Leading

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A creative approach to removing admissions barriers

Enrollment is one of the biggest challenges facing higher-ed leaders in 2023, and I recently spoke with two innovative admissions leaders at SUNY Schenectady County Community College who explained a creative, even fun approach they tried this year. And so far the results are promising. Below are four insights they shared.

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MORE ENROLLMENT IDEAS — We are hosting a meeting on this very topic in just a week and a half. I have been planning it with two other enrollment chiefs who will join us to discuss what they wish senior leaders would ask, how to staff your enrollment operation, and how (beyond hitting your targets) to measure success. Grab your seat now for Wednesday, March 8, at 12 noon ET, 9 a.m. PT — or sign up to watch later on demand.
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Like most two-year colleges, SUNY Schenectady has been battling declining enrollment lately. The Northeast has its demographic challenges, and the pandemic definitely didn’t help. As an open-access institution, the campus will admit any student with a high-school diploma or equivalent, so last cycle it tried turning the traditional process on its head.

Instead of waiting for students to come to them, Pamela McCall, interim dean of academic affairs, and Laura Sprague, director of admissions, teamed up with three local high schools and proactively admitted their entire graduating classes.

Schenectady is one of a growing number of colleges experimenting with direct admissions. Equity and access are part of the motivation, but so is a sort of desperation for lead generation and tuition revenue among community colleges and less-selective four-year institutions in the increasingly competitive enrollment market.

The experiment at Schenectady accomplished two goals:

• Eliminated bureaucratic hurdles in admissions
• Chipped away at psychological barriers for students who may not have considered college or a two-year institution

The results were quantifiable: The college saw higher yield rates among instant-admit students than among traditional applicants. Not only did instant-admit students enroll right away, but some trickled in for the winter term and spring semester.

Here are four lessons McCall and Sprague shared for any sort of admissions partnership.

Start with friendly faces. Find an initial partner that shares your enthusiasm. This instant-admissions program had a lot of logistical pieces to work out, so Schenectady officials started small, working first with a rural high school with a graduating class of 54 students. After that was successful, they expanded to a suburban school of 320 seniors, then an urban school of 660.

Tech work paves the way for innovation. Be prepared for lots of behind-the-scenes work, and make sure your IT department is on board before you begin. For this partnership, the college had to work with the IT departments of the high schools to facilitate the transfer of hundreds of transcripts and other student data (to limit the steps required of students). Any data Schenectady couldn’t get from the schools it asked for from students via a QR code that brought up a virtual form.

In 2023, success is relative. Declining enrollment is still a trend nationally, but programs like this can help institutions stave off steeper losses, which Schenectady officials believe was true here. Also, even students who did not enroll (yet) are now in the college’s database as a focused group for outreach.

Admission should be a celebration. Amid all the logistics to pull off any partnership, it’s easy to forget that deciding (where) to go to college should be exciting for students. Schenectady leaders were deliberate in making admissions days at the respective high schools feel like a good time, complete with T-shirt giveaways, music, a balloon arch, food, and a visit from the mayor.

In brief

“Sadly, it’s a club.” Teresa K. Woodruff, interim president of Michigan State University, said hundreds of leaders of other institutions that have also suffered from gun violence, including Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia, have helped her navigate this crisis, The Chronicle reported. The role of leaders during a tragedy like the one that killed three MSU students is to bring the campus community together to combat feelings of “unsettledness.”

Data: Endowment drops. The volatile stock market in late 2022 resulted in sharp declines in the market value of and returns on college endowments, The Chronicle reports. Endowments had a one-year return of negative 8 percent in the 2022 fiscal year, according to the latest NACUBO-TIAA Study of Endowments, a marked drop from the year before, when returns averaged 30.6 percent. Small endowments fared worst, the study found.

Transfer trouble in the UC system. A proposal by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California to simplify the college-transfer process in the state, to widen access to higher education, has drawn resistance from UCLA, one of three selective UC campuses that do not already offer guaranteed transfer-admission programs, the Los Angeles Times reports. The debate centers around whether state funding should be tied to simplifying the transfer process. UCLA has argued, in response, that it already has a successful process.

How to be a good provost. The transition from dean to provost can be painful, George Justice, provost of the University of Tulsa, writes in The Chronicle, because it means loosening your grip on the daily operations of disciplines, and shifting your loyalty from the interests of one college to what is best for the entire institution. Empowering your deans, rather than micromanaging them, is crucial, he says.

Moves

Efforts by Cedric T. Wins, the first Black leader of the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, to diversify the Virginia Military Institute have met opposition from a conservative political action committee formed by Wins’s former classmates, The Washington Post reports.

The Stanford University president accused of falsifying data in a scientific research paper is pushing back, The Washington Post reports. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who faces an ongoing review of his work, said in a statement to the newspaper that the allegations are “completely false.”

Memoriam

Rebecca Blank, the long-serving chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, died of pancreatic cancer at age 67, the university announced. Blank had been set to become president of Northwestern University last year, but stepped aside after her diagnosis.