History

In January 2001, Michael Ditchkofsky, who was then the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Peterson’s, initiated a key client program designed to reinvigorate Peterson’s relationships with its principal institutional customers. The request heard repeatedly from clients was for help with recruiting strategies, since most graduate programs—if they did any recruiting at all—focused on recruiting tactics with little or no sense of whether those tactics were successful.

By summer, a sales program aimed at Graduate Deans and Research Officers was launched and implemented by Peterson’s senior executives to provide help in developing recruiting strategies for those programs that participated in Peterson’s traditional recruiting services. The program was extremely successful for clients who chose to participate. One university reported an increase in graduate enrollment of 34% in a year during which the average national enrollment increase was about 7%. Another university in the Midwest experienced a 60% increase in domestic applications to graduate engineering programs.

Due to the focus on student recruitment, there was a necessary focus also on program competitiveness. This focus naturally led to an examination of more strategic issues and concerns: Were programs optimally configured to compete for external funding? What strategic hires could programs make to improve their research profiles? What infrastructure improvements would be required to introduce a new program? What areas of research focus would departments need to choose in order to impact their fields?

Because the bulk of the Group’s time was spent on these issues, it broke away—in January 2003—from Peterson’s traditional higher education business division and became a separate division in its own right: the Academic Services Group at Peterson’s. In the following year or so, client work took the Group even further afield from where it started: strategic planning for doctoral programs and research; program competitive assessment; faculty instructional capacity; program marketability assessment; program feasibility analysis; organizational development and planning; and institutional change management.

By February 2004, it was clear that the mission of the Academic Services Group had evolved beyond Peterson’s traditional business of recruiting students. What began as a graduate student recruiting service evolved into a capacity to solve strategic problems related particularly to research universities. The Yardley Research Group, co-founded by Michael Ditchkofsky and Louise Williamson, was incorporated on April 19, 2004.