A number of colleges and universities are aggressively recruiting professionals from outside academe for various administrative roles. Many of these professionals come to campuses from substantial corporate careers, with excellent aptitude for the job at hand, and are generally wonderful additions to the staffs. The test often faced as managers is…

What creates the "one-and-done" scenario is the National Basketball Association (NBA) rule that prohibits a player from graduating from high school and going directly to the NBA. The league's obviously cynical and self-interested rule prohibits a prospect from signing to play before at least one year has elapsed. In contrast, Major League…

As chief admissions officer at two small colleges, the author has been responsible, in part, for ensuring that entry-level admissions counselors are trained properly. He learned through trial and error, and has adapted his methods to be increasingly sensitive to the learning curve of new employees. His thoughts about training new admissions…

Good enrollment managers know that keeping current enrollment must be Job Number One and that maintaining enrollment must be the concern of all campus constituencies. However, a large number of students are "lost" during registration due to closed classes. Lost enrollments are a largely invisible phenomenon that represents frantic and frustrated…

This is the fifth in a series of articles describing an attrition prediction and intervention project at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa. The project was originally presented in the 83(2) issue (Miller 2007). The statistical model for predicting attrition was described in the 83(3) issue (Miller and Herreid 2008). The methods and…

On every college and university campus, common themes weave throughout identity and access management (IAM) and its relationship to Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Institutions approach IAM differently as there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Nevertheless, all face common elements. Over the past few years, a number of…

College and university admissions offices publish the numbers of "college preparatory" courses they recommend. However, they typically fail to publish how well students should perform in high school courses in order to succeed in college. This study assess the relationship between high school course performance and college performance. A strong…

Colleges and universities generally do not allow for the top-down style of leadership that many definitions of strategy assume. Rather, postsecondary institutions are loosely coupled professional bureaucracies composed of individual employees and academic units that can pursue individual strategies with little or no input from management…

Shifting economic winds over the past year brought an end to a powerful, healthy wave that many higher education institutions rode successfully in recent years. While the work of college and university enrollment leaders and organizational executive teams is never easy, the recent student demographic spike, the abundance of online admission…

In most admissions offices, the focus of training sessions for student telecounselors and tour guides is on transmitting information about the institution. Although this transmission of institutional knowledge is important, these training sessions are opportunities for student admissions employees to consider how their work relates to their…

As universities begin to implement business intelligence tools such as end-user reporting, data warehousing, and dashboard indicators, data quality becomes an even greater and more public issue. With automated tools taking nightly snapshots of the database, the faulty data grow exponentially, propagating as another layer of the data warehouse.…

The array of admissions models and the underlying, and sometimes conflicting goals people have for college admissions, create the dynamics and the tensions that define the contemporary context for enrollment management. The senior enrollment officer must ask, for example, how does an institution try to assure transparency, equality of access,…

This article is the fourth in a series of articles describing an attrition prediction and intervention project at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa. In this article, the researchers describe the updated version of the prediction model. The original model was developed from a sample of about 900 First Time in College (FTIC) students…

The purpose of this qualitative study is to analyze and understand what information students seek from a college's Web site during their college search. Often, college Web sites fail either to offer students an interactive dialogue or to involve them in the communicative process, negatively affecting students' college search. Undergraduate…

Enrollment management is central to the success of a college or university. A school must enroll students into courses, completion of a series of which will lead to graduation. While all colleges and universities must manage the enrollment process at least operationally, it is challenging to keep track of all the related data that would allow for…