I get what you're saying and believe me this college was anything but normal, but from what I seen it wasn't much different regardless of the college, it's size or student target.
Our college president at the time was nuts about studies and data. He did tons of studies and research of how students perceived us vs other colleges/universities. One of the studies I saw focused within a 250 mile radius of us and came back that we were the "safety college" when other colleges wouldn't accept them and we would be either their second or third choice. When you dug deeper into it, the students that did come to us didn't get accepted by 1 of 3 close to us large universities which I though was very odd because 1 of them (a very large Big10 state university) had satellite campuses all over the state (4 were in that radius alone) that was in the same boat we were in and were way under-enrolled, would accept anybody, and these satellite campuses were basically back doors to get into the main campus once you passed through freshman year.
Out of 40+ college and universities in that radius, only 5 were either at enrollment or were over-enrolled to the point where they were in a position to turn down students. 3 were large state universities and 2 were specialty universities larger than us. 2 colleges merged into 1 college due to dwindling enrollment. All of the rest were under-enrolled and ranged from being extremely small community colleges to state funded colleges easily 5 times our size. Price wise we were below average for our size and were best value ranked in US News and World Report at the time so cost wasn't considered a factor vs other colleges in our region.
The response by the president armed with all of this data was that we needed to stand out more from the crowd, offer incentives and postgraduate degrees and ultimately expand and focus on our strengths similar to a specialty university. Unfortunately the faculty heard him say the U word, freaked out, and he was gone by the end of that year.