In May, I sent an email to some students at my university. It contained three lines, just 34 words. I didn’t know how much it would consume me until after I’d sent it, or how much it would teach me about our students’ experiences.
Here’s how it all started: Grades had just been posted for the spring semester, and I decided to use the filters in our student-advising management system to find the students who had done well (3.0 GPA or higher) but who hadn’t yet registered for either of the next two terms. I sent the students the following email: “Good morning — glad to see that the spring semester went well for you! I noticed you’re not enrolled for the summer or fall yet. Is there anything I can do to help with that?” It went out to more than 4,000 students.
After I hit send, I stepped away from my desk for a meeting. When I came back, a little over an hour later, more than 100 new emails awaited me. My first reaction was that there was something wrong on the server side — that was a lot of spam! But I soon realized that the responses were all legitimate. And: They. Kept. Coming.
I really like my job and didn’t want to quit, so I couldn’t just “select all” and delete everything. I’m an inbox-zero guy. My inbox is my to-do list, and I feel good if I go home with 20 or fewer unread emails. When I went home that first night, and my unread-email count was approaching a number with a comma in it, I felt full of excitement, but it wasn’t the good kind.
A simple question emailed by an administrator to students -- ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ -- made a difference in keeping them enrolled.
The total email count: 1,300 responses within just a few days, or about 35 percent of students to whom I had sent the email. The messages were still coming in as late as August.
Fortunately, May was a good time for me in the academic calendar; we were between semesters, and orientation hadn’t started yet. My reaction went from dread to fear to empowerment. I realized that I had stumbled on something significant, and I wondered how I could turn this around to help students. I started going through their emails, one at a time.
Simple things could keep students from registering, I found. The same problems and barriers emerged again and again, exposing our cumbersome internal processes:
Parking tickets. This one stood out. Really, we’re keeping students from registering because of a $35 parking ticket? A registration hold for an overdue library book is more understandable — that is an academic resource the university needs back. But a hold for a parking ticket makes no sense, because the resource has already been reclaimed (the car has been moved, and someone else is now able to park in that spot). This forced a broader question: Why would we want to set policies that impede progress term to term? It’s not just financially shortsighted. It’s morally the wrong thing to do.
Not enough courses. The email responses also revealed a shortage of crucial gateway courses. Since 2010, our enrollment has grown from 23,000 to 36,000, but course availability hasn’t kept up. Students are not registering for next term, I learned, because they can’t get into the courses they need to graduate. Colleges need to build better pathways.
Easily fixed problems. Several students wrote that they were undeclared or had misdeclared their majors and didn’t know how to change it in the system. It’s easy to do, but it was enough of a hurdle to stymie them. They essentially wrote, “I know what I want to do, I know what I want my major to be, but I don’t know who to talk to. I know where I want to go, but I don’t know how to get there.” A dozen students, in a rage, wanted to drop out over easily fixed problems, such as nonideal course availability and difficulty signing up for a class because of confusion over prerequisites. I was able to connect them with the right support.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more willing to meet students where they are. To those who didn’t read their email, I’d say things like, “If you don’t check your email, you do so at your own peril.” Maybe that’s true, but not all students are at that point in their personal development. If we can shrink an email down to read more like a text message, it might not model ideal business communication, but it opens the door for future communication.
So much of our communication is written in the language of faculty and staff members, not students; it’s written to inform, not to engage. That’s not the way to go. If you received an email that was 14 paragraphs long, would you read it? I know I wouldn’t, and neither would students.
I don’t think I’ve discovered the magic formula for engaging students, but I do think the timing of the email I sent, along with the fact that it was short enough to be seen on one screen without scrolling, helped. It was also open-ended. “How can I help?” engaged more students than I expected. Many wrote back just to say, “Thank you for checking on me.”
My email awakening showed me this: If I’m just doing administrative work all the time and not talking with students, I’m going to lose sight of what’s important. I won’t be familiar enough with the problems that students deal with day to day. I need to get into the weeds. My little email went to 4,000 students, but if we’re going to have an impact on student success, it’s got to be one person at a time.
Chris D. Hutt is assistant vice president for academic advising at Kennesaw State University. This essay was adapted from a talk he gave last month at EAB’s ConnectED Student Success Collaborative Summit.
