There’s a nice article in Inside Higher Ed today by a faculty member suddenly working in admissions:
Whole sections of the admissions and recruitment process might not even be part of the division of academic affairs, but part of an enrollment services division, staffed by people who are experts in marketing, admissions, financial aid and more conversant in “yield management” than in the language of academia. Faculty often talk about admissions, financial aid, and recruiting, but rarely run across or seek out the people responsible, and are not often involved enough in the process to understand it.
Up until a year or two ago, I would count myself in this category. However, last year I received a federal six-year grant to work on a project to help middle school students make a successful transition to college, and I was suddenly in the college admissions and recruitment business (though we sell college, not a college), and I began to better understand what the competitive world of college recruitment is like.
This is a nice bit of timing, as part of what’s kept me busy over the past few days has been work for Admissions…
At big schools, it’s probably easy to take the Archchancellor Ridcully stance toward undergraduates (“They come with the place. Like rats.”), but part of what we’re selling at small liberal arts colleges is the idea of close contact between students and faculty, which means faculty need to get involved in the admissions process at least a little bit. The Admissions office runs several Open House events every year, usually on school holidays, and faculty are recruited to go to lunch in the Field House and chat with prospective students and their parents. In the sciences, we also run tours of the facilities, so students get a look at the resources we have to offer.
I always agree to go to these events, unless I have some schedule conflict, both because I spent enough time in grad school that I never turn down a free meal, but also because I know how important this stuff is. Students make admission decisions based on amazingly arbitrary criteria, and anything we can do to make their visit to campus a more positive experience might be the thing that makes a difference between getting a good student to enroll, and losing them to another college.
And this does pay off. I know for a fact that we’ve gotten a handful of students to come to Union based largely on the fact that we went out of our way to give them tours of the Physics and Astronomy facilities, and talk to them about what we have to offer. And those students include some of the very best students we’ve had over the time I’ve been here. The occasional really awkward lunchtime conversation (I have a gift for choosing to sit down at tables containing future History majors) is a small price to pay for that.
Of course, it’s also a job that never ends. You might be thinking “Wait a minute– yesterday was May 28th, but the due date for students to commit to colleges was May 1st. Why would they be having an Admissions event a month after the class for the fall was admitted?”
Yesterday’s Open House was aimed at high school juniors, who are just starting the college application process. We’re already recruiting the class for the September after next…