Faculty and students discuss enrollment at all-campus meeting

Students were invited to join faculty, staff and administration, Thursday, during an all-campus meeting regarding CSC’s Strategic Enrollment Management Plan and inquiry on how to increase enrollment.
“Because we are asking for input today, we thought it would be important to include students in the input gathering process,” said Dean Margetts, liberal arts.
CSC President Randy Rhine said, “It’s important that when I, or we, say enrollment, we are not just talking about recruitment and admissions, although that is a part of it. We are talking about the total population of our students, and that includes undergraduate students, graduate students, online students, full-time, part-time.”
Margetts and Sherry Douglas, associate vice president of student services, introduced the enrollment management plan, although it is not finished. As co-leads of the enrollment management team, Margetts, Douglass and the other countless other committee members have been planning the enrollment management plan for over eight months.
The enrollment management plan includes “four high level components:” recruitment, onboarding, retention and completion.
“The idea of this whole document, the enrollment management plan, is that students go through the recruiting, through the onboarding, onto retention and then onto completion so that no student gets left behind,” Douglas said.
Plans for recruitment include increasing inquiries to applicants, increasing applicants to enroll and increasing campus engagement and alignment in recruitment.
Onboarding focuses on the first year in college for undergraduate students and the first 12 hours for graduate students. The goals include increasing number of applicants who are eligible to enroll and convert those to students who are actually enrolled and streamlining the transition from campus advisors and handing that off to faculty advisors.
Part of onboarding also includes increasing the first year retention rate from 65 percent to 68 percent for undergraduate student. The data concerning retention of undergraduate students is more easily accessible that of graduate students, so the committee does not currently have fully formed goals for onboarding graduate students, Douglas said. They will have the goals finalized when the plan is released in the fall of 2018.
Retention concerns maintaining students after their first year. The plan is to increase undergraduate second year retention from 51 percent to 58 percent and undergraduate third year retention from 45 percent to 48 percent.
Douglas said that the data shows that after the first year, you should lose 10 percent per year.
To focus on retention, the committee has already met with faculty to develop academic program retention and reviewed retention data. They have also sorted over 3,900 cancellations from students and sorted through their reasons for leaving.
Currently, the completion rate for CSC is 83 percent. Completion means that undergraduate students have completed at least 90 credit hours and graduated. The STEM plan aims to bring the completion rate up to 95 percent.
Six committees have been implemented to support the enrollment management plan. Those committees include the advising sub committee, first-year experience, student engagement, the summer school task force, the community college task force and the online standards committee.
“It is important to the committee to flesh out ways to ensure that we do not drop the ball and allow the student to fall off the grid,” Margetts said. “We recognize of course, as I know you all do, that students self select out of these four areas all of the time and there are somethings that are out of our control.”
To assist in a productive discussion, students were invited to give input during break-out sessions. After the enrollment management plan was explained, a commmittee team member at each randomly assigned table in the room led a discussion on what needed improved to increase enrollment.
“With the group that I was with, they were very appreciative of students input,” Joel Schroeder, 20, sophomore of Paxton, said. “They want to learn and implement our input as students. It made the staff aware of what students actually think, want and experience.”
Each person in the room was asked to self reflect and examine what they could do individually to help CSC thrive.
Margetts said, “We really know that it is going to take all of us collectively working together and that each of us have different ways of accomplishing these goals. Our goals are clear, but each of us has individual skills, talents and interests.”
Douglas explained that 30 students equals 1 percent of our current population and 1 percent of the student population equals $100,000.
On April 25, a team will be outlining an update of the plan to the cabinet. The plan is to be finalized and implemented by the 2018-2019 school year.