• Publications Release: Higher Education’s Road to Relevance

    10/21/2020

    AACRAO Consultant Dr. Laura Wankel and Susan A. Ambrose’s book, Higher Education’s Road to Relevance was released in summer 2020.

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  • Use data science to nudge students at exactly the right time

    10/16/2020

    Getting students to follow through isn’t easy. Whether applying for financial aid, registering for classes, or paying bills, they can seem frustratingly indifferent to requirements and deadlines. And this truism is only exacerbated by the stresses of the pandemic. So, how can you encourage students to take steps toward their academic goals?

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  • Update on AACRAO’s Strategic Planning process

    10/05/2020

    Deploying the expertise and experience of AACRAO Consulting, the AACRAO Board is in the final stages of a year-long process of developing a new strategic plan. Most recently, consultants Stan Henderson and Tomikia LeGrande spent the summer gathering feedback via focus groups with various AACRAO stakeholders, including AACRAO staff and leadership (i.e. PAC Chairs, Program Committee, task force and committee chairs, caucus chairs, and state & regional leaders), and will report their findings to the Board next week.

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  • S3E6: How to Work Smarter

    10/05/2020

    Tools, methods, and approaches to help you focus and operate more efficiently

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  • Is the SEM Process useful in a time of seismic change?

    10/01/2020

    As higher education professionals, our chief mission is to provide an optimal educational environment. We are enabled to do that if our institution is healthy, a state usually reached when our enrollment meets our expectations. Thanks to the pandemic, our status and our expectations are now a matter of new and uneasy speculation.

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  • Reflections on the 2020 March on Washington

    09/29/2020

    Dear Somebody…please let it be you! Everyone is aware of the recent racial and social injustice events that have taken place in our nation. If you have never heard the names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, use a simple google search or go back through history to other notable civil rights activists such as Representative John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, Jr to determine what we are fighting for. Racial inequality tensions escalated this past May with the death of George Floyd and the involvement of four police officers in Minneapolis. Various industries began issuing response statements, and Institutions of Higher Education were not an exception.

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  • September - New Research Advisory Board members, burnout, and impact of 2020 disruptions

    09/25/2020

    "One thing that is clear from the initial review is that our members are experiencing elevated levels of stress professionally and are both feeling burnout and observing burnout in their co-workers."

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  • S3E5 - Registrar Tips, Tricks, and Hacks - Vol. 1

    09/15/2020

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  • S2E3: The Future of Globalizing Higher Education

    09/15/2020

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  • Holistic admissions: A just solution at a pivotal moment

    09/14/2020

    Higher education is in the midst of a “test-optional revolution,” according to Michele Sandlin, Managing Consultant, AACRAO Consulting. “With the College Board and ACT unable to do college entrance exams due to the pandemic, a huge volume of schools are going test-optional,” Sandlin said. “Some are saying that change will be temporary, but a lot of predictions are that test-optional is here to stay.”

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  • Recruitment Planning for Fall 2021 (and beyond?)

    09/03/2020

    Join AACRAO Consultant James Miller, Director of Admissions at Seattle University, on Friday, September 18th from 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm EDT as he hosts an AACRAO Coffee Break about how you and your colleagues are meeting recruitment challenges this fall.

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  • “Strategic” doesn’t mean static

    08/31/2020

    In unpredictable times, institutions must be able to plan and respond nimbly. A well-developed Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) plan can be enormously helpful in this undertaking.

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  • August - Stranded credits, digital learning, and assessment changes due to COVID-19

    08/27/2020

    Pivot is the name of the game right now, even in how assessments are carried out.

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  • Strategy in the face of crisis

    08/17/2020

    When engaging in Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) planning, we strive for 20/20 vision by utilizing an assessment-rich approach.

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  • July 2020 - Reconciling identity and grief with humor

    08/14/2020

    “People, things, and events can seem to come to life in the archive.” This sentiment feels acutely true of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a graphic memoir that attempts to make sense of her father’s life, death, and queerness.

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  • Collaboration as a structured process

    08/11/2020

    Effective change management is essential to successfully implementing Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM). In the latest SEM Quarterly, authors Clayton Smith, Janet Hyde, Tina Falkner, and Christine Kerlin provide an overview of change management in higher education, identifying levels of change management and how to manifest change in institutions.

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  • What 2020 means for enrollment

    08/06/2020

    Higher education’s response to the pandemic and rising social movements is likely to shape institutions for years, even decades, to come. Decisions at this time may have lasting, and sometimes unintended, consequences.

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  • The racist history of standardized testing in college admissions

    08/03/2020

    Admit It, the AACRAO admissions podcast, is back with Season 2. The first episode features Dr. William (Bill) E. Sedlacek and focuses on "noncognitive assessments," a term that is not without controversy. These are non-traditional measures of students' potential to succeed that move away from solely defining "best students" by known scales such as GPA, test scores, leadership, involvement, and accomplishments and instead attempt to assess who students are as people. Many campuses already use a holistic admissions process, which may include gauging a student's positive sense of self, realistic self-appraisal, and more.

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  • S2E2: Implementing a Noncognitive Assessment - Part 2 of 2

    07/30/2020

    "The reality about your students, particularly if you have an applicant pool that is diverse socioeconomically, is that your students are doing hidden but Herculean and unbelievable things every single day. And that fact of the matter is that they don't talk about those things in college applications [...]."

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  • S3E4: International Students and Online Learning

    07/30/2020

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