Category: Blog

Understanding Those Who Need Us: 4 Types of Students and How to Help Them

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

As next semester’s registration period ramps up, advisors will see an increase in student traffic, experiencing long days juggling back-to-back appointments, walk-ins, phone calls, and emails. It’s a time of year filled with stress. Students are concerned that they won’t get the classes that they need, worried that they may not pass a prerequisite course, and eager to get some direction from an advisor. Advisors are busy trying to triage the student traffic, struggling to respond to and assist all the students who are seeking their help, and managing a myriad of administrative duties between students. It’s the same thing every semester. Or is it? Does it have to be? These are the thoughts and questions I’ve posed to myself throughout my career in higher education. There must be a better way to avoid the mad rush of registration leading up to the start of the semester. While institutions struggle with managing this workflow throughout the year, I have not found any system that effectively reduces or eliminates the rush. Such is the nature of human beings in need. They seek us out, which is a very good thing. The problem is, there are usually not enough of us to […]

Advising: Meeting Student Needs?

by Carol Moore

Several months ago, the Chronicle featured an article on advising focused on the work of Dr. Ned Laff, who detailed the importance of broad-based advising and the gaps between what today’s students need and what they frequently receive. Drawing upon an advising career at multiple colleges, Laff focused his comments on the disconnect between advising and career services. I resonate with his analysis, and, with more than four decades of my own in higher education, I contend that the gaps reach even deeper. At the root of the problem is the failure of colleges to keep up with evolving market demands. Neither the fundamental concepts of college advising nor the associated reward system have been updated in decades, resulting in a disconnect between market demands and what the academy is delivering. We need to do a better job for today’s students. Why aren’t we delivering? It is my observation that we will not deliver what students need until we connect advising to faculty evaluation. Multiple surveys over a decade or more indicate that today’s students and parents expect a college diploma to come packaged with a clear-cut career path-not just a major and a broad general education, but experiences that […]

4 Essential Leadership Competencies Department Chairs Need to Lead in the New Normal

by Jennifer Scott Mobley, Ph.D.

Introduction As a higher education leader for almost 20 years and a former department chair for ten, I have witnessed time and time again how the right department leader can animate an academic program. As John C. Maxwell once said, “The reality is that 99 percent of all leadership occurs not from the top, but from the middle of an organization.” Sitting at the nexus of the student body, the faculty, and the administration, department chairs are poised to provide crucial leadership in the effort to help students progress toward graduation and their institutions toward transformation. Despite their important positioning, department chairs are rarely taught how to lead nor are they typically rewarded for good leadership. Nearly 50,000 currently serve as department chairs in the United States with about a quarter of them being replaced each year (Gmlech and Buller, 2015). And yet only 3.3 percent of department chairs came to their positions with formal coursework in the administrative skills they need (Cipiano and Riccardi, 2012). While challenges facing higher education grow in intensity and become more complex, many department chairs enter the role woefully unprepared for the challenges that await them. The convergence of interconnected crises in recent years-including […]

The Great Resignation or the Great Joy in Higher Education: Emerging Lessons from the Pandemic

by Kathleen Vinson

I. Introduction The Great Resignation, the Great Attrition, the Great Disengagement, and the Big Quit are a few of the names for the phenomenon occurring throughout different industries, including higher education.1 Higher education is not immune from this great exodus and is at a turning point as retention of faculty, administrators, and staff is more important than ever.2 What’s joy got to do with it?3 Can it drive those who work in higher education to stay, leave, or return?4 Money is not enough by itself to retain workers.5 Over the last two years, higher education, like other industries, is facing a fundamental shift in how people view their work, their employer, and their life.6 Perhaps this is an opportunity for the Great Joy: to (re)discover joy in your work; reevaluate what you want from work, be open minded, and possibly reinvent how you work, where you work, who you work with, and what you work on. This article explores the challenges higher education faces as the pandemic continues to alter attitudes on work. It then offers some strategies to (re)discover joy in work. Finally, it discusses ways to maximize joy in work. II. The Struggle Exhausted, isolated, disconnected, burnt out, […]

Surviving and Thriving in the After Peak Advising Period: 7 Strategies to Regroup

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

The beginning of the fall semester is a tumultuous time for students, parents, staff, and administrators. Everyone is focused on enrolling new students and supporting continuing students. The weeks preceding the start of the term up through add/drop are intense for academic advisors as we urgently strive to manage the influx of appointments, walk-ins, calls, and emails. During these weeks, it’s easy to let the stress and fatigue get to you. The job becomes essential, but almost meaningless as you wade your way through email after email asking to get into a closed class, override a prerequisite, or help students accomplish last-minute registrations and schedule adjustments. During this time of year, I’ve heard many advisors (myself included) exclaim “this is not advising!” The work loses its luster when it becomes reactive, transactional, and limited in scope. Even though students who access advising during these critical weeks most certainly value our assistance, it can leave advisors exhausted and at risk for burn-out. So, what can you do to avoid it? This, too, shall pass. Earlier in my career, I internalized students’ stress and thought I’d never get through everything I needed to in time to meet critical registration deadlines. I’d reach […]

The Legal Landscape of Higher Ed: A High-Level Overview for Academic Leaders and Faculty

by Jon Boeckenstedt

We’ve arrived at the final of six posts about enrollment management, yet we haven’t really touched on why enrollment management (EM) is different from just admissions, or marketing or financial aid, or some of the other areas that are often found in a typical EM portfolio. In itself, this might be instructive; if you’ve found yourself occasionally confused or overwhelmed by the complexity of the previous five topics (Marketing, Demographics, Recruitment, Admissions, and Financial Aid), you can imagine how challenging it can be to put them all together into one big package, and to get those pieces and parts to work together in harmony. It can get even more complex when other areas of your university’s administrative functions-like the registrar, orientation, student success, housing, or retention-are rolled into the mix. Suffice it to say that enrollment management is really about managing and balancing the tradeoffs inhert in every decision a university makes about its enrollment strategy. I often tell people that the concepts of EM are much like a triangle balanced on the head of a pin: It’s easy to make any one corner go up if you push two down, or vice versa. It’s only when you try to […]

Access and Prestige: The Complex Function of Financial Aid in Higher Education

by Jon Boeckenstedt

In my last post, I wrote about how admissions works, although the lesson, perhaps, is that the term “admissions office” means very different things at different institutions. And while it’s still true that we in admissions and enrollment management all agree on one thing-that if a student never applies, they won’t enroll-it’s also true that the final step in the process is the processing and delivery of financial aid. A caveat: This is hard to grasp on the first pass-if it sometimes does not seem to make sense, that just means you probably understand it better than you think you do. I recommend paper, a pencil, and some note-taking to get you through this. It’s going to be challenging to navigate. About 15 years ago, I started gauging the age of my audience during presentations by putting an image on the screen. It’s the floorboard of an automobile, showing part of the brake and floormat for some context. You’re likely to notice the bright red carpet before you notice something else that doesn’t look quite right: To the left of the brake is a silver button, a little bigger than a quarter. I ask the audience members to raise their […]

Discovering and Acting on Your Students’ Post-Pandemic Online Preferences: An Update

by Rebel Smith, A. Graham Peace

Introduction Like a great many other institutions, we emerged from the pandemic knowing that the disruptions of the last few years would inevitably lead to changes in the preferences and desires of our student population around the educational model and how education gets delivered. We also knew that, to remain successful and competitive as an undergraduate program of ~2,900 students in a typical college of business at a large, public land-grant institution, we needed to keep in close touch with how those preferences were evolving. This article serves to tell that story: how we went about understanding our students’ changing attitudes about the educational model, what the data pointed to, and what changes we made in response. Students now clearly prefer to have online classes in all areas of their curricula, and they prefer asynchronous offerings over synchronous – a large change from what our data was telling us just one year ago. We hope that by telling this story, we urge and inspire other units to do the same: not only is it important to continually monitor and adjust to best meet your constituents’ needs, but those who are willing to adapt quickly have a distinct opportunity to take […]

The Role of Admissions in Shaping the Student Body, and the Institution

by Jon Boeckenstedt

In my last post on student recruitment, I mentioned that recruitment and admissions-although often thought of as the same thing-are actually very different functions at some universities. But because there are about 1,600 four-year public and private, not-for-profit colleges and universities that are at least nominally selective, the line and distinction between the two varies based on institutional type, market position, and mission. For context and clarity: IPEDS collects admissions data on all institutions that say they are not “Open Admission.” Looking at the 2,075 four-year public and not-for-profit institutions that admit freshmen and report admission data serves as the basis for discussion today; among them, we see that 466 are in practice or philosophy admitting 100% of applicants. Beyond that, however, there are millions of students enrolling at for-profit institutions and community colleges for whom admissions data is not available, and won’t be discussed here. There is one thing admissions and enrollment professionals all agree on: If a student does not apply, they will never enroll. Thus, in a nutshell, recruitment attempts to generate as much interest, and usually as many applications, as is possible. Even if a university gets 20 applications for every seat it has in the […]

Recruitment In Today’s Data-Driven, Evolving Higher Education Landscape

by Jon Boeckenstedt

It has been said that all the world is simply a struggle between the “Haves” and “Have Nots.” How you view admissions and recruitment at your university probably depends a lot on which type of university you work at, whether you’re at a public, private, or for-profit institution, and-especially-what the mission of your institution looks like. Are you at one of the private “Haves” or perhaps one of the public “Have Nots?” Are your founding and mission based on access for a wide swath of the population, or is your purpose designed to serve the elite students-and only the elite students-who have risen to the top of the pyramid of academic achievement we sometimes call “merit?” It makes a big difference. In my first post in this series, I wrote about marketing, and how all higher-education institutions do it to some degree. I also mentioned that the enrollment management and/or admissions/financial aid departments are leading the charge when it comes to the four components of marketing (price, product, place, and promotion). And in this post, we’ll get down to “brass tacks,” where we actually apply those concepts as we attempt to enroll a class in the next term that is […]

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