Page 13 - Campus Technology, March/April 2018

RETENTION dian schaffhauser Turning Around an Enrollment Decline
When Mesa Community College needed to crank up enrollment retention, it turned to an outside company for help. The result was a striking 9x return on investment.
THERE’S A DIFFERENCE between seeing a national trend of shrink- ing enrollment in two-year public institutions and feeling the hit at your own college. While the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reported that two-year publics saw a 2.6 percent drop in student enrollment for fall 2016, Mesa Com- munity College was facing a decline of 6 to 8 percent for the same period, one more data point in a series of waning enrollment numbers for the Arizona school. Surely, there was something that could be done to turn around enrollment retention.
According to Christine Bullock, IT project manager for Mesa’s College Technol- ogy Services, the college’s Office of Recruitment & Outreach has long made con- tact with students via education fairs, college prep workshops, mailings, e-mails, texts and in-person visits. Yet a phone call would provide a personal touch that could really lift response. “Someone calling a student, even if it only results in leav- ing a voicemail, puts that little bug in the student’s ear and reminds them, ‘Oh, I might need to make sure I have my financial aid submitted on time,’ or ‘Oh, I forgot to check and see if I could take that math class this summer instead of waiting until the fall,’” she explained. “You tend to get a better response from that.”
But how to make those phone calls? One option would be to set up a call center inside the college using internal resources. Of course, that would require hiring and
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | March/April 2018
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