See this session and others at AACRAO's SEM Conference in Los Angeles, CA. Register today!
ï
|
Richard Levin
Executive Director Enrolment Services and University Registrar
|
Monday, October 27, 2014 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
|
Could you describe your session and what made you want to present this year?
I work in a large and very decentralized environment. There are about 23 people who are registrars and have some level of admissions and recruitment responsibility. Part of my job is to make sure that the organization is aligned when recruiting, to have consistent messaging and get the most out of our resources. Even if people come from a less decentralized environment, we all deal with some of the same issues. I believe there might be some helpful lessons for others based on work we have done.
What are some of the challenges that you have faced with this decentralized structure?
There are student recruitment organizations in different academic areas: recruitment managers, recruitment staff, and admissions officers. They often have their own publications and websites; they have their own priorities and need to meet their own enrolment targets. The challenge is how to bring all of those resources together to best serve the university and be as efficient as possible. It’s also about what the role of central recruitment is. Recruitment staff members in academic divisions don’t report to us so we need to balance the mandate we have to create some consistency while also being a service to the different areas.
How have you addressed these challenges?
If you look across the whole university, there are a lot of people doing recruitment and admissions. So, how do we become more of a team and still allow divisions to meet their goals and be autonomous and how do we use data to support these coordination efforts? We had to look at what kind of coordinating bodies and committees and other mechanisms we needed to create to make sure that information was being shared and that people had a chance to work together.
Do departments collect their own data or are the centralized offices responsible for collecting data?
I think that’s one of the areas where we’ve really added value. There is certainly some data collection and analysis to varying degrees in different areas. We’ve tried to make that a priority at the center. We see that as a service we bring to our academic divisions, that we can help to show them what’s happening both in the university overall and their division and how we might respond to that.
Have you experienced any trouble with the divisions coming together?
I would say there is a lot of good will and recognition of mutual interest. At the same time, some internal competition is a reality. That’s one of the things we’ve worked on--how to have healthy competition among divisions in the university. In general, people are very good, but of course everyone has their own pressures; they are under pressure from their own divisions, and they need to meet their targets and that’s all very understandable.
What do you hope attendees will gain from attending your session?
Attendees will get some ideas about how to deal with competing pressures around recruitment at a university. I hope they will pick up some examples of things that we did that might help them and be able to identify with some of the challenges that we have and continue to have. People will be able to contribute to the discussion and suggest some of the things that they have dealt with and that have worked for them too.
What are you most looking forward to at this year’s SEM conference?
Connecting and reconnecting with people. It’s great to have a network of people across North America and beyond because we share so many common interests and there are so many ways of sharing knowledge or information and we’re all in similar boats.