Nationwide declines force universities to do more outreach
By JOSHUA HINTON, Student Reporter
Northwestern administrators say they’re implementing new recruitment tactics to drive up student enrollment amid nationwide declines partly triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
Enrollment rates across the nation have dropped since 2020, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which monitors enrollment data at United States universities. Nationwide, enrollment dropped by 2.7% in fall 2021 on top of a 2.5% drop in fall 2020. Since fall 2019, enrollment has dropped by roughly 938,000 students.
Northwestern’s enrollment has dropped by more than 400 students since the fall of 2015, according to data from the university’s Factbooks, which are available online. The number of students enrolled by headcount in fall of 2015 was 2,136, compared to 1,709 students in the spring 2022 semester.
FOCUS ON RETENTION
Northwestern is working on a five-year plan to counteract the downward trend in enrollment rates, said Dr. James Bell, the university’s dean of faculty. Administrators created the Retention and Enrollment Forum and Enrollment Task Force, headed by Bell, in fall of 2020 as part of the initiative.
“We meet three or four times a semester and talk about ways we can both enroll more initial students and retain the students we have,” he said.
The committee has at least one representative from each division and department at the university.
Bell said retention is a key topic, and one of the forum’s goals is to look at what each department is doing to retain its majors. The goal is not only to bring in new students, but also to keep existing students in their degree programs, he said.
“When we are in the enrollment forum, we’re talking about initial enrollment, so we are looking at recruitment efforts and what different departments are doing to try and draw in students,” Bell said. “How are they following up with students who come to Ranger Preview? How are they reaching out into schools to recruit or making contact with counterparts at community colleges to try to find ways to make ourselves known to potential students out there, whether they are first-time students or transfer students, to get our name out there in front of them?”
Another part of the forum’s mission to increase retention is to assess what barriers – whether financial, emotional or academic – cause students to drop out. Bell said the forum aims to build a community to support students in each department.
Bell calls the forum’s 16 members “enrollment champions.”
“The old-fashioned use of ‘champion’ – I am championing a cause, so they are the enrollment champions,” Bell said.
COULD ADMISSIONS STANDARDS BE CHANGED?
Northwestern has a pilot program for changes in admission standards based off a national trend showing that ACT and SAT scores do not necessarily show the success rate of students, Bell said.
Education researchers have found that a student’s high GPA in high school can equate to the same success as having a high score on either one of the widely used tests. A 2020 study by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research shows students’ GPAs in high school can be five times stronger at predicting college success than their test scores.
“For a long time, I think people were reluctant to do that because, does that equate with lowering the bar?” Bell said of changing admissions standards. “Really, what they found with study after study is that the predictor of success is about the same with both. And you are excluding some students who are really sharp students, and they proved that by performing well in high school. Maybe they don’t test as well as others. Whatever the reason is, they just didn’t perform as well on the ACT or SAT.”
Northwestern is also looking to add pilot programs to help students transfer from community colleges to Northwestern without losing credit hours, Bell said. In some cases, scholarships could be available.
Such programs would mirror the Bridge Program, which allows students to be dually enrolled at Northern Oklahoma College and Northwestern. But the program wouldn’t be exactly the same, Bell said.
“We are already reaching out to other community colleges in our state and even beyond our state … and we’ve had a lot of community colleges with that interest,” Bell said.
Different departments are trying new ideas to keep current students and recruit new students, and department leaders are sharing what is working and what is not working, Bell said.
The task force and the forum are working in the right direction by looking at the larger picture and the smaller picture, Bell said.
“You want to ideally increase the number of students you are enrolling and increase the percentage of students you are retaining,” Bell said. “We tend to say ‘fill-in-the-blank’ is all of our jobs, but truly, retention and enrollment really is all of our job. If you [students] aren’t having a satisfying experience and you don’t feel like you have faculty that are watching out for you, that is a hard sell.”