by Sara Jones, Sr. Director of Client Education & Strategic Advancement, Sr. Director of Marketing at EMAS Pro
I love it when a plan comes together!
Sitting in the AACRAO SEM presentation by the representatives from Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, it became really clear that their plan was coming together.
Their Problem:
35% declining enrollment
Their Solution:
Team-based, data–driven Strategic Enrollment Management from student search to and through graduation.
How they did it:
Raquel Fong, Academic Success Coordinator, and Jenna Kahl, Director of Enrollment and Outreach, were clearly professional educators and partners on a mission – recruit and retain the next generation of Arizona’s teachers. They did their homework, they made a 4 part strategic plan and a 10-part assessment tool, they engaged their stakeholders and they did not let up. They also put the students first.
Doing their homework (a.k.a. research) consisted of knowing what exactly the problem was and what tools they had available to help them. For instance, knowing that 42% of high school graduates express an interest in teaching and 10% go on to pursue it told them that somewhere along the way, future teachers were being steered away from their interests. By putting more advocates in the future teacher’s path, ASU could better influence the 32% of those future teacher who fell through the cracks.
Their 4-part strategic plan was not rocket science. It was very simple.
1) Collaborate with stakeholders.
This was impressive. ASU’s teacher college partnered with K-12 educators to formalize the personalized, 1-1 advising pipeline to the Teacher’s College. They engaged the faculty in recruiting people into their own programs with the ‘enroll them or lose the program’ motivations. ASU’s Teacher College also became the founding partner with RAISE, the microscholarship portal www.raise.me, to help students find funding for college.
2) Have strategic touch points.
This dynamic team realized that there are two tools that would help them engage the students and their support network – social norming and motivation for change. What a difference these two simple, yet insightful tools for communication and persuasion made.
Regarding social norming, ASU trained its staff to change their use of language and increase their use of data to better influence their students. Instead of saying, “the deadline for the FAFSA is coming up, you better get going on this.” They instead said things like, “75% of your peers have already got their FAFSA filled out, do you know when you might get yours filled out?” This subtle change in language, impacted significantly the actions of their students and prospects.
ASU also trained its staff in the ‘motivation for change’ approach, providing them with insight on what transactional behaviors and information to offer students in the 5 different stages they naturally progress through in their decision and commitment to enroll and persist to and through graduation. Being able to tell where students are on the continuum (Pre-contemplation, Contemplation, Preparation, Action and Maintenance) enabled both the recruitment staff and the student success/ retention staff to know what message to deliver at the right time, to the right frame of mind.
3) Holistically develop the student through Academic Advising.
Using all the strategies above, the student success staff focused on 4 key strategies. First, they assigned students to advisors by their major so that they were interacting with people with like passions and experiences. Then, they engaged in early outreach. And third, for New Student Orientation, they created and delivered a student-centered, year-long advising syllabus to articulate what the advisors were responsible for and what the students were responsible for. This early outreach, coupled with active advising from the start, helped students see exactly what was expected of them from the very beginning, through their first year. Through data crunching and satisfaction surveys, the Teachers College learned that this combination resulted in 90.5% retention rate from year one to year two and an 82% retention rate for first time freshmen. Finally, they kept up the developmental focus based on the motivation to change approach.
4) Utilize student leadership.
Understanding that students out number advisors and that students often are more motivated by peers than authority figures, the ASU Teachers College engaged their more mature students as ambassadors to create a team between student advisors and student ambassadors to ultimately provide a student-centered support. The ambassadors got to practice their human development and newly acquired teaching skills and the advisors had trusted partners in the ambassadors and ‘engaged the village’ to support the students.
In Chapter 3 of the AACRAO publication, Strategic Enrollment Management: Transforming Higher Education, Paul Dosal and Ron and Dori Ingersoll list 10 steps to leading change in higher education. It seems to me, that ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton’s Teachers College nailed all 10!
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Scholarly Articles for Social Norming:
Allcott, H. (2011). Social norms and energy conservation. Journal of Public Economics, 95(5), 1982-2095.
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational. New York: Harper Collins.
Cialdini, R.B. (2008). Influence: Science and Practice, 5th ed. Boston: Pearson.
Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., & Vlaev, I. (2010). MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy. London, UK: Cabinet Office.
National Social Norms Institute. (2015, November 9). Retrieved from National Social Norms Institute: www.socialnorms.org.