Conference Time – Exploring Innovation in Recruitment
April, for me, marks the beginning of a three-week stretch of great conferences that will offer opportunities for speaking, learning, and connecting with many of you. The month starts with the UCEA conference in California, moves to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the National Association of Branch Campus Administrators, and returns to California for the NAGAP conference toward the end of the month.
I am always interested when attending these events, at the breadth of sessions that are offered and the key topics that seem to emerge, often across the venues. This year’s underlying theme seems to relate to the idea of recruitment, and in essence, beating the competition. Some are looking to address this through their online offerings, other through the use of better recruitment practices, and still others by increasing their institutional retention of adult students. Regardless of the session approach it is clear what is on the minds of many of our colleagues in the adult student segment of higher education—we must increase in size if we are to maintain our individual viability in the marketplace.
Over the course of the next several blogs I plan to share with you some of what I have learned on this conference circuit during the month of April. I also plan to address some of the key reasons why the issue of enrollment is upon us even more strongly than it has been in the past and what some of the most successful institutions have been able to do to secure their position in the rapidly changing marketplace.
My goal behind this series of blogs is really twofold. First, I think it is important to look at some of the success stories that exist in the adult student arena and take from those stories some of the entrepreneurial spirit that it often takes to generate success. Second, I want to provide information that may serve as a catalyst for those institutions that may be grappling with the decision to invest, withdraw, or hold steady on their strategy to enroll adult students. The idea that “doing more of the same will result in the same” from an enrollment perspective is one that worries me greatly, and I worry about institutions who are contemplating that path as I know it will eventually end in the demise of their program. I am a true believer that “big does not eat little but rather fast eats slow”—and nothing is truer than that statement right now in the environment of the adult student market. I hope you will enjoy the next several blogs as we explore this idea—as well as some innovative ways that nimble institutions avoided being eaten.
Photo by whiteafrican
