{"id":237,"date":"2008-03-19T22:43:51","date_gmt":"2008-03-20T05:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2008\/03\/19\/enrolment-management-and-retention\/"},"modified":"2008-03-20T06:51:25","modified_gmt":"2008-03-20T13:51:25","slug":"enrolment-management-and-retention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2008\/03\/19\/enrolment-management-and-retention\/","title":{"rendered":"Enrolment Management and Retention"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Google, “enrolment management<\/a>” 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.<\/p>\n

As far as I’m concerned, there are four main parts of EM:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Outreach<\/strong>: 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<\/a> for CS outreach.<\/li>\n
  2. Recruitment<\/strong>: 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.<\/li>\n
  3. Conversion<\/strong>: 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.<\/li>\n
  4. Retention<\/strong>: Once the students get it the door, making sure we keep them around until they graduate.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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.”<\/p>\n

    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<\/a>) or other aspects of the student experience.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    Basically, I’m convinced that we can actually do<\/em> something about retention, as long as it’s done from the bottom up in the School, not top-down by the administration.<\/p>\n

    While at SIGCSE, my favourite session was probably the retention session<\/a>: all of the papers were interesting and actually presented quantitative results. The most relevant to me was the paper from Georgia Tech<\/a>. We suck compared to them.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}