Earlier this year, AACRAO Consulting found that West Virginia University had erroneously awarded 288 degrees. 29 recommendations were made to enhance WVU’s student academic records management. One of the recommendations was to create and appoint a university registrar position at WVU. It didn’t take very long for WVU to create a position description for the newly created Registrar position. 3 months later, WVU has appointed a Registrar to be the “official custodian of student academic records.”

I wish Dr. Steve Robinson all the best in his new position. It will be interesting to see how quickly he can counter the institutional-wide issues that led to inaccurate degree reporting / auditing. System-wide issues are extremely difficult to mend, regardless of the appointment of a centralized leadership position. It will take coalitions of folks working in conjunction with one another to create a more focused, error-free system of degree granting.

As I ponder this situation, I keep thinking about the role that academic and faculty advisors will need to have in order to fix things at WVU. Student Information Systems are wonderful tools for most folks in higher education, however, the components that academic advisors utilize are often lacking in terms of both function and usability. Without solid systems for academic advisors, degree audits and degree granting at WVU will still be an issue…

Academic advisors tend to get cold sweats over this type of thing. Fortunately, the institution where I work has a pretty solid degree audit system that is bulwarked by a solid system of humans. Class substitutions and transfer course equivalencies are part of my daily routine. Plus, I have my abacus at the ready in case of emergencies.

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers found that West Virginia University awarded 288 degrees despite discrepancies in credit requirements.

The investigation began in the wake of a degree scandal at the University in which Heather Bresch, Gov. Joe Manchin’s daughter, was inappropriately awarded an Executive Master’s in Business Administration degree.

Along with Bresch’s degree, AACRAO Consulting found that 27 students in the WVU College of Business and Economics, and 261 additional undergraduate degrees either fell short of credits or had other discrepancies.

Degree requirement discrepancies stemmed from several sources, said Jonathan Cumming, assistant vice president of Graduate Education. The discrepancies originated because the records-keeping process was incomplete. Credit-hour deficiencies could also be due to errors in class substitutions or mistakes made in recording transfer credits.

The mission of AACRAO Consulting’s work at WVU is to “provide professional development, guidelines and voluntary standards to be used by higher education officials regarding the best practices in records management, admissions, enrollment management, administrative information technology and student services,” according to the final report.

via UWire

The final report from AACRAO Consulting is quite lengthy but it’s worth reading as it provides a lot of insights into what went wrong at WVU. The Registrar’s position at WVU was probably fast-tracked at light speed. The position description is already online! One of the requirements for the position is that your degree cannot be one of the 288….just kidding

Lastly, I wanted to point out this quote from the AACRAO Consulting report: “Many faculty find the Banner system difficult to use, instead opting to keep records in paper form.”

SunGard Higher Education, ARE YOU LISTENING? The interface for Banner is horrendous. I would say that it’s horrible, but I don’t want to insult horrible! Let it be known that if anyone can create an interface/system that does what Banner does, and is actually friendly to humans, the higher education institutions of the world will grant you immortality and a cash prize!

SEM in this context stands for “Strategic Enrollment Management“. A recent article on strategic enrollment management in the Shepherd University enrollment management newsletter provides insight into the structure of strategic enrollment management components:

Revenue is an important part of the SEM strategy building. The institution must determine its Optimum Revenue, defined as the sum of appropriations and tuition revenue. Like Optimum Enrollment, (benchmark enrollment figure that indicates revenues and expenditures are in balance) Optimal Revenue is a benchmark that fluctuates and is impossible to calculate with absolute precision. An institution’s Optimum Tuition rate may actually be lower or significantly higher that the tuition currently charged. Current Revenue is then compared to Optimum Revenue. The difference becomes the SEM Revenue Goal.

• Current Enrollment x Current Tuition = Current Revenue
• Optimum Enrollment x Optimum Tuition = Optimum Revenue
• Optimum Revenue - Current Revenue = SEM Revenue Goal

Strategic Reinvestment, a key economic model of SEM, is a function of the SEM Revenue Goal rather than an absolute dollar figure. This refers to allocating resources saved from existing revenue streams, or allocating new revenues generated by SEM strategies to further the success of the SEM program. An example of this is setting financial aid levels as a function of revenue. The flexibility of this reinvestment provides unexpected control in bringing in the class at or above numerical and quality expectations until optimum levels are achieved. Such an approach eliminates important opportunities through miscalculating yields on financial aid offerings or putting continuing students in competition with new students for limited financial resources.

Shepherd University Enrollment Management Newsletter:
http://www.shepherd.edu/university/enrollment/

Additional information on strategic enrollment management:
http://consulting.aacrao.org/tag/strategic-enrollment-management/

Enrollment Management professionals love data. High school student demographics including race, ethnicity, geographic location, standardized test scores, etc. are all part of a strategic enrollment management toolkit. Unfortunately, the Princeton Review had a recent long-term information breach of that same sort of information that is so often of interest to higher education enrollment management divisions:

The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory firm, accidentally published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its Web site, where they were available for seven weeks.

One file on the site contained information on about 34,000 students in the public schools in Sarasota, Fla., where the Princeton Review was hired to build an online tool to help the county measure students’ academic progress. The file included the students’ birthdays and ethnicities, whether they had learning disabilities, whether English was their second language, and their level of performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which is given to students in grades 3 to 11.

Oops.

The University of Oregon is steering hundreds of freshmen to off-campus apartments next fall because its dorms lack sufficient room to handle an unexpected surge of enrollment.

The university expects 3,800 freshmen next fall, a 400-student increase, which will exceed dormitory space and force the university to provide more classes and services.

Some parents are anxious, angry and disappointed, and some students have chosen to go elsewhere because of the housing shortage, says Robin Holmes, vice president for student affairs.

Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon wants to know if you are a Chemeketa scholar…because if you qualify, Chemeketa will give you a full tuition scholarship for 2 years!

Are you a Chemeketa scholar?

Are you graduating from high school this academic year?
Do you currently have a cumulative, unweighted GPA of 3.5 or better (as of 7th semester grades)?
Do you live in the Chemeketa service district?

Are you willing to:

Begin your college career the fall after you graduate high school?
Enroll in 12 or more credits per term?
Commit to maintaining at least a 3.25 GPA in your Chemeketa classes?

Then you’re a Chemeketa scholar

Chemeketa Scholars qualify for

* A full tuition scholarship for up to two years.
* Placement in an on-campus, paid position such as student ambassador, peer advisor, tutor, or mentor. Job placement not guaranteed. Positions are limited.

I’m currently subscribed to 104 RSS feeds. My bloglines is sometimes a bit overwhelming as I peruse content from around the blogosphere. One of the blogs that I always read, no matter how busy I am, is the MIT Admissions Blog(s). The site is written by several MIT students and staffers. I love the breadth and depth of the content on the MIT Admissions Blog. Blog posts are full of student stories, campus and event photographs, and important procedural processes.

In my opinion, it’s the premier admissions blog in the United States in terms of content, diversity of bloggers, comments, and overall aesthetics. A Google search for “admissions blog” places the MIT Admissions blog in the 4th spot on the results page, just below the Oregon State University Admissions blog.

A recent post on the MIT Admissions blog on a talk by Noam Chomsky contains a wonderful mix of text and photographs.

Ben Jones, the MIT Director of Communications, even posted his own, custom made Lolz Catz post!

I think this student-written post on Application Cycles is a wonderful example of informing students about application policies while simultaneously telling a narrative of what it’s like to be a student at MIT.

The MIT Admissions Office has set the admissions blogging bar at a high level. It’s a wonderfully constructed group blog that is impressive within and outside of the admissions blogging context.

The 2007 batch of first-year medical students at the University of Missouri-Columbia is the least racially diverse in recent history.

We are constantly concerned and aware if we don’t mirror the population of the state, and we just keep working at it,” William Crist, dean of the medical school, said. “Fortunately, in big systems we try to view how well we’re doing not by a single class. You look at four-year periods because by chance you can get an unlucky year.”

Dear Dr. Crist, “chance” and “luck” have nothing to do with the intentional recruitment and support of students of color. Citing that the reason that Black enrollment is low because of the number of medical school applications by Black students does not answer the question of “why” the number of applicants is low. Maybe you could ask why the number of white student applications is so high? Is it luck? Perhaps it is because the system is biased towards white students…?

(continue reading…)

Declining Enrollment:
Eastern Oregon University is in trouble. With enrollment and finance on the decline, officials have created a “strategic plan that includes enrollment management, recruitment and transfer improvements.”

Student applications are down 41 percent this fall compared with two years ago. Tuition revenue for the university dropped $1.48 million below its expectations for this year; it projects an additional $847,000 decline in tuition revenue for 2007-08. With fewer students, the school is also failing to fill its residence halls, which means it must pay a bigger share of dorm debt.

Perhaps it is time for Eastern Oregon University to contact some strategic enrollment management consultants?

Admissions:
Marilee Jones, the Dean of Admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), resigned from her post today “after it was confirmed that she had ‘misrepresented her academic degrees to the Institute,’ Dean for Undergraduate Education Daniel E. Hastings announced in an e-mail to the MIT community today.”

According to Jones, “I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.”

Hastings stated that “the process of admitting the incoming class continues without disruption.”

(continue reading…)