Category Archives: Enrollment Management

April 17, 2013, 3:11 pm

Creating an Environment That Helps Adult Students Succeed

San Francisco — Adult students are an unrecognized minority group at traditional colleges. Not only are there fewer students who fall into that category, but the institutions have been set up to serve a different type of student. That’s the case two administrators at Mount Mercy University made here on Wednesday at a session of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ annual meeting.

The two officials—Colette Atkins, assistant dean of adult accelerated programs, and Jason Clapp, the registrar—described how they had worked together to meet the needs of older students who have job and family responsibilities on top of academic ones.

In the coming years, the adult-student population is projected to grow more quickly than the traditional-age one nationwide, Mr. Clapp said. “We need to be paying attention to that market.”

Mount Mercy started an…

April 15, 2013, 6:47 pm

The Pros and Cons of Tuition Dependence for Public Colleges

By Beckie Supiano

San Francisco — As state support for higher education has plummeted, public colleges have had to look elsewhere for money. That shift has brought changes, both good and bad, said Bradley Barnes during a session here on Monday of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ annual meeting.

Many public colleges act more like private ones in their pursuit of and reliance on tuition revenue, said Mr. Barnes, senior associate director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. “You may not want to admit it,” he said, “but it’s happening.”

On the positive side, tuition can be a more reliable form of revenue than state support is, Mr. Barnes said. That can give colleges a little more stability.

But as public colleges seek more students who can pay more, and especially those from out of state who are charged a much higher…

April 15, 2013, 6:00 am

What Colleges Can Learn About Applicants From When They Apply

By James Roche

What can admissions offices learn about prospective students based on when they send in their applications? Quite a bit, writes James Roche in a guest post today. Mr. Roche, associate provost for enrollment management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will present on this topic at the annual meeting this week of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Several years ago, as director of institutional research and a member of the enrollment-management team at Washington State University, I and some of my colleagues were reviewing our admissions process. As we pored over an already-very-thorough application-review procedure to see what else we could consider, one member of the group joked that maybe we should just admit students as they applied, first come first served, until we hit our enrollment target.

While we never pursued that route…

April 9, 2013, 4:32 pm

Enrollment Management Must Build for the Future, Experts Say

By Beckie Supiano

Enrollment management has become more challenging and more important in the wake of the recession and as colleges stand on the precipice of sweeping demographic change. That’s what Don Hossler and David H. Kalsbeek argue in an update to an essay on enrollment management they wrote five years ago.

The original essay traced the rise of strategic enrollment management, or SEM. Mr. Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, and Mr. Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University, wrote about how enrollment managers use their expanding portfolios to balance their colleges’ competing priorities.

Today “the issues are becoming more complicated, not less,” Mr. Hossler says. Presidents don’t all have to be enrollment-management experts, he says, but they do need to make sure they have…

March 27, 2013, 12:14 pm

Shared Governance and Enrollment Management

By John M. Baworowsky

Working with faculty members can lead to better decisions in enrollment management, John M. Baworowsky writes in a guest post today. Such a partnership can be valuable in designing new programs, marketing the institution, and more, says Mr. Baworowsky, vice president for enrollment management at Dominican University of California.

The concept of shared governance is a cornerstone of our decision-making structure. In 1920 the American Association of University Professors issued a statement calling for shared responsibility between faculty members, administrators, and boards. The organization asserted that higher-education institutions cannot adequately prepare students in an environment where faculty members have no input or control. Consequently, governance, or decision making, is shared between the administration and the faculty with the ultimate goal of producing better outcomes for…

March 24, 2013, 8:55 pm

Going to See ‘Admission’ With an Admissions Officer

By Eric Hoover

Tina Fey as Portia Nathan, a fictional admissions officer at Princeton U., in the film.

On Saturday I went to see Admission with Aundra Weissert, the super-cool associate director of admissions at Washington College, in Maryland. Although we agreed this wasn’t a great movie (“expectedly Hollywood-ized,” she says), some moments resonated with her. The best scenes captured truths about the national bellyache known as the application process.

Several details about life as an admissions officer were just right. There’s a scene in which Portia Nathan (Tina Fey), a fictional admissions officer at Princeton University, is driving to a high school she’s never visited when her navigation system goes haywire. “Everyone in admissions has a story about GPS failure,” Ms. Weissert says.

In the movie, one of Ms. Nathan’s …

March 4, 2013, 10:11 am

The Next Big Thing in Enrollment Management

By John M. Baworowsky

In a guest post today, John M. Baworowsky writes that social media could be a game changer for student recruitment–if enrollment managers got better at using those new tools.

I often wonder what the next big thing in enrollment management might be, and how changes in technology, communication, and information consumption will change how American colleges and universities reach prospective students. And I look to diverse sources for direction and inspiration. Recently, I ran across an article in Hemispheres magazine that featured an interview with Fareed Zakaria, the well-known Time magazine and CNN commentator. Zakaria suggested that “the ability to interact openly, without any kind of constraint,” is the key to innovation. I also recently read a white paper on change and innovation written for Kelmscott Communications by Kathleen M. Cross, called “Six Great New Ways…

February 7, 2013, 3:01 pm

The ‘Delicate Duplicitousness’ of What I Do

By Rick DiFeliciantonio

In a guest post today, Rick DiFeliciantonio, vice president for enrollment at Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania, describes the duality of his job.

A liberal-arts college is a strange and quirky combination of a church and a business, and the vice president for enrollment must act as both pious membership chair and hard-nosed, back-room sales manager. I must keep focused on my sacred role in the development of the soul of the 17-year-old, while at the same time stay apprised for my Board of Trustees of the imperatives of marketing, branding, and price optimization. My heart is responsible for the mission of the ministry; my mind is responsible for the company’s bottom line.