Recently, Stefanie Ivan, an enrolment management consultant and Royal Roads associate faculty, and I had an opportunity to facilitate a webinar on “Pathways to Post-Pandemic Enrolment Growth in Higher Education.” This is a follow-up webinar to the one we conducted on post-pandemic higher education enrolment trends (see my earlier blog) in February.

We asked participants to share their most effective strategic enrolment management (SEM) strategy efforts. We then asked them to describe strategies for enrolling and supporting international, Indigenous, and domestic learners. Lastly, we asked them to say a bit about the learner and student support they provided.

When asked to provide one word that describes the effectiveness of current SEM strategy efforts, the most frequently mentioned were disconnected, work-in-progress, and growing. Others identified include developing, unsure, hopeful but slow, disjointed, uninformed, innovative, ongoing, challenging, deepening, modest, and uncertain. It appears that the experience with SEM is quite variable with some saying it is stalled while others report it as in progress or growing.

We then asked about strategies in use to enrol/support specific types of students. Below are some of the comments we heard.

International Students:

• Work closely with our key agents and agent relations management; strengthen relational networks
• Develop a personal connection to the institution and community
• Targeting markets that connect with Canada’s labour shortage areas
• Provide incentives that are appealing to international students
• Optimize admissions processes
• Utilizing a group effort to recruit international students
• Develop personal communications
• Have not returned to accepting international students yet

Indigenous Students:

• Focused listening and working with communities to address their concerns and needs; engaging communities through partnerships
• Developed an Indigenous strategic plan
• Established an Indigenous scholars’ circle
• Increasing and deepening supports
• Going to communities with incentives, application forms, and testing formulas for completion on-site
• We are not currently recruiting Indigenous students

Domestic Students:

• Balancing in-person and online events
• More first-year transition strategies to help retention and success
• Target movement in the job market and second-career students
• Utilize a blended delivery model for full-time and part-time students
• Work toward understanding what students and employers
• Reach out to withdrawn student
• Establish better support services, create more webinars/engagement, partner with community organizations, and follow-up strategies
• Treat in-country ESL/ELL students as domestic prospects

Learner and Student Support:

• Online advising
• Development of non-academic learning communities
• Increased/streamlined communications (phone, email, forums, chatbot, extended hours, weekends)
• 1:1 wellness check-ins
• Alternative accommodations for learners who need it
• A strong return to in-person and social and co-curricular activities
• Entering students into classroom settings right away to determine learning needs

Here is the Video from the webinar.

With so much to do to stabilize and grow enrolments during these post-pandemic days, it will be important to be strategic and there is no better way to do this than through adopting and implementing SEM!

-Clayton Smith