By Kimberly McNair, EdD, Associate Senior Vice President for Strategic Enrollment Management, Montgomery College, Live from SEM 2024
Real stories from our AACRAO community prove that even the most ambitious changes are achievable with the right partnerships. Presenters from the Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS) and several of its system colleges provided an overview of their journey to develop and align enrollment management efforts to participants at the SEM 2024 Conference in Boston. The LCTCS serves three distinct populations: workforce students, credit-bearing students, and adults. There are 12 colleges in the LCTCS system, serving more than 150,000 students throughout the year. Learn from highlights of their session “Strategic Enrollment Management: A System-Wide Approach to Transforming Community and Technical Colleges,” which reveals the strategies, partnerships, benefits, and activities that turned a daunting vision into attainable goals with plans to reach them.
Setting Goals and Creating Partnerships
The Louisiana Board of Regents mandated a statewide goal stating that 60% of adults would achieve some sort of educational attainment. Using the statewide goal as a baseline, the LCTCS established its goal of graduating 330,000 individuals by 2030. Each of the 12 colleges has its own goal, which is expected to increase by approximately 6% yearly. Strategic enrollment management is needed at the system and college levels. A new policy outlining the system’s and colleges' responsibilities was developed as one of the initial efforts.
Given the scope of the work, the LCTCS Board utilized some of its grant funding from the Lumina Foundation to secure a 12-month partnership with AACRAO Consulting. In addition to training, AACRAO consultants worked with individual colleges using a cohort model to help those institutions either tweak their current enrollment management plans or develop entirely new enrollment management plans.
Presenters described several benefits of the partnership with AACRAO Consulting:
- SEM Training: an overview of SEM was provided to chancellors and their teams
- SEM Plan Writing Project: opportunities were created for broad and diverse representation and input from the college community
- Project Management: the project had a definitive start and end, reducing initiative fatigue
- Consistency: the same frameworks were used across all 12 institutions, a data dictionary helped ensure a single source of truth, and each institution had ownership over its approach to developing and/or refining its enrollment management plan
Customized Activities
Three colleges in the system opted to utilize an AACRAO "SEM Lite" approach, keeping and making tweaks to their enrollment management plans that were developed before or during the COVID-19 pandemic. Representatives from South Louisiana Community College, Fletcher Technical Community College, and SOWELA Technical Community College each attributed one or more of the following activities as being instrumental in helping them achieve their individual enrollment goals, which in turn support the overarching statewide goal:
- Careful reflection and consideration of who is important to bring to the table
- Implementing 8-week terms
- Increased efforts to convert non-credit/workforce students to credit programs
- Tell our story, i.e. the importance and value of a college education
- Bring students to help bolster recruitment events and activities
- Train interested faculty and staff to help with recruitment
- Collaborate with academic departments and others outside of enrollment management
- Utilize geofencing to send pop-up reminders about payment and registration deadlines
- Hold student town hall meetings and allow them to voice their truths
- Utilize change management practices
- Keep the enrollment management plan simple by focusing on 4-6 of the most important goals