AACRAO Spotlight interviews are published biweekly before major professional development meetings. They feature our conversations with industry experts, highlighting key issues and promoting sessions and workshops at the upcoming conference.
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In this issue of Connect, we talked with presenters of sessions part of the Research, Assessment & Publications Track, sponsored by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. These presentations use data to demonstrate how different SEM approaches can build enrollment.
We also talked with presenters from Western Seminary on how they used big data in a sophisticated way to drive retention efforts.
This year, The College at Brockport - State University of New York is enrolling it’s largest entering first year class in 30 years, says Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Management Randall Langston. “That’s in the face of declining demographics within New York State . Further, many of our metrics for academic quality and competitiveness haven’t declined, either,” he added. Langston credits that accomplishment to the institution’s data-driven strategic enrollment management plan and a terrific staff that has “buy-in” to this approach.
Read the interview with Langston here.
The term “big data” has been tossed around without a lot of definition, observed Reid Kisling, Registrar at Western Seminary. It’s one thing to be able to accumulate vast amounts of data—and another thing to be able to use that data in a sophisticated way.
Kisling and Andy Peterson, Ph.D., VP for Educational Innovation and Global Outreach will discuss a specific application for big data in their SEM presentation “Big Data for Retention: How one institution used existing database data to drive retention efforts,” and describe how the approach can be extended and modified for application at other institutions.
Read the interview with Kisling and Peterson here.
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Though it’s evolved into one of the most important administrative roles on a college campus, many people have only a vague notion of what registrars do. Few people in the career grew up dreaming about being a registrar. It’s not something you major in. “For a lot of people, it’s something they sort of fall into,” says Mary Hodder, Registrar at Douglas College in British Columbia.
Read the interview with Hodder here.