According to Google, “enrolment management” is a fairly Canadian term, and it’s one that comes up a lot in my life. The general problem is keeping the right number of bums in seats in our program (or faculty or University). In recent history, that has meant trying to increase the numbers.
As far as I’m concerned, there are four main parts of EM:
- Outreach: Going out into the world (often to schools) and getting people interested in the discipline. There’s no direct EM outcome to outreach, but it’s an important long-term thing. I’m a big believer in CS Unplugged for CS outreach.
- Recruitment: Convincing people that you have a good program, and getting them to apply. Recruitment is the part of EM that usually gets all the attention.
- Conversion: Converting the applications into actual students. This includes convincing the applicants to accept your offer, and making sure that acceptances actually show up in September. Conversion is often forgotten or lumped into recruitment.
- Retention: Once the students get it the door, making sure we keep them around until they graduate.
Retention is probably the most controversial of the group, because of the fear that it will take the most blunt form possible: “Stop failing the dumb kids.”
Maybe I have been sheltered, but I have never heard anybody push in that direction. Most retention activities focus on improving learning skills (like AEP) or other aspects of the student experience.
It turns out that something like 2/3 of the students that disappear are in good academic standing (i.e. not the dumb kids). My experience is that even among students in poor academic shape, the problem is often not straight-up dumbness, but poor study skills, lack of focus, or other factors that don’t necessarily mean we don’t want them around.
Basically, I’m convinced that we can actually do something about retention, as long as it’s done from the bottom up in the School, not top-down by the administration.
While at SIGCSE, my favourite session was probably the retention session: all of the papers were interesting and actually presented quantitative results. The most relevant to me was the paper from Georgia Tech. We suck compared to them.
I’m spending tomorrow downtown at a Student Success (aka retention) workshop. Hopefully it leaves us with some good ideas that we can actually implement around SFU.
March 21st, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Yeah. Do we have numbers as to where our “dip” in enrollment happens? Like, end of 2nd year?
The whole “I don’t want to code for the rest of my life” is typical. There has to be some remedy to get kids past that.
March 25th, 2008 at 11:18 am
If students who have decent grades keep leaving the program, you have to ask – If they cannot stick with it without someone holding their hand, do they deserve to get a degree? I say no.
(I make exceptions for those without the means to pay tuition obviously. That is a completely different problem.)
March 25th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Paul: Students are all beautiful and unique snowflakes.
Common reasons for leaving (that I don’t think correlate highly to “we don’t want that student back”) include money, family crap, administrative roadblocks, shitty instruction or curriculum design, no feeling of “community”, …
I guess the thing is: if students who have decent grades keep leaving the program, we should be asking ourselves what’s wrong with the program. I don’t know of University department that doesn’t have some crap to take care of.
Angelica: No numbers. Nothing. Anecdotal crap.
August 30th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I love your thinking with regard to the succes of student retention; that it must be from the faculty up perspective, rather than imposed by administration. Be interested in more of what you have done to achieve this. We are posting Canadian content efforts on our Canadian strategic enrolment management web site at http://www.uwindsor.ca/sem. Feel free to send something along for us to share with our peers! All the best, Clayton