This report is being released on the second Friday of the month due to further discussions with the consultant during this week.  Information from both the campus visit and the follow-up meeting will form the material that follows in this report.

We are able to know more clearly what happened with fall 2004 enrollments throughout Arkansas as the Department of Higher Education has recently published official fall enrollment reports.  That material is in two attachments for reference purposes (DHE's spreadsheet data and news release), and depicts several items of pertinence to enrollment management considerations:

• ASU-Jonesboro, the four-year university in East Arkansas, is the only public four-year school to have recorded an enrollment decline from fall 2003 to fall 2004.  There has been slight growth in headcount enrollments at all Jonesboro instructional sites over the last five years.  Insights on these figures are given later.

• The two-year campuses in East Arkansas, ANC (Arkansas Northeast College), Black River Technical College, East Arkansas Community College, Mid-South Community College, and Phillips County Community College had a mixture of increases and declines, but on balance enrolled about the same total number of students in the fall 2004 as they did in 2003.

• Independent colleges in our area, Crowley’s Ridge College and Williams Baptist College, had enrollment increases in fall 2004. 

• Across the state, university campuses in larger urban areas recorded larger percentage enrollment increases than campuses located in more rural areas.

• More students than ever are enrolled in Arkansas post-secondary educational programs in the fall 2004, which should be regarded as a success story for the state.

If we look closely at ASU-Jonesboro, we see some interesting aspects of the fall 2004 enrollment, as reported by our ASU institutional research office:

• ASU-Jonesboro headcount enrollment (the number of individual students taking any number of credit hours at all instructional locations) declined from 10,573 in fall 2003 to 10,519 in fall 2004, a loss of 54 students.  This number has varied up or down approximately 100 students in each of the last five years.

• Within that number, however, is a decline of students registered principally at Jonesboro, rather than at other places where ASU-Jonesboro courses are taught.  The headcount enrollment at Jonesboro, which in 2001 was 9,300, has dropped to 9,071.  While this still is a large number of students, the trend of enrollment decline over several years is troubling.

• Better news is that Jonesboro courses taught at other sites have experienced the greatest enrollments ever in the fall 2004, in most locations.

• Within the Jonesboro enrollment, we see a mixture of gains and losses:  Fewer first-time freshmen overall, but more minority freshmen enrollments; more undergraduate transfers to Jonesboro, but fewer transfers to other instructional sites; more graduate student enrollments than ever before, and the largest enrollments ever in Jonesboro web-based course offerings.

• While we are still analyzing the data, it appears that the distribution of students in various types of enrollments, and some variations in revenues based on those enrollments, will cause ASU-Jonesboro to fall short of revenue projections for the fall 2004.  As more is known about this budget condition, plans will be made to respond during the remainder of the fiscal year.

• Clearly, the budgetary loss through enrollment decline is unfortunate, though manageable, but the greater import from the downward trend is that we are not performing at our capacity or capability, nor are we fully providing the benefits that we can extend to the public that supports us.

Enrollment management is a concept whose time has come, as was stated last month, and may be a process by which we can reverse the declines reported above.  What is enrollment management?  Our recent consultant gave several observations about the notion of a strategic enrollment management plan that are worth repeating here.

An enrollment management plan will provide an opportunity for ASU to focus on the cycle of recruitment, retention, marketing, financial aid, and student services to support our core business functions of teaching, research, and public service.  In other words, enrollment management supports our mission and is based upon institutional objectives.  The outcome of our recent and current strategic planning process will inform the enrollment plan, as will the participation of many persons throughout the institution.

While the task of developing a written enrollment plan has been assigned through the offices of Student Affairs in order to respond to the Higher Learning Commission, the process of forming the plan falls to all of us.  The enrollment management plan is not a Student Affairs issue exclusively, but instead must be joined by academic personnel, the faculty, supporting staff, Advancement areas, the Finance and Administration offices, even the President’s office.

While enrollment management will result in new and more students enrolled on the Jonesboro campus, increasing numbers is not the only purpose of the plan, nor are numbers its most important dimension.  The process should additionally help define and shape the academic profile of the university, it should enhance our diversity initiatives, it should bolster our retention efforts, it should help increase semester credit hour production that may lead to additional funding under the ADHE formula, and it should positively affect the image of the institution, a prime direction of our strategic plan.  So, an effective and productive enrollment management plan will help us arrive at destinations we already have charted.

To get there, we have put out a request for proposals from qualified enrollment management specialists.  We will ask an expert to come to the Jonesboro campus to conduct an audit of current and previous enrollment activity.  Over the course of several days, we will ask the expert to examine institutional information, enrollment data, and material from planning activities conducted recently.  The expert will be asked to analyze this material carefully and critically, and to mix it with commentary and reports given during a campus visit.  Faculty, staff, students, and enrollment-focused personnel will be asked to attend these meetings, which will be open and announced to the public.  We will want the consultant to visit with academic leaders and the chairs and deans who can expound on academic program opportunities.  We will ask the consultant to evaluate our facilities that are used for enrollment functions, and to offer an assessment of potential effectiveness of these spaces.  At the end of the visit, we should expect to hear a verbal report from the consultant based on these various observations.

We also will ask the consultant to produce a more lengthy and detailed report, one that expands the verbal presentation and that references data more thoroughly considered.  This report may also serve as a guide or roadmap for immediate and short term directions to the university, in order to produce positive enrollment outcomes next year.  The report will be published throughout the Jonesboro campus to help us understand what each of us may do to support the effort, and also to promote acceptance of these directions in the institution’s interests.

The timetable is rapid.  We would like to engage the consultant this month, begin to supply information next month, and conduct the audit before the end of the fall term.  We would like to have the report in early spring 2005, in order to make adjustments throughout campus to anticipate registration for fall 2005.  Realistically, the fully developed enrollment management plan will guide our efforts most specifically in the 2005-2006 academic year recruitment cycles.  That time period is opportune to demonstrate the operational plan for the Higher Learning Commission visitors in 2006, and to generate enrollment data two years from now, the fall of 2006, to anticipate the Legislative Session in the spring of 2007.  We would be hopeful then to demonstrate growth in enrollments, retention, diversity, quality of admitted students, and increases in the number of graduates.

Enrollment management is a process that will depend on all of us, and in which each of us have an interest.  I look forward to joining the effort, and to celebrating its success in a subsequent issue of this communication.

If you have comments about this material or any other aspect of the university, I would appreciate your communication to president@astate.edu.  Thank you for reading this report.

Leslie Wyatt
President

Referenced Material:

Enrollment Data from Department of Higher Education

Enrollment News Release from Department of Higher Education
 

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