A Blueprint for Creating an
Enrollment Management Plan
The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point has embarked on an effort to build a
strategic Enrollment Management Plan. Managing the university’s enrollment
proactively rather than reactively has become essential to improving student success.
In the absence of such planning, academic departments’ ability to effectively plan for
future scheduling of classes and available seats is compromised, resulting in the
students at UW-Stevens Point experiencing rising difficulties with lack of seat
availability in high-demand courses, inconsistent advising, and increased time to
degree. In this way, crafting an effective Enrollment Management Plan will create a
foundation for the university’s larger effort to foster greater student success.
In addition, enrollment management serves three other important university priorities:
1. To strengthen the financial wellbeing of UW-Stevens Point. Public higher
education is funded more and more by tuition, fees, and auxiliary revenues and
less and less by the state. Given that most of the funding needed to operate UWStevens Point now comes from its students, it is more important than ever that
the university manage its enrollment strategically, considering carefully the
number of students it can serve and the number it needs to serve in order to
provide the best possible education. This kind of management is as much about
financial planning as it is about determining the size and quality of the student
body in any given year.
2. To meet UW System degree attainment targets. UW-Stevens Point is
participating in UW System’s More Graduates Initiative, designed to produce at
least 80,000 new graduates in Wisconsin by 2025. As part of this initiative, the
university submitted a More Graduates plan for producing our portion of these
degree-holders. UW-Stevens Point’s plan is based on improving our freshmento-sophomore retention as well as persistence beyond the second year, and
generating modest growth in the number of underrepresented minority students,
non-traditional students and transfer students enrolled at UW-Stevens Point.
Achieving these goals will require the development and implementation of
purposeful strategies designed to retain and enroll students, and to make
appropriate adjustments in these strategies year-by-year as we track our
progress.
3. To facilitate the implement of the university’s new General Education Program.
In the midst of rising enrollments and financial constraints, UW-Stevens Point is
also engaged in significant curricular transformation. In particular, the
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implementation of the new General Education Program in the fall 2013 semester
will create a number of challenges involving the freshmen registration process,
the relationship between general education and department-level academic
programs, consistency in advising, and coordinating enrollments and general
education seat availability demands across disciplines. In addition, the recent
approval of a university Strategic Plan raises questions about the alignment of
UW-Stevens Point’s academic program array with these newly established
priorities. Enrollment management will play a crucial role in helping UWStevens Point to navigate these transformations.
To facilitate the strategic management of the university’s enrollment, the institution has
created an Enrollment Management unit consisting of the Offices of Admissions,
Financial Aid, and Registration and Records. To lead this unit, UW-Stevens Point is
hiring an Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management. In addition, an
Enrollment Management Committee (EMC) has been created to assist in this effort. The
EMC will report directly to the provost and to the Strategic Planning Committee. The
EMC will play an advisory role, providing data-driven guidance to the provost, deans,
and directors within Academic Affairs about the strategic management of UW-Stevens
Point’s enrollment. It is not intended that the committee will be a decision-making
body. Major initiatives, especially those involving substantial university resources, will
be vetted by the Strategic Planning Committee. The EMC will also routinely share
minutes of its proceedings with the Academic Affairs Committee and the Faculty
Senate.
Membership in the EMC includes the following representatives:
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Academic Success
Admissions
Business Affairs
Colleges (one representative chosen by the dean of each college)
Financial Aid
International Students & Scholars
Multicultural Affairs
Office of Academic Affairs
Policy Analysis and Planning
Registration & Records
Residential Living
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The new AVC for Enrollment Management will be in place by July 1, 2012. In order to
assist this person in helping the campus to craft an Enrollment Management Plan, the
EMC suggests answering the following questions, the answers to which are essential to
shaping the plan:
1. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE UW-STEVENS POINT’S STRATEGIC PLAN
AND ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT
UW-Stevens Point’s recently
completed Strategic Plan has
provided the foundation on
which the university is now
building its Partnership for
Thriving Communities. As this
set of initiatives continues to
develop, it will clearly have an
impact on the institution’s
program array, student body,
and facilities and support
services. For example, the
Healthy Communities Initiative
on which the university is
currently working will not
necessarily require new
academic programs.
Nevertheless, it will entail the
expansion of many student
support services. In addition, if
implemented fully, it will almost
certainly bring about subtle but
important changes in the
university’s program array as
departments seek to participate,
changes in the student body as students are drawn to the program, and changes
in the university’s use of facilities.
As part of its Strategic Plan, UW-Stevens Point has also committed to assist with
UW-System’s More Graduates initiative, which is part of the UW System Growth
Agenda. The Enrollment Management Plan must incorporate, monitor, and
continuously adjust the enrollment targets that comprise this effort, and these
targets will need to be adjusted to integrate with the Partnership for Thriving
Communities.
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Finally, the implementation of the Strategic Plan will include the specific
resource allocations needed to support the achievement of the plan’s intended
outcomes. As a result, the Enrollment Management Plan should be adjusted
annually to accommodate changing budget priorities.
2. WHAT SHOULD BE THE COMPOSITION OF UW-STEVENS POINT’S STUDENT BODY ?
Obviously, the key function of any enrollment management plan is to shape the
composition of the university’s student body. This includes, first and foremost,
building a profile of each year’s entering class. This profile is based on a variety
of academic and demographic characteristics, including:
 Academic qualifications such as grade point average, high school rank,
and ACT and SAT scores.
 Intended major
 Racial and ethnic identity
 Gender identity
 In-state, out-of-state, and international residency
 Freshmen versus transfer status
 Full-time versus part-time status
 Undergraduate versus graduate status
 Traditional versus non-traditional age group
 Other factors (veterans status, for example)
In addition to shaping each year’s entering class in this way, an enrollment
management plan should also explain specifically how the institution intends to
recruit and retain students. A new Director of Admissions will soon be hired at
UW-Stevens Point and will lead the effort to develop a Recruitment Plan that
supports the university’s enrollment management goals. In addition, a
Retention Task Force has also been organized and is currently at work on
recommendations for the specific retention strategies that the EMC and the
university should pursue.
3. WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT AND UWSTEVENS POINT’S ACADEMIC PROGRAM ARRAY?
The university’s academic program array should meet both the needs of the
students enrolled at UW-Stevens Point and the priorities articulated in the
institution’s Strategic Plan. As noted above, the evolution of the Partnership for
Thriving Communities may lead to the expansion of some programs or the need
for additional resources. Such factors should be anticipated as much as possible
and incorporated into an Enrollment Management Plan.
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In addition, attention to the program array should include other factors that
affect the nature and distribution of course offerings. Of particular importance,
for example, are recommendations on managing under-enrolled courses, low
enrolled majors, the proportion of courses offered online or via other means of
distance education, and the structure of the course scheduling grid to maximize
course enrollment and enhance classroom utilization across campus.
As a significant part of the university’s academic program array, the General
Education Program (GEP) should be of particular concern in the Enrollment
Management Plan. This includes aspects of the GEP such as freshmen
registration, annual seat availability, and course distribution among
departments.
4. WHAT FACILITIES, SERVICES, PERSONNEL, AND BUDGET ARE REQUIRED TO SUPPORT
UW-STEVENS POINT’S ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT PLAN ?
The number of enrolled students and their level of academic preparation, the
number of courses offered and their distribution across the scheduling grid, and
the relationship of each of these factors to the university’s Strategic Plan all will
influence the facilities, services, personnel, and budget required to support
enrollment management. As a result, the plan must account for these issues
carefully and make recommendations to ensure proper alignment with the
Strategic Plan, and the resulting composition of the student body and program
array.
In the area of facilities, the availability of classroom and laboratory space ,
computer lab space for teaching, a prospective student visitor center, and rooms
within Residential Living will be especially important. In addition, the physical
appearance and maintenance of campus plays a central role in the recruitment of
prospective students, staff, and faculty to the university. In the area of services,
many units within the university will be central in meeting enrollment priorities
of the university, including the Partnership for Thriving Communities and
related strategic planning initiatives. Finally, in the area of personnel,
changing enrollment numbers will have obvious implications on the number of
faculty and academic staff (both instructional and non-instructional) required to
ensure student success.
Given that enrollment management will inevitably require resources to su cceed,
the Enrollment Management Plan should include specific budget
recommendations to be considered by the Strategic Planning Committee and the
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administration. These budget recommendations should be updated on an annual
basis and should cover, whenever possible, at least a three-year period.
Taken together, the issues related to these four broad areas—the Strategic Plan,
the student body, the academic program array, and facilities and support
services—should provide the components necessary to build an effective
Enrollment Management Plan. Each of the four areas necessarily informs and
shapes the other three, and managing these interrelationships must be the core
function of the plan.
Facilities,
Services,
Personnel &
Budget
Strategic Plan &
Resource
Allocations
Program
Array
Student Body
Enrollment Management Plan Components
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In addition, the EMC will need to consider a fifth question essential to monitoring
the university’s progress in meeting the goals and outcomes of its Enrollment
Management Plan. In particular:
5. HOW WILL UW-STEVENS POINT’S ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT PLAN BE
EVALUATED AND CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVED ?
However the final Enrollment Management Plan is structured that specific goals
and outcomes it entails will need to be continuously monitored and adjusted as
the university’s situation changes over time. The EMC recommends the creation
of real-time, interactive reporting tools (e.g. dashboards) to track key indicators
of success. These tools could perhaps be part of a larger Strategic Planning
Dashboard. The EMC should be consulted for help in identifying the key
indicators, and for recommendations regarding how to construct the dashboard
(vendor provided or home-grown, for example). A dashboard, in turn, cannot
be created without first ensuring that the university maintains a reliable Data
Warehouse. Building a data warehouse entails articulating clear definitions of
key terminology and variables, deciding what data will be captured, establishing
conventions for when data snapshots will be taken to populate the warehouse,
and determining key standard reports.
These efforts are crucial to creating an Enrollment Management Plan that can be
assessed, evaluated, and improved and whose achievements can be accurately
and effectively reported.
Ultimately, the intention of an EM plan is to ensure the purposeful practices of
enrollment that shape UW-Stevens Point in accordance with its Strategic Plan
while at the same time being fluid enough to be responsive to changing needs
and trends.