mortiz0010

Students are starting to arrive on campus.  And most every college will be doing all it can to make the arrival day welcome big and hearty. Presidents will walk around greeting students and parents. A few may even help carry something in. Administrators are on hand doing the same. At some schools, faculty are around to help out too. And of course, student ambassadors are everywhere helping, pointing, guiding and smiling to try and make the move in easier and friendly. Great start. Sort of like drop-off day at summer camp feeling. Too bad it is like Tom Lehrer’s line in his song National Brotherhood Week. It’s only for a week so have no fear. Be grateful it doesn’t last all year. If he were singing about move-in, it would be Thank god it only lasts a day and not all year a s it should! Yup, as the last parents drive away, their tears drying, it all ends. The president...

I just spoke to the VP for Enrollment Management at a large university. She informed me that enrollment looked slightly down from projections done in the Spring “now that the enrollment period is over”. OVER? Enrollment is over? Is she nuts? Are the other seven out of ten administrators I spoke to who had similar thoughts also crazed? Is there some academic Alzheimer’s out there that affects  the brains of college and university administrators when it comes to enrollment? Enrollment is not over. It is barely underway as the second unique event of a multi-year process. Enrollment is not a singular event. It doesn’t end when a student signs an application, sends in a deposit and shows up on the start of classes day. It is a process as shown in the chart below. It is a continuum that starts with marketing and pauses at graduation. The real work of enrollment we call retention is just really beginning. It’s the  pet rock thing  again. If admissions sells 100 pet rocks on Mond...

Retention can be understood in part by buying a dress. When a woman buys a dress she wants something that will be a good fit. She also wants to be attractive, for her to look good in it and for it to be worth the cost of the dress in her mind. Like buying that dress, the final decision to buy or not is not an intellectual conclusion It is an emotional one. It is a decision that is supposed to make you happy. (Unless you’re a bridesmaid and have to spend a lot of money on what is almost always a bad looking, ill-fitting and costly ugly choice. But in the analogy that is the same as having to choose a school which is a runner up and not the top choice.) If the choice does not make you feel as if it is a good fit which means it is does not provide an emotional, affective and financial (time, money and effort) return of investment, then the dress is one that is discarded or returned. For a school, that means a student leaves it hanging in his or her historical closet and walk...