Students are settling into yet another school year on many of our campuses, ready to give the old college try (we hope) in their particular fields of study. Of course, while they may have just started file in, most AACRAO members have been hard at work preparing for their arrival since early August, if not earlier. While there are innumerable logistical tasks to complete both in advance and during the student’s time at school this semester, it can be helpful to take a step back and realize that as tedious, trying, or archaic as some of these duties may be, they all serve to put students in a position to succeed.
Considerations to boost student success
Naturally, there is great incentive to make these tasks that support student success more efficient and impactful, but there is no magic bullet. Indeed, this process helps form the foundation for the field of strategic enrollment management. As Bob Bontrager and Christine Kerlin put it at AACRAO’s 2004 Annual Meeting, you must consider “the characteristics of the institution and the world around it; institutional mission and priorities; optimal enrollments; student recruitment; student fees and financial aid; retention; institutional marketing; career counseling and development; academic advising; curricular and program development; methods of program delivery, and; quality of campus life and facilities.”
Phew.
You could likely include even more components than these, but the fact remains that it takes a village. Regardless of where you happen to fall within the range of the student lifecycle or your institution’s organizational structure, you can actively support a student as they progress towards graduation.
The benefits of a homogenous data environment
Technical applications occupy an integral role in the enrollment management paradigm, since a well-designed system can help support any stakeholder acting to support or participate in the student lifecycle. In the Handbook of Strategic Enrollment Management, Wendy Kilgore and Brent Gage note that an ideal technological solution would be homogenous – “that is, one in which the goals and needs of all end users is the same” – and would help to support effective reporting capabilities, appropriate recording mechanisms, processing automation which improves overall business efficiency, and the creation of tools that allow campus stakeholders to access information readily in the general pursuit of a data-driven decision-making culture (pages 429, 433). Of course, the authors readily admit that many institutions, for any number of reasons, do not have a homogenous data environment, since many departments have disparate technical needs from their tools.
Join the webinar
On September 22, AACRAO is offering a webinar in conjunction with OnBase by Hyland which will examine the role that technology plays to support student success. Join Susan Reyes, an analyst and programmer for Enrollment Services at Sand Diego State University, and Tuan Anh Do, the Director of Enterprise Applications at San Francisco State University, as they discuss their experiences with leveraging technology in the student lifecycle and share seven steps to improve student outcomes for 2017.
Read more and register here. Also, look for an interview with the presenters in the next issue of AACRAO Connect – stay tuned!