VIEW FROM THE TOP

SEM LEADERSHIP: INSPIRATION AND PERSPIRATION

Stanley E. Henderson

I live in two worlds and alongside a third. It makes for complicated leadership.

In my role as Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management and Student Life (EMSL) at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, I find myself straddling what on many campuses are often two distinct—and not always compatible— divisions: enrollment and student affairs. And, as my hybrid division exists outside Academic Affairs, I alsooccasionally find myself butting up against the psychological divide that can separate the faculty and student services because (some) faculty have dim views of both enrollment management—“you’ll take any warm body to get the numbers”—and student affairs—“you touchy-feely types detract from the core academic mission.”

When I arrived in 2005, my background in enrollment management did not necessarily endear me to all of the student affairs offices and staff in my new division. They were skeptical of my lack of prior student affairs leadership. They felt the principles of enrollment management would subvert the student development theory on which they based their activity. They could foresee my draining resources to the enrollment units to the detriment of the traditional student affairs service areas.

As to the academic side of my world, it should hardly be surprising that faculty on any campus are not impervious to criticisms of enrollment management. Just as I was arriving in Dearborn, a story in the Atlantic Monthly suggested, “At its worst, enrollment management employs a host of ugly tactics to deter low-income students….” (Quirk, 2005) The following year, a respected educational analyst decried the rise of enrollment management: “Through a set of practices known as enrollment management, leaders in both public and private four-year colleges increasingly are choosing to use their resources to compete for college-qualified students from low-income families who cannot attend college without adequate financial support.” Haycock (2006)

Just to make matters interesting, student affairs, the other half of my life, also comes in for its share of criticism that does not go unnoticed in the faculty ranks. Laurence Smith, a long-time student affairs professional, heard in recent presidential interviews what many had always thought. These academic leaders raised questions about why student affairs people persist in seeing themselves as educators: “it confuses the roles they should play”; “annoys the faculty,” who see student affairs as intruding on their turf; and gives rise to the provost pressing for student affairs to be moved under academic affairs “to ensure greater coordination and better use of resources.” Said one president, “Student affairs vice presidents should pursue their roles as change agents in the life of students and in the events that touch them on campus.” Smith (2011)

The skepticism of my divisional colleagues, the questions of faculty—it has been a challenge and an opportunity in SEM leadership. And it has shown me the View from the Top isn’t always what we thought it was down on the hillside.

VISION AND OPPORTUNITY

If the challenge to SEM leadership was the uneasy engagement of enrollment management and student affairs, the opportunity was in forging a happy marriage. I went to UM-Dearborn with a specific leadership vision in mind to forge a campus approach to Strategic Enrollment Management. I saw great possibilities in the combination of enrollment management and student affairs. I wanted to get rid of that pesky “and” in our name by adopting what I call a “cradle-to-endowment” approach. This was a way to operationalize Michael Dolence’s definition of strategic enrollment management as “touching every aspect of institutional function and culture.” (1991) By moving away from the silo mentality that had characterized student affairs, we could blend our efforts to touch every aspect of a student’s life from before she even knew she wanted to come to UM-Dearborn, through recruitment, to admissions, to financial aid, to orientation, to advising, to registration, to her eventual success and graduation as a happy alumna ready to give back to the institution’s endowment.

This visualization of what student life should be turned the traditional enrollment funnel on its side to morph into Bob Bontrager’s student enrollment continuum, showing our student her path to success. It also suggested a new approach to student affairs. Every aspect of our work in EMSL needed to deal with students’ academic success. In Athletics, if being on the team is not helping a student go to class, do the work, and be successful academically, then Athletics is not fulfilling its role. If a student becomes so involved in the campus newspaper or in student government, that she can’t be successful in the classroom, those organizations are doing a disservice and that has to be addressed. This holistic approach to student academic success took both enrollment management and student affairs to a new level. We began to talk about not just what great things were going on in individual offices but where the intersections were between traditional enrollment offices that “just recruited and handed the class off” and service offices like financial aid that facilitated their ability to pay and student activities that engaged them to stay.

The consideration of intersections led to the formation of a Student Success Center that blended offices of Academic Support, Career Services, and Counseling, as well as the Women’s Resource Center into an umbrella concept that extended the four offices’ ability to have an impact on student success. Each office retained its identity but also became part of a larger whole. Staff developed an intrusive coaching approach that monitored and reached out to students at risk through Early Warning, career coaching to find a more appropriate major, getting students in distress to counseling, and finding resources to help students in danger of dropping out. Together the staff identified at risk groups and then used their specialties to address the needs. Career Services would work with undecided students to find a career path. Counseling would work with students with disabilities to keep grades up. Academic Support worked with students admitted with counselor discretion to ensure resources for success. The Women’s Resource Center developed transition programming using each of the other elements of the Success Center for non-traditional women students returning to college.

FACILITATING VISION TO REALITY

My vision of reshaping student affairs to be a major component of the “cradle-to-endowment” approach to enrollment management was the right idea, but I couldn’t strong-arm it into existence. In my 43 years of experience in higher education, I have come to view leadership as both vision and facilitation. It’s necessary to have a vision for where the enterprise needs to go, but it’s also necessary to clear the way for those who can give the vision reality. The most difficult lesson in leadership, in my opinion, is to avoid the “Woodrow Wilson Syndrome.” Wilson lost his League of Nations because he refused to compromise with the US Senate over the Treaty of Versailles. All of us who would bring vision to leadership must inoculate ourselves against Wilson’s Syndrome. Visionaries must understand that their vision will provide a map, even a structure, but its reality will be defined by others who do the heavy lifting of implementation.

As a visionary, you have to surrender your vision to those who can carry it forward and recognize when it’s finally implemented, it won’t look just as it did in your mind’s eye. Visionaries who understand facilitation will work to clear the way for the vision carriers, will celebrate their progress, and embrace the realized but changed implementation of the vision.

On my campus that facilitation was embodied in empowering EMSL staff to define the division’s goals. Their committees’ collective thoughts, not my individual pen, drafted the language. Their consensus, not my edict, realized these goals:

1. To attract, recruit, enroll, educate, retain and graduate students, utilizing EMSL personnel, the existing student information system, university communication systems, processes, databases and programs. Provide relevant and timely information, and implement innovative and customer centric recruitment and retention practices.

2. To provide opportunities for students to be engaged in campus, community, and global collaborations that connect to their courses, integrate their experiences, and develop their skills.

3. To develop in students the ability to think critically and act responsibly about their academic, engagement, and developmental experiences and needs.

4. To clearly communicate and execute critical administrative processes and deadlines, integral to student success

Each EMSL office can recognize its specialty in these goals, yet none exists in isolation. The enrollment continuum is easily recognizable, if not exactly seamless. I’m still standing astride the two parts of our EMSL name, but when my executive assistant answers the phone now, her deliberate emphasis on the “and” leaves little doubt that each side of that connector carries its own weight in our SEM mission for our students and our campus.

OF CULTS, INCREMENTALISM, AND DATA: SEM LEADERSHIP IN THE FACULTY WORLD

That third world of the faculty that I live alongsidehasbrought its own brand of challenge to SEM leadership. When I came to Dearborn, it was really the first time I was in such a senior position that I could educate the campus as to what my vision of “cradle-to-endowment” Strategic Enrollment Management was. One of the first criticisms I received was, “you really shouldn’t speak so authoritatively about enrollment management.” “Oh, really?” I said. “Yes, you always seem to have all the answers,” the person explained. I said, “That’s what I was hired for. I’m supposed to be this well-known practitioner of enrollment management—that’s what you wanted me to do.” “Well, you shouldn’t always come across as having all the answers.”

I eventually internalized that conversation as a cautionary tale that SEM leadership needs to avoid the cult of personality. Enrollment management leaders are front and center—sometimes almost as the “face of the university”. It’s easy to succumb to a cult of personality. However, our personality is not nearly as important as how we help others’ personalities become enrollment champions on campus. Instead of building up our own position, we must be looking for friendly folks who will become members of the SEM choir and proselytize more effectively than we could because of their roles in the campus culture. If I facilitated my EMSL staff’s creating a divisional version of the “cradle-to-endowment” vision, I should be doing the same for academic partners.

I also realized that my critical colleague was really telling me that in an academic context, less is more. As a result, I evolved my view of SEM into not just a vision but an incremental process. Incrementalism in pursuit of growing SEM on campus is not a weakness. In fact, it mirrors the academic world. A new theory in political science or biology doesn’t just spring full blown in the discipline overnight. It involves hypotheses, experiments, reports, replication of the original study. It develops. It is incremental. If we want strategic enrollment management to be in the academic context of the university, we really should think along these academic lines. It will more likely lead to eventual success for enrollment management than will the frontal assault.

One of the essential tools to this academic incremental approach is the adaptation of data and analysis in academic research to enrollment management. Collecting the data, analyzing it, and deriving results drive academic life. Data are no less important to those of us in SEM.

“The successful enrollment management enterprise must be able to produce good data (or extract it from good sources), analyze it, and turn it into information that can be used to make viable decisions. Without data, enrollment managers are relegated to making decisions based on intuition, anecdote, and conjecture.” (S. Lingrell, 2012)

Data can also help SEM leaders drive the development of relationships between campus units. When our IR director did a major analysis of student performance, the data showed EMSL and faculty would each need to play a role in improving retention and persistence to graduation. The data were so compelling in the story they told that they galvanized faculty to join with EMSL in a Student Success Alliance

When our Admissions Director gave an analytical report on Counselor Discretion admits, a category that faculty have incessantly criticized, the Math department chair congratulated her on the quality of her data and the rigor of her analysis. The research debunked the long-held belief that Counselor Discretion admits all came at the end of the recruitment cycle “just to make the numbers.” Exposed to the data that showed how much care was used in making the admission decisions, faculty began to talk about bringing equal care to helping these students be successful.

These kinds of collaborative, academically oriented relationships can give SEM new opportunities and new partners in finding answers to the hardest questions. In fact, on my campus, collaboration built a bridge between Academic Affairs and EMSL that advanced our now-shared vision of “cradle-to-endowment” and the goals that grew out of that vision.

FACILITATING PARTNERSHIPS

Enter the Higher Learning Commission, the ten-year reaccreditation process, strategic planning, and a campus commitment to assessment. As academic departments put assessment plans in place for their majors, EMSL units were beginning a program review process to identify strengths and weaknesses by using the Council for the Advancement of Standards (CAS) rubrics. The CAS review process suggested that at some point we would introduce learning objectives to our offices to allow us to measure how the services and programs that formed the “cradle-to-endowment” path were performing. The student development programs, relying on such resources as Learning Reconsidered (2004) slid naturally into sets of objectives and assessment of the outcomes. Our registrar and financial aid director, on the other hand, questioned how their processes and policies could lend themselves to such assessment.

To facilitate our support of campus goals and the reaccreditation process, we reached out to academic partners in the Provost’s Office and the Learning and Teaching Center to shape EMSL’s assessment plans around the campus academic model. While supporting the student development folks, these colleagues also gave language to our process offices, showing how they could identify and assess objectives in line with their work and in support of moving students successfully through the university. The result was a set of “Students will” statements that framed what we in EMSL wanted our students to accomplish as they moved from “cradle-to-endowment.” These statements mirrored those in the academic departments, and brought consistency to the entire campus. As with the EMSL goals, these Students will” statements show the individual office specialties but even more their intersections and blending to allow for assessment of broad learning about essential objectives. The statements also provide the basis for more specific “Students will” statements in each of the offices.

Students will (what we want students to be able to do):

•Understand and access campus academic and administrative support services

•Apply problem solving, critical thinking and creative thinking skills

•Be engaged in campus inclusion, exposed to various cultures and global experiences

•Gain career knowledge, workplace skills, and have experiential learning

•Participate in campus and community engagement initiatives

•Recognize the value of a University of Michigan-Dearborn education

•Develop and practice “soft skills”, personal responsibility, and leadership

GETTING STARTED AND MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

I love vision. I believe great leaders need to be able to articulate their vision. But I have come to believe that vision is only the foundation of leadership. The true heavy lifting of leadership comes in the facilitation of others’ work. Vision is grand, sweeping, eloquent, inspirational. Facilitation is intricate, incremental, opportunistic, drenched in sweat. Vision gets things started; facilitation makes things happen.

Finally, here is my mantra of SEM Leadership as facilitation:

Over the years, I have actually moved away from the language of Strategic Enrollment Management—“SEM-ese” I call it. Few campus leaders—or, more importantly, few campus cultures—can speak “SEM-ese”.

While I initially tried to give SEM workshops for academic units and Faculty Senate, I could sense that the history, definitions, and principles of SEM were not resonating. I long ago gave up trying to teach or translate for my academic partners prospect-to-applicant conversion rates and admitted student yield rates, let alone predictive modeling and financial aid leveraging. What I work for now is how to facilitate embedding SEM practice in the campus culture. I find myself watching what people do rather than listening to what they merely say.