New enrollment strategies come from evaluation

By Kara Bacon
Trail Co-editor

An enrollment advisory team at Northwest College recently completed an evaluation of the 2004-05 enrollment that will allow the school to find pit falls in recruiting and retention.

Through statistical data found in the evaluation Dana Young, vice president of student affairs, said NWC will be able to find more specific reasons why enrollment is down and how to improve it. The advisory team has found a few areas that need adaptation to yield better enrollment results for the school such as: techniques and locations of recruiting and parts of the fall-to-fall retention. Young said the evaluation will “show us where we need to better focus time, energy and money.”

For recruitment they have made plans to visit more high schools in Idaho, Montana, this year they are adding portions of Oregon and South Dakota. Young said the recruiters would be going to more Montana and Wyoming schools with intensity. Adding more locations gives NWC more contacts with possible students. They are now in the process of visiting a total of 35 high schools in Idaho and 35 in eastern Oregon. This is the first year that they have recruited outside of the Boise and Twin Falls areas in the state of Idaho. They are also changing some recruiting activities said Brad Hammond, registrar and director of admissions.

Young said they had mailed out more cold contacts. According to Young a cold contact is the first communication between NWC to prospective students. This year 15,000 cold contacts were mailed out in hopes of getting more inquiries to the school.

Another adaptation is in the process of admissions, from inquiry to admission, Young said that every person who make an inquiry will be assigned to an admissions representative. This representative will be a continuous contact that students have with NWC. That way, Young said, the process may not be that confusing for prospective students. This change is a direct result of the fact that there are drops between in the number of students who are admitted and the number who actually enroll. Young said that our figures are still in good standings between about 70 and 80 percent of people who are admitted did enroll. Another factor is that NWC has hired two new admissions representatives or recruiters Kim Siebert and Lisa Smith.

The other side of maintaining a healthy enrollment is keeping students from fall to fall. Young said this come down to making sure that “people who are already here are getting what they came for” and that they are happy.

They also try to keep as many students from withdrawing as possible. In the current plans they are changing the withdraw form Young said that it will so be called the “change of status form.” She said that it will be expanded from its current form and that it will be a little more personal. Another goal is to have students who want to withdraw sit down and talk about with a staff member whether it is a recruiter, Young herself or a counselor in the Student Success Center. Young said many students don’t know their options when it comes to change of status there are usually solutions that don’t involve dropping out completely. Her main exceptions were students who have not really been attending, have family emergencies or leave for the military.

In the evaluation, with in the goals for retention was retention priority number five, which is to “increase student awareness and utilization of college technology. Young said that this is still some thing that needs work. The problem that Young sees is the fact that no one person heads technology it is spread out across campus to many people.

Several faculty and staff collected various statistics to complete the evaluation that was presented to the Board of Trustees during the Nov. 14 meeting by Young. The board initiated the evaluation through the 2004- 06 strategic plan. The data was gathered for two areas recruitment and retention. The evaluation was originally the enrollment management plan, which was a collection of targets, priorities and actions for the school to strive to reach. In the evaluation the results are added to the targets showing the school the outcomes of their actions. The data shows how many students are getting to what stages in the inquiry to enrollment process, a year-to-year comparison of those rates, international student enrollment, the number of Big Horn Basin high school graduates that enrolled to NWC in fall of 2003 and 2004, comparisons between part-time and full-time students and the number of students from Carbon County and Yellowstone County in Montana.