Admissions may move to Office of the Provost

Robert Palmer, vice president for student affairs, reported that the search for a new director of admissions has been put on hold and the position description is being rewritten for a new vice-provostial post that would oversee admissions, financial aid and records and registration, and would have "some involvement" with academic advisement and institutional analysis.

The admissions office now is part of student affairs, while financial aid and records and registration are part of university services.

Palmer said the new vice provost also would be responsible for "bringing together others in key areas outside" enrollment activities, including orientation, career planning and placement, Equal Opportunity Program, alumni affairs and Millard Fillmore College.

Palmer said that a "drastic reorganization and restructuring" of admissions activities is called for because "what we've done in the past simply does not work" anymore.

Provost Thomas E. Headrick, who also attended the meeting, said it makes sense to begin moving various student-service entities into a coordinated structure.

"The work you do with students at the recruiting level and at the advising levelŠtheir academic programs and their longer-term aspirations, ought to be seen as a single piece," he noted.

Headrick told the executive committee that there are two aspects of the issue that must be considered: how UB restructures its "interactions with students in order to serve them better from beginning (of their academic careers) to (the) end" and whether it involves having a single person in charge or having a team approach.

"Clearly, making this kind of changeŠyou begin to focus on those kinds of issues. What we have now doesn't provide that."

Where enrollment activities are located on the vice-presidential organizational chart is not important, Headrick emphasized, although he conceded that with the current sense that more faculty involvement is needed in the process, "it may be easier for that to be managed, or nudged, from someone in the Provost's Office than it is from one of the other vice-presidential areas."

In sorting out the issues of enrollment management, the university must start from the proposition that "we want to provide adequate support and service for students in terms of pursuing their academic and other aims at the university, and we want to do it in an integrated way in which nobody gets lost in the process," Headrick said.

For years UB had a recruitment system that brought in large numbers of qualified students by focusing only on marketing, recruitment and related processing activities.

But, Palmer noted, "the competition has become much different and the pool (of prospective students) is drying up."

The academic literature identifies several key activities that are part of a successful enrollment management strategy, Palmer said, including strategic planning, institutional research and evaluation, marketing, recruitment, financial aid, orientation, student retention programs and career planning and placement.

"These types of activities force us to look at enrollment management in a comprehensive way," he said.

He added that enrollment management includes not only an institution's initial contact with students, but also retention activities that engage students with faculty and move them through the institution "all the way through graduation."

"I think that's the approach we need to look at."

But, Palmer noted, the current organization of enrollment activities at UB does not allow the university to follow this approach in enrollment management.

"It has become apparent to me that the Division of Student Affairs, the senior vice president for university services and any of the support areas truly does not have the muscle and wherewithal" to put together a "first-rate enrollment management system," Palmer said, "because the missing element in all of this is the involvement of the academic arm.

"We must have the deans involvedŠfaculty must be engaged in the recruitment and retention of students," he said, adding that "the academic unit, the provost's area has the capability to encourage that interaction."

Palmer noted that he had spoken with President William R. Greiner, Headrick and Senior Vice President Robert J. Wagner about his proposal, and "I believe we have an agreement in principle on how to proceed."

Dennis Malone, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said that while he can see the point of pulling these various activities into a more cohesive unit, he was surprised that they would be located in the Provost's Office because "it is not exactly what I'd describe as an academic area."

He also questioned why another vice provostial position needed to be created to oversee the operation.

Palmer stressed that the "key element" missing from the current structure is the involvement of the deans and departments in the enrollment-management process. "We're going to have to change the way we think and act," he said. "We have to see that enrollment management is broader than a particular unitŠ.we all have to be involved."

He noted that placing responsibility for the activities at the vice-provostial level would give the individual overseeing the effort "muscle and clout and a base of operations."

He added that it also would give the position "a bit more leverage. You can't get there from student affairs, folks, where we need to go. I'm convinced of that."

Jack Meacham, professor of psychology, said that while most any organizational process will work, what will count will be how the process is perceived by students. "The question is, who does the student come in contact with? Is it one person who carries that student and his or her family from the admissions point all the way through to graduation?" he asked. "Or does that student and his family get handed off from one person to the next and to the next. And then what happens in that hand-off process? Do students and families get dropped along the line?"

The medical profession has moved to a case-management or team approach from a single-practitioner approach, Meacham noted, adding that UB should be thinking about a team approach in enrollment management. "It's the model down at the level of touching the students and families that I think is important, and not the model up at the organizational level that matters."