As leaders on campus, we are also increasingly engaged with the trustees, which makes our ability to negotiate the desires and demands of the trustees, CFO, president and provost really important, alongside out ability to maintain those relationships.
A successful enrollment management team needs to be data smart; we have to have the ability to discern what in the data matters and how to connect that into actionable steps. Many times these steps require coordination with colleagues, perhaps with student affairs or academic advisors.
Data smarts is certainly a big part of our success. Managing those negotiations on priorities and approaches is absolutely vital in our role. Another thing is we have to be diplomatic, but maintain the ability to make decisions and take calculated risks.
We must focus on influence rather than on power. Influence means collaboration and working with people across campus, which is much better than simply using power for its own sake to drive forward an agenda. We also need to have a broad understanding of the interconnections that exist across the student lifecycle, and the impact these have on administrative decisions. We understand what the market forces are on the incoming students, the market we sit in, who we compete with, and we understand all of this from the front end.
So many institutions are starting to understand the value of the career services function, and that has become part of our work so we also understand the employment pipeline. This goes back to the perception of us operating in a black box. That visibility and transparency is critical to our ability to develop a long term enrollment vision and enact it year to year. There are three functions of the university that have the scoreboard on every single day for everyone to see: admissions, advancement and athletics.
The scoreboard is on everyday and everybody sees the outcomes those offices can produce, almost in real time. We also help to build the infrastructure around following through on those promises long-term. No one cares more about the front end or the back end than enrollment management.
When you look at the makeup of enrollment management structures around the country, there is a shift where more pieces of the student lifecycle are coming under the responsibility of enrollment management. Relevant, accurate data provide essential information for the school as a whole. It helps you improve the student experience, gauge your value proposition, and tell a more compelling story to prospective families and future benefactors.
It influences the process of setting price and financial aid levels. Enrollment management involves coordinating the four previously mentioned critical areas: admission management, retention, research, and marketing. By making these areas work together, your school increases the likelihood that students will achieve success and want to remain connected as alumni. Just as technology has transformed society, it is transforming enrollment management in ways that will improve your internal processes and connect your school community to the external world.
Using technology as a foundation for enrollment management helps your school leaders do reports and benchmarking that will inform your decision making. It will also support convenient new modes of communication that convey your core messages in a variety of formats so you can reach your audiences effectively in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
When maintaining a systematic approach to managing enrollment — one that includes regular two-way communication — your school nurtures a more informed community that better serves students and families. A transparent environment of information sharing supports a healthy enrollment management process. Organized by strategic planning and supported by institutional research, enrollment management activities concern student college choice, transition to college, student attrition and retention, and student outcomes.
These processes are studied to guide institutional practices in the areas of new student recruitment and financial aid, student support services, curriculum development, and other academic areas that affect enrollments, student persistence, and student outcomes from college" p.
Enrollment management is an open-systems and synergistic organizational approach that fosters an organizational atmosphere that makes reporting relationships among student-service units more transparent.
It also fosters an environment where offices and divisions work collaboratively to enhance the quality of the student experience, thus facilitating the strategic management of enrollments.
Enrollment management can be viewed as a synergistic organizational concept that can be used to link several administrative functions within a college or university in order to optimize institutional enrollment goals. Examples of this approach can be found among the financial strategies of many college campuses, where important linkages have emerged between senior enrollment managers and chief financial administrators.
Both private and public colleges use some of their tuition income to fund campus-based scholarships for students. Tuition revenue accounts for millions of dollars, and campus-based financial aid has become a large expenditure at most four-year institutions.
Enrollment management efforts have therefore become closely linked to budgeting and campus financial planning.
Successful enrollment management strategies and practices must also take into account the growing importance of college and university rankings. For many institutions of higher education, enrollment management has come to involve a combination of student enrollment strategy, budgeting strategy, and institutional positioning strategy. A university's office of institutional research should play a major role in successful enrollment management efforts.
The more enrollment management professionals know about the characteristics, attitudes, and values of prospective students, the better able they are to design effective recruitment and orientation programs. Persistence studies conducted by institutional researchers can inform strategies to enhance the success of first-year students, and institutional research professionals can examine the impact of various forms of student financial assistance upon matriculation decisions and the academic success.
A strong institutional function is a critical element of a sound enrollment management effort. The office of admissions plays a key role in enrollment management efforts. The first order of business for enrollment managers is to ensure that their university has broad marketing efforts in place to make the institution visible and sufficiently attractive, so that desirable prospective students are motivated to seriously consider them.
These marketing efforts should be segmented to appeal to different types of students, emphasizing different strengths of the institution. Once prospective students have expressed interest, campuses need to provide the right information at the right time in order to be perceived as a good match, and thereby attract applications.
The office of financial aid has a dual purpose. The first purpose is that of providing federal, state, and campus-based need-based financial aid to enable students to attend the institution of their choice. The second purpose is the growing use of campus-based financial aid to reward academic merit and other special talents to enable colleges and universities to attract a desired number of students with the academic ability and other special talents they are seeking.
Historically, institutions of higher education relied primarily upon endowed gifts to fund campus-based scholarships. Toward the close of the twentieth century, however, more and more institutions began using part of the tuition students pay to fund scholarships.
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