About Hardwick-Day

When Jim Day was with the Minnesota Private College Council, he led a Lilly Endowment-funded study which documented that the state's publicly-subsidized flagship university enrolled a more affluent student body than its private colleges. This led Jim to found Hardwick-Day in 1994, to help private colleges and universities gain strategic competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Hardwick-Day is a national firm with offices in Minneapolis and Washington, DC. With a small group of principals, associates, analysts, and statisticians, Hardwick-Day engages with over 50 private college and university clients who represent a range of missions, selectivity, and sizes. Hardwick-Day has never advertised, and a majority of clients have been with the firm for nearly a decade.

Hardwick-Day is unique in at least four ways:

1) Hardwick-Day is the only enrollment counseling firm focused on private colleges and universities.

2) All Hardwick-Day principals have worked as cabinet-level officers in marketing, finance, or admissions for private colleges and universities.

3) Clients work only with principals, and the varied experience of all our principals is at the service of each client.

4) Beyond the firm's analytic and modeling capabilities, Hardwick-Day understands the lending industry and capital markets and provides valuable guidance for clients as they chart a productive relationship with the capital markets and families.

In addition to financial aid optimization, Hardwick-Day conducts comparative alumni research, operational assessments, financial modeling, focus group and survey research, seminars focused on the economics of college enrollment, and executive search and development services. The firm conducts discrete projects in some cases but serves as a sort of "investment banker" for most others—providing them with a full range of customized analytics and advice over many years.

Approach

In a fiercely competitive and highly dynamic market, the institutions with the most sophisticated understanding of price-demand response will fare better than their competitors both in terms of enrollment goals and net revenue generation. No matter how fine-tuned financial aid programs are, there are still systematic instances of over- and under-awarding, which, if they could be known and addressed, would contribute to additional efficiency, stronger yield, and ultimately a better market position. More...

People

Hardwick-Day is a small firm and collaborates closely on client engagements. Each of the principals brings a set of skills and successes that create a complementary, coherent whole: policy research and analysis, statistical virtuosity, marketing and communications perspectives from both academia and the business world, and every aspect of enrollment management operations. More...