Not all colleges and universities have formal, fully-articulated strategic enrollment (SEM) plans. And even institutions with SEM plans sometimes find those plans gathering dust on a shelf, rather than being the student success drivers they were intended to be.
“Many institutions don’t have a comprehensive SEM plan, or they have a SEM plan that went bust, but you still must communicate coherently to the student and remain focused on the student experience,” said Nora McLaughlin, Registrar at Reed College.
Reed College has never adopted a campus-wide SEM plan, in part because of the college culture.
“Reed avoids unnecessary bureaucracy.” McLaughlin said. “That’s a good thing, but it can also mean that people may not be talking with each other about what’s important.”
Multiple smaller initiatives
In the last few years, instead of a broad SEM plan, a number of smaller communication and collaboration initiatives have sprung up on campus along with more broad-based efforts.
“Some of these initiatives emerged as efforts to promote communications among different offices, rather than waiting for a campus-wide directive,’” McLaughlin said. “By doing these smaller things, we’re building an infrastructure of communication and planning that supports our shared goals.”
Across Reed, these kinds of projects have developed organically, in what McLaughlin laughingly described as the the “Trojan-horse model” of SEM.
“These initiatives don’t always come from the top down,” she said. “In one case, it was three offices sitting together in a room saying -- look, all three of us are reaching out to students who haven’t enrolled, and that probably looks like we’re not communicating with each other -- because we aren’t.” For example, the financial aid, registrar, and housing offices may each be contacting the student, but not communicating with one another about what they know about the student.
“Why not collaborate to find a solution: Why haven’t they enrolled yet?” McLaughlin said. “Once we did that, we developed a strategy for communicating with students and with each other to promote better student engagement.”
Get the right people in the room
In addition to better tracking student enrollment, McLaughlin identified other issues that have been solved by more localized enrollment management strategies, such as creating a committee for data governance, addressing student retention, and streamlining the leave of absence process.
“We’ve learned an important aspect of problem-solving is to get the right people in the room to have productive conversations,” McLaughlin said. “Engaging individuals with relevant expertise helps us both manage our finite resources and identify our shared direction. Even without a big-picture SEM plan, we can ensure offices are talking to each other and we can serve our students more effectively.”
McLaughlin will share more about Reed College’s experience with “Getting the Right People in the Room” at the AACRAO SEM Conference, Nov. 11-14, 2018, in Washington, DC. Learn more and register now.