic creature lumbering across the landscape. It never is. Anyone actually working on a grad enrollment team knows the truth: You’re managing a collection of micro-markets that don’t sync up, don’t behave politely, and don’t read the same weather report.

And the newest survey data from programs using Liaison’s BusinessCAS, GradCAS, or EngineeringCAS application platforms just confirms what everyone’s been feeling in their bones all year. It’s not one story. It’s a dozen stories happening at once. Here are a few, anchored in data that come from real users of our Centralized Application Service platforms, that matter right now.

Most Grad Teams Are Small… and Carrying More than Their Share

Seventy-three percent of graduate programs responding to our latest survey of Liaison CAS users enroll under 500 students. That means most teams are tiny: picture the coffee-powered, spreadsheet-heavy, multi-hat operations trying to hold a funnel together while the market throws curveballs in three time zones.

The old assumption that “grad is stable” has quietly expired. You can see it in how jittery pipelines feel, in the sudden pressure to squeeze more yield from thinner pools, in the way even seasoned directors are double-checking their forecasts like they don’ttrust their own eyes.

Small teams can do incredible things, but they can’t conjure capacity out of thin air. Focus becomes oxygen. Tools that extend reach matter more than tools that merely report on the chaos.

Marketing Budgets Are Becoming a Strategic Fault Line

A third of programs either don’t have dedicated marketing dollars or don’t know what they are. The most common bucket—up to $50K—couldn’t fund one solid undergrad campaign, let alone an entire grad portfolio trying to hold ground.

Meanwhile, the cost to reach prospects has climbed every year. Students expect to hear from programs that want them. Silence reads as disinterest, and disinterest reads like, “Maybe I should apply elsewhere.”

In a normal year, this would be a problem. In a volatile market, it’s a liability. Schools moving budget with intention by aligning to program goals instead of last year’s spreadsheet are the ones holding their altitude.

Discounting Is Everywhere… Except in the Conversations That Matter

More than a quarter of programs don’t know their own tuition discount rate. In 2025. With yield friction rising. Discounting used to be boutique: used sparingly, debated endlessly. Now it’s part of the operating system, and many enrollment teams still aren’t plugged into the logic behind it. It’s hard to shape a class when you don’t control the levers that shape behavior.

The schools weathering volatility best are the ones treating finance as a partner, not a distant department. With hared language. Shared dashboards. Shared timelines. Otherwise, you’re playing the game with half the board erased.

“Some Goals Met” Is the New Normal

Only 3% of programs hit all their enrollment targets. Ninety-four percent were in the “some” category, which is higher ed’s version of “We survived… mostly.” And this isn’t a blip. The wild swings of recent cycles have settled into something steadier and stranger: chronic volatility. Enrollment leaders can’t plan around averages anymore because averages don’t describe the lived experience.

More and more schools are building multiple models because the market demands it. Pivoting by week is becoming the norm.

Application Trends Look Less Like Data and More Like a Weather Map

Thirty percent of programs say apps are up. Forty-two percent say they’re flat. Twenty-eight percent say down. That’s not a trend line, it’s a thunderstorm rolling across a patchy landscape, hitting some valleys hard and skipping others entirely.

National patterns can’t tell you anything meaningful anymore. Peer groups matter. Modality matters. Geography matters. The programs doing this well are comparing themselves to their real market, not the imaginary national one.

The Outlook for Fall 2026: A Pretty Even Split Between Hope, Worry, and Shrugging

Thirty percent expect applicant growth. Twenty-five percent expect no change. Twenty-three percent expect a decline. Twenty-two percent aren’t sure.

That blend of confidence, caution, and shrug-emoji uncertainty has become the ambient tone of graduate enrollment. And most leaders aren’t short on skill here, but the real challenge is navigating signals that keep rearranging themselves, nudged by policy shifts, student behavior changes, and the noisy mechanics of a market still finding its balance.

So What’s the Real Takeaway?

Graduate enrollment is fragmented, uneven, and sensitive to visibility, staffing, timing, and a dozen small structural factors no dashboard fully captures. The programs doing the best aren’t the big dogs with the biggest budgets, they’re the ones with the clearest line of sight, one made possible by data granular enough to distinguish between “a genuine problem” and “a harmless market echo.”

And that’s the quiet advantage of the programs contributing this data: They’re sitting on CAS platforms that give them comparative, program-level intelligence without guesswork.

If you had this kind of dataset—clean, structured, and pooled across peers—you wouldn’t need to squint at your softening app numbers wondering whether trouble is brewing.

You’d know.

And in a year like this, knowing is the difference between showing up late to the moment… and getting ahead of it.