Staff Affairs discusses student enrollment, future
University of Idaho Staff Affairs discussed ways to support student enrollment and updates to the current process, including a new enrollment deposit, Wednesday at its bimonthly meeting.
Cezar Mesquita, director of Undergraduate Admissions, said staff members have an important role in helping encourage enrollment, even if they’re not directly employed in enrollment-related departments.
“From the admit stage all the way through the enroll stage, this is where the broader staffing community of the University of Idaho can really help,” Mesquita said. “Whether you’re working with a department that’s directly active in activities, hosting a program, getting people out there on the road or whether you’re indirectly associated with an event, it is so important to have everyone on board.”
Mesquita said those tasked with enrollment over the last few years have found some some students who are admitted and enroll at UI do not end up actually attending. He said one idea to fix the issue is requiring an enrollment deposit for newly enrolled students. He said if they go with this plan, UI would begin to charge students a $100 non-refundable enrollment deposit to encourage students to follow through with enrolling.
He said the deposit would be applied to students’ tuition costs and would not be an extra fee for students. He said students could also apply to have the deposit waived based on financial need.
The application completion rate has been around 70 percent for the past 10 years, according to Mesquita, which means a 10 percent increase in completion would equate to about 900 more students. He said it would not be easy to get this increase, because there are barriers to completing applications that aren’t obvious and will be difficult to change.
Mesquita said it’s important for staff to understand the different stages of the “enrollment funnel,” which he described as a way of explaining the process in which people become university students.
He said the funnel starts with suspects — people within an institution’s reach who could be interested in higher education. He said the students typically included in this model are recent high school graduates, which amounts to about 3.5 million students per year in the U.S. and roughly 18,000 per year in Idaho. However, he said it is equally important to consider those who have been out of high school for more than a year or two or are over 25 and considering becoming first-time college students — known as adult learners.
“These students are not necessarily reflected in these figures over here, but know that currently in the United States right now, the entire U.S. college population, students who are enrolled, about 40 percent of them are adult learners,” Mesquita said.
Those in the next stage of the model are considered prospects — people who could potentially become students. Mesquita said this is the point when the university tries to recruit individuals by sending information to students in the area who have taken the SAT or ACT.
Yet, he said it is better to interact personally with students through campus visits or high school recruitment trips than to put out a wide-reaching advertisement or promotional campaign.
“If we’re going to be putting an ad on Google, on Facebook or doing something that’s direct marketing, we can cast a really, really wide net with those activities,” Mesquita said. “But the response rate generally is going to be low and generally those students are just lukewarm excited about the University of Idaho.”
To ultimately boost enrollment, he emphasized the importance of small acts like saying “hello” to families touring campus and helping encourage students and parents to choose UI. He said from a staff standpoint, enrollment is becoming increasingly important.
Daphne Jackson can be reached at [email protected]