Student Enrollment Gets New Plan of Attack
By John R. Adkins
jradproduction@gmail.com
The Chancellor announced his plan to address the issue of student enrollment, a document now known as the “Student Enrollment Management Plan”.
The plan is co-led by Vice Chancellor Lisa Cooper Wilkins and Interim Vice Chancellor David Yee, who are expected to have the plan finalized by Oct. 31.
An overview of this document’s plan was presented by Yee on Friday, Sept. 13, to the Associated Students Executive Council.
Three “key features” of the student enrollment management plan were outlined as follows:
The first of which is that the plan builds upon existing documents and the work that has been done by the enrollment management committee in previous years. Examples include the committee’s spreadsheet of ideas on how to grow enrollment, as well as taking into account things like the City College mission statement and the education master plan.
Second is that the plan will be focused on the “student experience.”
Finally, it will integrate with the enrollment management committee so it involves the participatory governance process.
Additionally, it was stated this document will have two pieces, strategic objectives, and the actual items that come out of it.
The strategic objectives are broken down into four areas, all of which are based on the “student experience.”
- Recruitment of students
- Retention of students
- Completion of student degrees
- Partnerships
Ideas that people have in terms of growing enrollment will now be mapped to one of those four focus areas, and then the enrollment management committee would be responsible for looking at items in terms of, “what is the focus for that year.”
This document aims to be a means of tracking data on different focus areas to see what is working and what isn’t. The enrollment management committee can then look at the actions taken each year and decide on different directions based on the data from previous actions.
“One of the problems with enrollment is everybody wants to grow it, but then everyone is going in different directions, and given our limited resources we need to make sure we’re focusing our intention,” Yee said.
The full structure of the Enrollment Management Plan document remains to be seen, as well as what impact it might have on enrollment in the years to come.