Category: Blog

Surviving and Thriving in the After Peak Advising Period: 7 Strategies to Regroup

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

The beginning of the fall semester is a tumultuous time for students, parents, staff, and administrators. Everyone is focused on enrolling new students and supporting continuing students. The weeks preceding the start of the term up through add/drop are intense for academic advisors as we urgently strive to manage the influx of appointments, walk-ins, calls, and emails. During these weeks, it’s easy to let the stress and fatigue get to you. The job becomes essential, but almost meaningless as you wade your way through email after email asking to get into a closed class, override a prerequisite, or help students accomplish last-minute registrations and schedule adjustments. During this time of year, I’ve heard many advisors (myself included) exclaim “this is not advising!” The work loses its luster when it becomes reactive, transactional, and limited in scope. Even though students who access advising during these critical weeks most certainly value our assistance, it can leave advisors exhausted and at risk for burn-out. So, what can you do to avoid it? This, too, shall pass. Earlier in my career, I internalized students’ stress and thought I’d never get through everything I needed to in time to meet critical registration deadlines. I’d reach […]

The Legal Landscape of Higher Ed: A High-Level Overview for Academic Leaders and Faculty

by Jon Boeckenstedt

We’ve arrived at the final of six posts about enrollment management, yet we haven’t really touched on why enrollment management (EM) is different from just admissions, or marketing or financial aid, or some of the other areas that are often found in a typical EM portfolio. In itself, this might be instructive; if you’ve found yourself occasionally confused or overwhelmed by the complexity of the previous five topics (Marketing, Demographics, Recruitment, Admissions, and Financial Aid), you can imagine how challenging it can be to put them all together into one big package, and to get those pieces and parts to work together in harmony. It can get even more complex when other areas of your university’s administrative functions—like the registrar, orientation, student success, housing, or retention—are rolled into the mix. Suffice it to say that enrollment management is really about managing and balancing the tradeoffs inhert in every decision a university makes about its enrollment strategy. I often tell people that the concepts of EM are much like a triangle balanced on the head of a pin: It’s easy to make any one corner go up if you push two down, or vice versa. It’s only when you try to […]

Access and Prestige: The Complex Function of Financial Aid in Higher Education

by Jon Boeckenstedt

In my last post, I wrote about how admissions works, although the lesson, perhaps, is that the term “admissions office” means very different things at different institutions. And while it’s still true that we in admissions and enrollment management all agree on one thing—that if a student never applies, they won’t enroll—it’s also true that the final step in the process is the processing and delivery of financial aid. A caveat: This is hard to grasp on the first pass—if it sometimes does not seem to make sense, that just means you probably understand it better than you think you do. I recommend paper, a pencil, and some note-taking to get you through this. It’s going to be challenging to navigate. About 15 years ago, I started gauging the age of my audience during presentations by putting an image on the screen. It’s the floorboard of an automobile, showing part of the brake and floormat for some context. You’re likely to notice the bright red carpet before you notice something else that doesn’t look quite right: To the left of the brake is a silver button, a little bigger than a quarter. I ask the audience members to raise their […]

Discovering and Acting on Your Students’ Post-Pandemic Online Preferences: An Update

by Rebel Smith, A. Graham Peace

Introduction Like a great many other institutions, we emerged from the pandemic knowing that the disruptions of the last few years would inevitably lead to changes in the preferences and desires of our student population around the educational model and how education gets delivered. We also knew that, to remain successful and competitive as an undergraduate program of ~2,900 students in a typical college of business at a large, public land-grant institution, we needed to keep in close touch with how those preferences were evolving. This article serves to tell that story: how we went about understanding our students’ changing attitudes about the educational model, what the data pointed to, and what changes we made in response. Students now clearly prefer to have online classes in all areas of their curricula, and they prefer asynchronous offerings over synchronous – a large change from what our data was telling us just one year ago. We hope that by telling this story, we urge and inspire other units to do the same: not only is it important to continually monitor and adjust to best meet your constituents’ needs, but those who are willing to adapt quickly have a distinct opportunity to take […]

The Role of Admissions in Shaping the Student Body, and the Institution

by Jon Boeckenstedt

In my last post on student recruitment, I mentioned that recruitment and admissions—although often thought of as the same thing—are actually very different functions at some universities. But because there are about 1,600 four-year public and private, not-for-profit colleges and universities that are at least nominally selective, the line and distinction between the two varies based on institutional type, market position, and mission. For context and clarity: IPEDS collects admissions data on all institutions that say they are not “Open Admission.” Looking at the 2,075 four-year public and not-for-profit institutions that admit freshmen and report admission data serves as the basis for discussion today; among them, we see that 466 are in practice or philosophy admitting 100% of applicants. Beyond that, however, there are millions of students enrolling at for-profit institutions and community colleges for whom admissions data is not available, and won’t be discussed here. There is one thing admissions and enrollment professionals all agree on: If a student does not apply, they will never enroll. Thus, in a nutshell, recruitment attempts to generate as much interest, and usually as many applications, as is possible. Even if a university gets 20 applications for every seat it has in the […]

Recruitment In Today’s Data-Driven, Evolving Higher Education Landscape

by Jon Boeckenstedt

It has been said that all the world is simply a struggle between the “Haves” and “Have Nots.” How you view admissions and recruitment at your university probably depends a lot on which type of university you work at, whether you’re at a public, private, or for-profit institution, and—especially—what the mission of your institution looks like. Are you at one of the private “Haves” or perhaps one of the public “Have Nots?” Are your founding and mission based on access for a wide swath of the population, or is your purpose designed to serve the elite students—and only the elite students—who have risen to the top of the pyramid of academic achievement we sometimes call “merit?” It makes a big difference. In my first post in this series, I wrote about marketing, and how all higher-education institutions do it to some degree. I also mentioned that the enrollment management and/or admissions/financial aid departments are leading the charge when it comes to the four components of marketing (price, product, place, and promotion). And in this post, we’ll get down to “brass tacks,” where we actually apply those concepts as we attempt to enroll a class in the next term that is […]

What an Administrator Needs to Know About Demographics

by Jon Boeckenstedt

Having read in the last post about how marketing is an integral part of every college or university, it’s natural to wonder about the markets themselves: Who are they? Where are they? How have markets changed? And, especially in times of economic uncertainty, are there new markets we should be looking at? The good news is that there is considerable data out there to help you make decisions about marketing; the bad news is that those decisions—while grounded in solid data and information—are still as much art as science. Motivations of markets tend not to be easily quantifiable or predictable, and even though you may take some of the lessons you learn from one market to another, it’s still likely a “one size fits all” approach won’t suffice if you want to do as much as you can, given the natural limitations and constraints on resources. As Yogi Berra is popularly quoted as saying, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” And while you look externally at markets, using all the information available at your fingertips, it’s still important to realize that there are many forces external to your university that you can’t control no matter how big […]

Applying the Four “P’s” of Marketing to Higher Education

by Jon Boeckenstedt

There are typically three or four responses among higher-education colleagues when they hear the word “marketing”: It does seem strange that a subject matter taught to both undergraduate and graduate students can generate such responses, but I’m here to tell you that the term and the practice have both gotten mostly unjustified and unwarranted bad reps in the halls of academia. Some of it is probably deserved, of course, just as some portion of all criticism is likely justified. But the disdain for doing marketing suggests a lot of our colleagues don’t have as complete an understanding of the concept as we might hope. Some of this response, of course, is because we believe we’re too noble to engage in base activities in which we have to persuade people to like us; some people point to higher education’s long history (Oxford was founded in 1096, for instance) and relatively unchanged business model as proof that modern approaches to interactions are not only unnecessary but distasteful; still others think that we offer a product that is intrinsically valuable, and that this needs no formal effort to effect the exchange. If that’s you, then let me lean on Clark Kerr, former President […]

6 Things Executive Leaders Should Know about Attracting and Retaining Effective Academic Advisors

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

It’s nothing new. While 2022 has brought what is being termed “The Great Resignation,” advising administrators have been struggling to attract and retain qualified, effective advisors long before the COVID pandemic and its budgetary and emotional challenges. One of the most overused, under-applied mantras in higher education is, “students first.” It sounds great, but what are you doing to achieve it? I’ve seen countless schools proudly roll out a campaign with flashy signs, social media, and t-shirts. Let’s tell our students how much they mean to us and how we are committed to their success! But, during all of these transitions, I seldom see a real commitment to ongoing, sustained support for students. Programs and personnel seemingly change with the wind as a new, student-centric trend is established. Academic advisors are central to the mission of supporting students and providing accurate, timely assistance to them. Advisors are among the first institutional personnel that students meet, as well as the last they encounter as students transition out of the institution. Yet, contrary to the often-stated mission of “students first,” advisors often receive inadequate pay, training, supervision, and recognition, which can lead to advisor ineffectiveness and/or outright departure. By treating advisors as […]

There’s More to Lecturing than Lecturing

By Chet Jordan, Ph.D. Dean of Social Sciences and Professional Studies, Greenfield Community College     We often neglect silence. In our quest to preserve and uplift success, we shy away from what isn’t there, from who and what was left behind, and from the stories that got lost along the way. It is beautiful to celebrate the grit, determination, and ability of those who cross the finish line but there is kaleidoscopic complexity in each individual who never comes into the camera’s view. One of the largest subgroups in the American higher education system is comprised of transfer students. Although students transfer in various directions throughout the system, a vast majority attempt to transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions. Recent data show that 31% of students who first enroll at a community college transfer to a four-year college within six years (Shapiro et al., 2019). Astonishingly, close to 80% of community college students hope to earn a bachelor’s degree, yet 60% who enroll in a community college with the hope of transferring to a four-year institution fail to do so.     ..by mapping everything out early and tracking my steps, my priorities were clear; I knew what […]