UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP COUNCIL (ULC)
Minutes
December 18, 2012
Attendance: Nivine Megahed, Tracy Costello, McCeil Johnson, Marty Mickey, G. Maxx Shawlee, Sarah Brick, John Bergholz, Tim Collins, Kathleen Gorski, Holly Battaglia, Steve Thompson, Sarah Moss, Suzette Fromm-Reed, Kimberly Michaelson, Generosa Lopez-Molina, Tom Bergmann, Carol Moulden, Kathy Walsh, Chris Malaeb, Cynthia Shaw, Julie Bechtold, Steve DeBenedetto, Scott Karakas, Bobbi Biringer, Marsha Watson, Tim Skoning, Amy Lefager, Kathy Vandlik, Deb New, Steve Neer, Mital Patel, Joselyn Zivin, Tom Ehrhardt, Vance Wyatt, Seema Iman, Ellen Belluomini, Mary Kelly, Mike Graham, Juliet Kasl and Steve Kovack.
Agenda/Minutes: The agenda for the meeting was approved. The November minutes were approved by consensus.
What’s Happening:
Marty stated that the second floor renovation will start on January 16, 2013 when we move the advising and enrollment areas into the atrium and onto the 3rd floor. The renovation itself will start a few days after and continue on into early March. Also, he indicated we have a new ULC link on the NLU web-site.
Kathy Walsh shared that they started painting the library. They are weeded down to nothing but books that get used. We are opening up space in the middle of the library and we have been cleared to get new carpet. We have some power and data upgrades so we can do more exciting stuff. We will be moving more computing and more tutoring capability in there. We will only be closed occasionally.
Kimberly wanted to report that she has been working with enrollment and outreach trying to establish an all university calendar to identify what faculty events are occurring and mailings are going out so we can try to get a handle on what resources exist here at the university to try to draw our alumni to those events. Please contact Kimberly with your events and call with any questions or comments.
Tom stated that they will be starting the Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) in January/February. They received 21 nominations and will be narrowing that down to about 10-12 in the next couple of weeks as they get ready to kick the program off in January. It is a 12-14 month developmental program that people go through for emerging leadership skill building. Tom also indicated we have about 21 positions open, but are recruiting for a few key positions, such as the VP & Chief Research Officer and also looking to backfill the Executive Director of On-Line Learning position that was recently vacated. Tom also mentioned that HR recently met with our health insurance brokers. Our claims utilization looks pretty good. We are where they expected us to be. The bad news is that health insurance carriers are looking to increase the rates as much as they can in light of all the changes with Obama care. They are going to keep working real hard to keep those renewals as low as they can.
Generosa wanted to update everyone on the New Ideas Summit process. They have been working with Marketing, deans and faculty looking at the next groupings of activities. They launched the New Ideas Summit on November 8 and are now looking at between 6-9 programs to do some additional research on and hope to have recommendations to Dr. Quinn by the end of January on which to proceed with. The programs they are considering are baccalaureate in communications, a master’s in public health, a masters and doctorial in higher education leadership, organizational leadership at both the bachelors and master’s program, and an entrepreneurship program at the masters level. They are also exploring a sustainability master’s program as well.
John stated that they have a new annual fund person on board and a new approach so they have restarted it with a different look. They had some target mailings that went out. One related to the veteran’s initiative and the faculty/staff solicitation. For the first time in some time there is a state of the university letter that sets the tone in our communications with external audiences - the alumni donors. This is signed by the president laying out some of the funding priorities and a request for gifts. Last night the entire advancement office was up on the fourth floor in a make-shift phone room making phone calls to lapsed donors. It was a pretty good night, with not so much the dollars we raised, but the reaching out to people. He believes the total raised was about $5000.00. These were mostly donors below $100.00 and we were reaching out to them for the first time. On Friday we had a half day Veteran’s Advisory Meeting. We had seven of the 19 advisory council members come to that. It was chaired by Dr. Curda and Steve Goodwin who is our volunteer chair. It was a good launch with a lot of energy.
Bobbi gave a brief summation of the winter term. In summary, she indicated we are on track to meet our new student headcount budget for the term
Retention: Discussion of what steps we might take as an institution to improve our overall retention of students.
Nivine stated that it is important for us to view retention as everyone’s responsibility at the institution because it is one of those areas that is not just about the student experience and how well they were served when they are coming in. It is also about the academic experience and the financial experience. Everything about serving our students helps us to improve our retention or erode our retention, depending on how we are doing it. Ultimately, all of us bears responsibility in ensuring that we build a great educational experience for our students.
Steve stated out by talking about the value of retention. Every 1% improvement in the overall annual rate translates to about $500,000 of revenue to the university if you keep those students enrolled.
Steven then talked a bit about why student might leave and the barriers to retention.
Students, when they do leave, are not required to give us a reason why they leave. They just don’t register for the next term, but we do get reasons. These are consistent of actual reasons why those students leave:
· Financial reasons
· Disappointed with their experience here
· Do not register for the next term
One of the things we are trying to do now is a change of status now that we have not had before. When students do decide to leave, we will ask them to tell us if they completely want to withdraw or return at all. Right now we do not have this status. Part of that process would be to actually collect a specific reason as to why they have chosen not to come back.
We are trying a number of different things with NLU to increase retention. We do a lot more structured outreach to encourage students to enroll earlier. The change of the registration process this year is that when we opened winter term registration, we also opened spring term registration at the same time. This is a change for us. Normally, spring term would not have opened until February. By combining these, we already have around 2,000 continuing students registered for spring. We are moving towards the point where students will be able to register a year in advance. This gives students a lot more predictability in what they can plan their lives around.
Integrated learning support is a product for the AQIP project. It is part of the strategic plan to develop a warning system with early indicators of when students are starting to get into trouble and reaching out to them earlier. Adding more learning support to the undergraduate level earlier in their programs because we know students need that. We are trying to get away of extra learning support being a dirty word or punishment and making it an integrated part of it.
Break Out Session:
The group then conducted break-out sessions in which everyone was asked to consider the following:
1. Is there any guidance you can give that would alert us to an early warning system of when students are having problems?
2. Discuss things that you know are going on in the institution that you think are good practices that are increasing retention.
3. What ideas do you have that we may be doing more of to increase retention?
Group 1:
Once we get D2L running, there is a lot of integrated support data that we can get to determine a student’s involvement. What kind of student participation? Once we have that data, what are we going to do with it? The group suggested the following:
· Build – follow pathways to success through long-term commitment
· Proactively mitigate retention issues
· Mentors (alumni, coaches, etc.) for students
· Involve faculty to reach out to students
· Create financial motivators
· Strategic discounts, “early-bird specials”, etc. at multiple points, not just entry
· Promote awareness of scholarships
· Reduce textbook costs
· Everyone talk to students
Group 2:
This group wanted to frame it in two pieces, one is the now which is very tactical and the other is to simultaneously to be strategic in helping our students such that we are not always being reactive.
This group suggested we redefine enrollment as a relationship that starts when students inquire at that first point of contact and our goal is to make it a long-term relationship. They also stated that in our short-term or long-term tactics, it is important to understand how to influence people’s behavior. Behavior is a combination of motivation and ability and it happens in three environments: individual, social and organizational.
We need an institutional conversation about the issue of resistance and to come to some mutual agreement about what the definition of resistance is for our institution. Then, employ a strategic approach, including the framework for motivation and behavior that helps give us a framework to tackle some of these key issues. We can think of the university as a health club rather than a shopping mall. Students tend to come in and say I bought this class, how come I did not get an A. A fitness perspective is ‘no pain, no gain’. You get out of it what you put into it.
Group 3:
This group suggested the following ideas to help retention:
· Facilitating faculty communication to advisor on specific “needs” (email to student, email to advisor/intervention)
· Early alerts
· Faculty need to know early alert process; they need to know what to do
· Knowing who to make the referral to
· Advising – pilot on collaboration efforts between advisor and faculty (AQIP – undergrad)
· Creating process of collaboration
Retention Practices:
· Engage alumni – mentoring students
· Creating a richer/valuable experience
· Integrate guest speakers/special events in the classroom experiences
· Regular check-ins with advisor (scheduled as needed)
· Rebuilding the faculty role
Group 4:
This group suggested the following:
· Early notification between faculty and advising
· Adjunct faculty training in D2L and what their role is in notifying advising when a student is not attending class
· Early term visit from advising to make sure students understand their role and our role
· Book adoption (having it done timely); how students get their books
· Financial impact – students having too many hours when they arrive so they are no longer eligible for financial aid
Group 5:
This group suggested the following:
· Fully utilize D2L
· Student engagement (participation in designated course actions)
· Career development participation
· Online course materials
Sarah stated, that we have various support mechanisms to help students in their first terms including Welcome Week at each of the five campuses, M-R from 4-7p. As always, Chicago has consistent volunteer levels but our support for students during Welcome Week at the other campuses is a consistent opportunity. If faculty are willing to support students at one of the other campuses, we would joyfully welcome your help. Sign up here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SOS-Welcome
Additionally, during the second week of the term we are going to be calling all students (new and continuing) and checking in with them to see if they are experiencing any barriers to their success. Our call campaign last term for new students was very successful. We will be looking for volunteers to call students during the second week as well. We have set a very audacious goal of calling all students (new and continuing at every campus including online). I will have a script and we will have live support for callers who have questions they can’t answer personally. If faculty are willing to make some calls, we would joyfully welcome your help. Sign up here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SOS-Welcome
Take Aways:
Marty stated that retention is a team effort where we need to come together to accomplish this. We need collaboration among everyone. We all need to pull together to make this happen.
Meeting adjourned at 12:00 p.m.
Next meeting: January 23, 2013 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM (Chicago Campus–Board Room).
Respectfully submitted,
Juliet Kasl