Enrollment Management Plan

I have set some goals for our division to improve scheduling efficiency while serving our students, which of course is the overriding principle. But serving students cannot become the rationale for poor stewardship of resources — which includes the chaos of having to cancel sections the week before classes begin. So, we’re engaging in this exercise to achieve these goals, using old and new tools (like Ad Astra)

Here are our Enrollment Management goals, with a bit of discussion.

Designate every course as “low-volume” or “high-volume,” and develop appropriate (different) approaches to courses in these categories.

Example: Russian III

We want to continue to offer the whole Russian sequence, but in the near future, data trends suggest that we aren’t going to have many sections, and the sections we do offer will have relatively small demand. Courses like Russian III need a different approach (and different criteria for success) than high volume courses, like Ethics or Comp I.

Example: Honors Literature courses

We have roughly a zillion Honors Lit courses, and offering them every semester until they make is a textbook case of Futility, because they are competing against each other. If we approach (most) honors courses as LVCs, we could step back and be more strategic in how often we offer each of them, thereby increasing the probability that any one of them will make. (Thanks for already doing this, Stacey!)

The moral? In general, LVCs should be offered fewer times in an academic year and with more attention to stable, strategic scheduling. LVCs that are integral to sequences require even more special handling.

Creative pathways for progression

In spite of our best efforts, there will be LVC sequences that have very low enrollment. What are the alternatives? Think about it: We can:

• offer sections of courses that don’t make, which will anger and frustrate just about everyone involved
• boost enrollment so we don’t have this problem (by marketing? a campaign of mass hypnosis?)
• give up and stop offering the whole sequence
• come up with creative alternatives

Here’s an example: We had only a handful of students sign up for Russian IV —considerably below the make rate and even below the break-even rate. From the institutional perspective, there’s a huge disincentive to run courses with such low enrollment, but at the student level, the course is needed for progression. We’ve tried various approaches, but this semester we’re trying something completely unhinged: CE as an alternative. Essentially (and mostly because of the good will of the professor — thanks, Mary!) we’re offering a CE version of the elements of Russian IV. At the end of this road, students can opt to take the challenge exam. This is a far from perfect solution — and we may find out by the end of this term that it’s not a solution at all — but it’s an attempt to find a creative “outside-the-box” way to meet student needs that also respect institutional priorities and expectations. We need more of that. Possibilities abound, and some might even work within the many constraints within which we must operate. Find them and try. The alternative is to give up and just not offer courses that have low demand.

High-volume course goals

Reduce empty seats: This means not merely reducing the number of sections offered that aren’t full, but also changing the way we think about courses. Typically, professors (rightly) become concerned about the number of students needed to make a section. While that’s appropriate at the level of an individual prof’s teaching assignment, enrollment management is about having sufficiently many sections to meet student need while tending toward maximizing efficiency. I take it that empty seats is a metric that, prima facie, suggests we need to look at how many sections we have on the schedule.

Reduce the number of sections canceled preemptively and at endangered sections review. This goes hand-in-hand with reducing empty seats, and it’s obvious why we’d want to make this a goal. Canceling sections — even two weeks before classes begin — causes significant upheaval for students, professors, departments, and the dean’s office. In fact, it’s hard to see a win for anyone. Do I think we’ll reduce cancellations to zero: nope. But as I recently quipped, we can’t create a perfectly germ-free environment for surgery either — but it doesn’t follow that we should give up and do appendectomies in the student lounge.

If we make reducing the number and distribution of empty seats an explicit goal, this will have positive consequences in other ways as well. For instance, canceling sections not only means students have to find their way into other courses, it also means more bumping, which means more disruption throughout the ecosystem. So, investment in fewer empty seats is also an investment in a more stable schedule for professors — and that has implications like morale and the sense of locus of control.

Goals for all courses

Appropriate representation of the core: A Core Pathway At Every Campus!

Ensuring that we have a core pathway at every campus does not mean we offer everything everywhere. It means we’re reflective and strategic about what we offer where and when, but with an eye on the larger picture of what else is going on at a campus.

For example, much as I personally love teaching Intro to Philosophy, it makes much more sense to ensure that we have plenty of Ethics sections at Eastview and RRC. If it came to pass that we had minimal intro to phil footprint, we would nevertheless maximize the probability of serving the students at those campuses, given the primary student aspirations at those campuses. So, we find out what core courses would be most useful to the most students, given their aspirations, and prioritize.

Pathways for persistence and completion

This is a lofty goal, but the ideal would be a strategic pathway rationale for every course on the schedule.

Consider an easy case: Arabic I through IV. Insofar as possible, we should offer sequences like this on campuses and at days and times that make it possible for a student to plan her life — yes, even for the next two years.

It’s easy to overlook this when we build the schedule in shorter planning cycles (like semesters). We certainly don’t look at the schedule in two-year increments — but we should. Empirically, this is a significant factor in student persistence and completion. And it stacks up anecdotally: How many times have you heard a student complain that she or he delayed transfer or graduation because of “not getting a course”?

Are you thinking: Great! Doesn’t apply to me because I don’t teach a sequence. You spoke (thought) too soon: We know that students who took X do better when they take Y, so we need to ensure that there are plenty of pathways that put X before Y in plausible sequences. You can probably tell me off the top of your head which other courses are great preparation for your Y: Why would we not at least try to build in these “success pathways” as we contemplate the schedule?

One of the simplest ways we can support persistence and completion is predictability. Again, we should plan in two-year cycles, especially for sequences, but we can also attack the predictability problem by designating sections as structural or ad hoc. Structural sections are those we planned in advance, and those should roll-over at schedule building time. But look at how many sections we add in response to something, like a big wait-list, or a request from another department or division running a weekend college program. Those are ad hoc — not in the sense that they are random, but in the sense that we are responding to what may be a one-off situation. Those should not roll over, but should be placed on the schedule intentionally. Intentionally also means making an ad hoc section structural when and if the conditions justify.

Reduce Scheduling Idiosyncrasies

In our division, we have (mostly) 3 and 4 credit hour courses, and we schedule those courses based on the number of minutes they need to meet accreditation expectations. Are you aware, however, that in the college, in some semesters you can find classes scheduled at odds with everything else on the schedule? Or that we’ve had some semesters in which there were upwards of 30 different terms, each of varying length, each with a number of classes among which to distribute instructional minutes? Think about the impact on students: They could very well be in classes that are out of sync with everything else going on in their course load. Not to mention the headaches generated by trying to find a classroom for a seven-week summer term that begins in the fourth week of the summer.

Our goal is to reduce idiosyncrasies of scheduling, so that our courses fit into standard time slots and standard semesters — unless there is a compelling pedagogical reason to do otherwise. The bar for “compelling” is pretty high, given the price of these idiosyncrasies.

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Do I think we can solve all our problems and find a comprehensive schedule that offers smooth, predictable pathways for every student? See the quip about appendectomies, above.

An essential factor in doing better at enrollment management will be good, timely communication and cooperation with campus managers, and a willingness to engage in a more collective approach to schedule planning and implementation.

What does this mean to you? Here’s an example:  Suppose we lose a lot of sections (empty seats!) of some particular HVC: If we can find ways to be more efficient with that course across the college, then I have more negotiating room for LVCs, like Latin or an honors lit course, at endangered sections. I’m in a position to think about our division globally (mainly because I’m the one making all these deals), but departments can strengthen my hand by thinking globally, too.

We aren’t going to pursue these goals in the dark. As I said, Don Becker is one of our assistant deans for data and pathways (the other being Jason Vidrine). While they serve all of our Liberal Arts AoS, Don is the designated schedule data analyst, and he started this Enrollment Management initiative with LAHC departments. He has been analyzing the schedule and making proposals that move us toward these goals, with more to come.

If you’d like more information about the Enrollment Management initiative, be in touch with me or Don Becker.