The Lee Honors College at Western Michigan University led a new recruitment initiative in April 2015 called Honors First, intended to increase the yield of academically high-achieving applicanïts. This week, we talked with Anthony Helms on how WMU created and launched the Honors First initiative and what he learned during this experiment.
Tell us a little about your presentation.
As the Director of Academic Advising for Lee Honors College, my goal is to increase recruitment of honors students. Every year since 1984, Western Michigan University has hosted the Medallion Scholarship Program, the highest merit-based scholarship offered at the university. One of our main goals of this program is to recruit and enroll at least 50 percent of these competitors — a goal that we had great difficulty in achieving in the past.
This year, we conducted a pilot recruitment initiative called Honors First. We invited all the students competing for a medallion to meet with their academic advisors in groups or individual appointments. We also offered them priority registration, allowing these students to pick their classes in April every year instead of waiting until the summer.
For the past three years, we exceeded our enrollment goals, and Honors First took our efforts a step further. This past April, we had 257 students participate in Honors First. When classes start on Tuesday, 253 of those students will be freshman this fall. It’s an extremely high yield rate for a pilot program.
What is different about the honors student population?
This is a part of the presentation that I’m really excited to talk about. High-achieving students are generally cheaper to serve, graduate on time and have a high retention rate. We typically have a 95 percent freshman retention rate in the honors college, where the vast majority of these participants land, which is substantially higher than the rest of our campus.
I surveyed the honors students before and after the competition to assess what they valued as potential students. Of this population, we saw many students much more academically focused — they don’t care too much about overnight stays on campus or meeting current students. The top three needs of the honors student population were academic advising, interaction with faculty and early registration. I can package this survey information and other data to our Associate Provost for Enrollment Management for him to take back to the enrollment management team to find more ways to be successful in serving these students.
What else has the university done for honors students to maintain such a high retention rate?
We’ve been much more efficient with our annual audit process, so we are constantly assessing ourselves and measuring for success. Each of our staff members in the academic advising office also specialize in an academic college, allowing us to customize honors curriculum and make it compatible with specific programs. My favorite part about working here is that we are constantly looking for our weak points and finding ways to fix them. We’re very student-oriented and present ourselves as helpful resources to students that want to get the most out of their degree.
What do you hope attendees will learn from your session?
It’s amazing what you can learn from the students when you simply ask the question, “Of the many resources we have to offer at this institution, which of them is most important to you?” By asking this question, you can reinvest in the right resources to make these services better and more accessible. This session is much more than just attending to honors students — it’s about identifying target populations, offering special privileges to bring them to campus early, and asking how we can better serve similar students in the coming years. Secondly, this initiative was a great way for academic advisors to have an impact on enrollment managing and recruitment. We knew that honors students wanted stronger presence from faculty and academic advisors, so we pushed them to be more active in the recruitment process. I hope sharing my experience at the SEM conference will help others start these types of initiatives at their institution.
What are you looking forward to doing at AACRAO SEM?
I’ve presented at and attended several other conferences, but this is my first time attending a conference focused on strategic enrollment management. After the conference, I plan to continue my training with several AACRAO online courses as well as the SEM Endorsement Program next year. This conference will give me the opportunity to network and meet people and find new strategies and initiatives that I can bring back to Western Michigan University. I look forward to all the training and expertise that I’ll encounter at this conference, and I plan to be a sponge and soak up as much as I can.