THE ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT REVIEW
Volume 22, Issue 1
Fall, 2006
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Editor: Don Hossler
Associate Editors: Larry Hoezee and Daniel J. Rogalski
Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and Planning
This issue surveys a number of topics for enrollment managers. A couple of selections
focus on the implementation of student information systems that so many of us are
working on with new campus partners. The changes in technology are seen in all sectors
of higher education and one book chapter brings in additional challenges faced by
enrollment managers in the community college setting. A research article that integrates
application, admission, enrollment and financial aid modeling brings in a fresh
perspective on the college choice process. This issue closes with a review of a new
monograph that examines the topics of student academic success, persistence, and the use
of a collaborative model of institutional research to enhance enrollment management
efforts.
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Cramer, Sharon F. (2006). Student Information System Implementations: A
Context for Campus Change. College and University Journal, 81(2), 21 – 33.
In the last eight years, two of the editors have been intimately involved in
implementations or upgrades of student information systems. This has become an
important aspect of the roles and responsibilities of many enrollment managers. This
article will be helpful, particularly to those anticipating an upcoming implementation. An
AACRAO membership survey conducted in spring, 2005 provides the research for this
article on student information system implementations. Nearly 500 members reported on
the process for bringing web-based functionality to their campus.
Although the process was not always easy for the campus, members suggest the benefits
far outweighed the costs. Highlights include the following:
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50% of responders report that a single product was purchased to offset campus
needs.
Two-thirds of the responders relayed that their campus is or was recently in a
major system installation upgrade over the preceding five years.
About 70% of the survey responders anticipate a major upgrade/ replacement of a
student information system over the next five years.
Nearly one-half of institutions used functional staff to handle their daily
responsibilities and the system implementation. Though the percentages were
smaller, many respondents also reported that technical staff members were also
asked to handle their daily duties as well as work on the implementation.
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External consultants were also mentioned as a valuable resource, and staff to do
training were also noted in the survey results.
Usually campus officials were pleased with the implementation and the resources
they used to complete the new system.
Collaboration within the unit was quite strong, as was campus-wide satisfaction
for a job well done.
The author suggests the need to meet increasing student demands for web-based selfservice provided the primary impetus for system implementations. She suggests that new
opportunities, friendships, and transformations will occur and that enrollment managers
need to set up a nurturing environment for these changes.
DesJardins, Stephen L., Ahlburg, Dennis A., & McCall, Brian P. (2006). An
Integrated Model of Application, Admission, Enrollment, and Financial Aid.
Journal of Higher Education, 77(3), 381-429.
Using institutional data from the University of Iowa, the authors integrate data and
information from application, admission, financial aid, and enrollment relationships.
Operating under the conceptual framework that students are rational actors that attempt to
maximize their net utility, the researchers build models to look at choices a student makes
and how changes from student’s expectations may cause them to deviate from their
original plan.
The sample includes students who sent ACT scores for the 1997-1998 through 2001-2002
academic years. The authors found the ACT Composite multiplied by two and the
addition of the high school rank predicted admission reasonably well. Diverse factors
such as being female, African American, and/or Hispanic also helped. However, these
diversity factors were found to influence selection as noted by the authors examining the
application behavior of this group.
Student expectations were also considered using various simulations. Students that
unexpectedly received increases in student aid were more likely to apply, however this
relationship was variable depending on the level of tuition of the state of residence and
the amount of expected aid. For example, a person from a low tuition state considering
an application to Iowa needed to have very high aid expectations before actually
applying. In another simulation, the results revealed expected financial aid would need to
increase from $3,000 to $8,000 to students from low-income families in order to have the
odds of these students applying be equal to those of high income students. Other
simulations showed that students with high test scores and high secondary grades were
less likely to enroll. This finding is not surprising as these students are aggressively
recruited and have many options. Similar patterns can be found at virtually all colleges
and universities.
Enrollment managers interested in the effects of their aid offers, or who are seeking to
refine their own enrollment management research efforts should take a look at this
journal article. It provides insights germane to all campus settings and also provides a
number of useful techniques that institutional researchers on their campus could utilize.
Lauren, B. (Ed.), (2006) The Registrar’s Guide – Evolving Best Practices in Records
and Registration. Washington, DC: American Association of Collegiate
Registrars and Admissions Officers.
Although all of the roles registrars perform may not overlap with the interests of
enrollment managers, several of the chapters we highlight are applicable to all of us.
Thirty-five different subject matters are covered by professionals from many different
higher education settings. In this review we highlight chapters and content relevant to the
readers of the Enrollment Management Review.
Theresa DiPaulo provides a useful chapter on transfer and articulation. On many
campuses, especially commuting institutions, the traditional aged first-year student that
enrolls and remains at the same institution until graduation has become an anomaly.
Most colleges and universities long have realized that today’s college student reflects our
fast-moving technological culture. Many students expect quick, online customer service
and when they transfer to your institution they want their courses to transfer and easily
articulate into their degree program. DiPaulo helps us understand and begin to resolve
the issues inherent across these inter-institutional transitions.
College students that are geographically mobile look to the enrollment management
division for the help they require to articulate their courses. The point of entry may be
your admissions office, but soon the registrar’s office, advising, and faculty members
may need to involve themselves in a successful transfer. The entire system needs to have
policies and business processes to allow a student to assess what progress they have made
toward the degree and what is left to complete -- courses might transfer as electives,
general education requirements or possibly right into the major field of study.
A system that helps the student maneuver seamlessly through the necessary maze relays a
message that your institution is transfer student friendly. To establish this kind of image
in the transfer student marketplace institutions need to sort through complexities such as
whether a course grade of C- transfers to your institution. Imagine the emotional effect
on students and parents that are going through this situation if you do not have clear
policies on situations such as these.
Course equivalencies require the attention of professionals working on transforming the
campus culture for transfer students. For example, a calculus course taught at sending
institutions should prepare a transfer student well for more advanced classes on your
campus. Yet, it is not uncommon for math faculty at a receiving institution to determine
that the material covered at the sending institution no longer covers what is currently
taught on the receiving campus. What may have been a nice pipeline of enrolling
students coming from a sending institution yesterday can become the source of many
withdrawal slips or low grades. As a profession we are not here to set people up for
failure, thus we need to develop careful systems that allow periodic checking of how a
course prepares students to be successful.
DiPaulo lays out resources that can help you avoid these and related difficulties. Web
sites are listed as a useful reference tool to understand state transfer, articulation and
transfer credit practices. An online collection such as College Source will bring course
catalogs to your credit articulation team. In addition, she addresses the growing
significance of external influences such as state policy makers, appeal processes, and how
“sunset clauses” make good sense for course articulation. These clauses allow students
grandfathered under one agreement only so much time to claim that benefit before they
lose it. This policy helps an institution avoid the scenario years later of a transfer student
trying to claim a benefit that is no longer applicable.
This chapter would help any articulation committee or appropriate professional on your
campus. If you are dealing with “swirling,” “lateral,” “reverse,” or the “two-plus-two”
transfers, this chapter is a worthwhile read.
In another valuable chapter, Christine Kerlin outlines the roles and activities related to the
mission of an enrollment services organization and the registrar in a community college.
Kerlin regularly contributes to the profession and this chapter helps us better understand
the evolutionary changes occurring at these institutions. True to the role they have
played since the beginning, community colleges looks to meet local educational and
training needs. However, local needs have changed over time and the competition for
students has increased. As a result, enrollment managers on these campuses need to shift
as well.
Enrollment professionals at community colleges coordinate a plethora of student services
to meet local needs. Recruitment, school relations, articulation, and entry services are
joined together by these professionals. Some managers even are now enrolling the next
class, not only for 2-, but also 4-year degrees (there is a slow but growing trend toward
community colleges being authorized to offer a limited number of bachelor’s degrees).
Resolving the tensions associated with this diverse array of challenges has become an
important task for enrollment managers on many campuses.
Because most community colleges are public, EM professionals work in an environment
tied to the direction of state legislators and government regulators. Although substantive
changes do not occur each time a newly elected person takes office, considerable effort
by a senior enrollment managers will be spent articulating to others how services are
meeting local needs, especially as public initiatives such as taxes and new programs are
considered.
Because local needs are changing, the enrollment officers need to develop a plan
synchronous to those needs. Current needs to address include students from the area high
schools attending the college for pre-college classes or involved in a dual enrollment
program. Distance education, non-credit offerings, continuing education, international
and immigrant students all require attention too. As a result, the EM professional needs
to be careful in planning and developing strategies to meet these needs. Recruiting,
communicating, and developing publications are joined by institutional research,
marketing, and retention concerns – all functional areas needing guidance. Community
college enrollment professionals need to draw upon many skills to offset the changing
needs of the local community. Issues and considerations for the various special
populations needing student service are described in this useful chapter.
Returning to a topic already discussed in this issue, Nancy Krogh begins her chapter by
noting that student information systems (SIS) change constantly. New systems, updating
current systems, upgrades, add-ons, and bolt-ons invite planning discussions and mandate
universal participation. She notes that 60 percent of institutions are or are planning to
change their SIS and, as a result, today’s enrollment management professional needs to
be conversant on this topic so as to contribute to the campus conversations in a
meaningful way.
In this environment, we would note that one of the main tasks for enrollment managers is
to advocate that the system be developed to meet student needs and to provide key
functionalities that enable enrollment organizations to play a major role in the recruitment
and retention of students. It is possible to spend significant amounts of money on special
bolt-ons, add-ons, and other technologies, but if they do not meet your students’ needs
and those of an enrollment services unit, then they probably are not worth the energy.
Secondly, managers involved in these conversations must have a realistic budget.
Indirect costs for hardware and personnel are important parts to successful
implementations. Adding new SIS implementation responsibilities to existing team
members contributes to burnout and can jeopardize critical enrollment management
functions. Giving up people to make the implementation successful means they may not
be able to carry their customary duties forward.
The selection of the software becomes a part of this change management as well. The
manager needs to clearly define why a system is needed and what will be accomplished
once the implementation is in place. Learning about which solutions are available in the
marketplace and what functionality each vendor could bring to your campus also folds
into your responsibilities.
Once a vendor and software have been selected, the campus will need to organize for this
change. Krogh outlines each role internal to the organization and discusses the two
primary approaches of working with a consulting firm. She suggests the campus team
leader in each implementation area of the project have some discretionary funding and
latitude to bring in consulting experts when help is needed or that an entire firm would be
hired to help direct the project. Regardless, the internal project managers should be able
to veto anything a consultant recommends and make sure the consultant is not training on
your expense account. She encourages enrollment officers to become nimble in these
areas because campuses are making a significant investment in this software.
Krogh notes the project team of which the enrollment professional becomes a part will be
a long-term commitment. After defining scope, analyzing fit and identifying gaps, the
team will be involved in configuration, testing, go live, evaluation and review steps.
Each part of the process requires staff involvement. Communicating to others in
enrollment units to keep them informed and planning for training are important parts of
change management responsibilities. We encourage enrollment managers involved in
SIS implementations to talk with their colleagues to get their ideas on how to be
proactive with data conversion, data integrity issues, and how to manage a successful SIS
implementation.
This chapter touches on a number of the high level issues important to the enrollment
officer planning to be a part or already a part of these campus conversations. We
recommend reading it as you help communicate student needs and relay the needs of
those using the SIS to serve those needs.
St. John, Edward P. & Wilkerson. Michael, eds. (2006). Reframing Persistence
Research to Improve Academic Success. New Directions for Institutional
Research, No. 130. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
This edited volume provides an overview of an ongoing consultation and research project
on student success – a topic relevant to enrollment managers. The Indiana Project on
Academic Success (IPAS) is a collaborative action research initiative that encourages and
supports Indiana colleges and universities to utilize applied research to improve
institutional practices and programs that facilitate student academic success and
persistence. The primary purpose of the volume is to familiarize readers with the IPAS
action research model while making the case that institutions and institutional actors
would benefit from the implementation of more rigorous, theoretically-grounded research
processes that would better substantiate the efficacy of institutional interventions related
to student persistence.
Because the IPAS project is presented as being at its midpoint at the time of publication,
this volume is not offered as a compilation of success stories that institutions can adopt as
“best practices.” That being said, several chapters (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) do provide
institutional research and enrollment management practitioners with helpful examples of
the IPAS research model in action, which could serve as potential models for institutions
looking to embrace new practices related to institutional planning and program
evaluation. These chapters highlight both quantitative and qualitative research initiatives
used for these purposes. Imbedded within these chapters, and within the IPAS model
more generally, is an increased level of collaboration between institutional research
offices and academic, enrollment management, and student affairs offices that have a role
in institutional programs related to student success. The IPAS model places the
researcher and unit practitioners in a working collaboration in which both parties
formulate the research questions, carry out data collection, analyze and interpret results,
and implement program adjustments. Because the action research process is highly
collaborative and often focuses on complex institutional challenges, it is understood the
inquiry process requires considerable time to produce results that are truly informative
and methodologically rigorous.
Enrollment management practitioners will find Chapters 1and 2 particularly interesting,
as they challenge the commonly held view that a plethora of research exists concerning
the impact of campus interventions on student persistence. Chapter 1 presents the results
of an extensive literature review in which the authors conclude relatively little rigorous
research exists that can inform institutions as to best practices related to student retention
and persistence. In this chapter, the authors limit their focus to studies published in firstand second-tier higher education journals and provide a direct link between institutional
programming and student retention and persistence. These criteria resulted in a
population of only sixteen published studies which were grouped in four categories:
counseling and mentoring programs; learning communities, living-learning communities,
and structured academic experiences; student-faculty interaction; and transition
programs. Of these four groups, the authors conclude that the literature related to
transition (orientation) programs was the only area that reported consistently strong
connections between institutional interventions and improved student persistence. In
addition, the authors also conclude the rigor of the sampling strategies and data analysis
employed in these sixteen studies was lacking in most instances.
Chapter 2 highlights efforts in the state of Indiana to ascertain whether institutions had
conducted applied retention and persistence studies that could further inform the results
of the literature review discussed in Chapter 1. Forty-seven Indiana colleges and
universities were asked to provide written reports of such studies and accompanying
materials (e.g. surveys, statistical tables, etc.). Ultimately, thirty-four relevant documents
were received from just sixteen institutions. The authors classified the thirty-four
documents into four categories: institutional studies; assessments of programs designed to
reduce student departure; assessments of the college environment and experience; and
reports of policies and procedures developed to reduce student departure. Similar to the
results discussed in Chapter 1, the authors conclude that the vast majority of the
institutional studies did not meet the expectations for sufficient methodological and
statistical rigor to establish the efficacy of their retention and academic success
initiatives. The authors note that only seven of the thirty-four documents reported
multivariate statistical procedures used to determine the influence of various factors on
student departure or success. In addition, the authors note that only two of the thirty-four
documents used concepts derived from student departure theory.
In an era of tight campus budgets and increased institutional accountability, the authors of
this volume offer an action research model that can help institutions identify and
implement programs that facilitate student success while providing maximum return on
investment of scarce financial resources. The volume is convincing in bringing to light
the dearth of existing research to help guide institutions in their quest to identify effective
interventions to increase student persistence. Existing evaluative studies on retention and
persistence often fail to control for the number of variables that influence student
persistence, often fail to control for program selection bias (whether institutional or selfselection), and lack a longitudinal research perspective. The volume also makes a strong
case for strengthening the level of collaboration between institutional researchers and unit
practitioners by using research to support assessment and an inquiry-based approach to
encourage and engage in institutional reform.
Briefly Noted:
New NPEC Papers
The National Center for Educational Statistic sponsors a collaborative research effort
entitled, The National Postsecondary Education Cooperative (NPEC). NPEC is a
voluntary partnership of postsecondary institutions, associations, government agencies,
and organizations. During the last year NPEC commissioned a series of research papers
on the topic of student success. These papers have been written by many of the leading
scholars in this area including: John Braxton, George Kuh, Laura Perna, Scott Thomas,
and Vince Tinto. These papers can now be accessed on the web. Enrollment managers
will find useful insights in all of these works. Information about an upcoming conference
related to these papers and copies of the actual papers can be accessed at this url:
http://nces.ed.gov/npec/symposium.asp.