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SUNY Fredonia moving ahead on increasing enrollment

“In terms of recruitment of students, we still have a lot of work to do and a lot of work to go, (and) a lot of work to be done, but I think we’re happy with the progress that we’ve made so far.” Cedric Howard, vice president for Student Affairs

Even though there’s still more work to be done, the State University of New York at Fredonia is excited about the steps the Strategic Enrollment Management team has made to increase enrollment at the college — and those steps seem to be working.

At a recent College Council meeting, Vice President for Student Affairs Cedric Howard presented a plethora of data regarding the 2017-18 school year’s enrollment numbers.

As National Enrollment Day (May 1) has just passed, there’s no better time than now to try to get a good indication as to where the school stands in terms of potential students.

“… It’s really the first significant indicator of what type of year you’re going to have,” Howard said.

According to Howard, there is so far 1,065 first-year student deposits — the highest number the school has seen in the past four years, and it’s 165 deposits more than there were at this time last year — a 16.1 percent increase. Transfer students are also currently on par, with approximately 160 deposits.

President Virginia Horvath also reported that the university is at about 91 percent of its anticipated undergrad enrollment of 1,830 students.

“Let me put that into context. Traditionally, our campus has roughly an additional 20-25 percent increase in deposits between May 1 and Aug. 1. We’re thinking very conservatively,” Howard explained.

“We’re thinking we’re probably going to get an additional 15 percent, so we’re planning for another 150 deposits to come in over the next three months,” he added.

To achieve that, the college is working on implementing a number of community programs to reach this upcoming fall’s undergrad goal.

The school is also glad to announce that it has not diminished in quality: the main grade point average for the students that have made a deposit is 89 percent, and the mean SAT score is 1090.

Additionally, in just future freshman students, there have been acceptances from 435 high schools across 19 states. For the honors program, the target is 100 students, and there are already 137 deposits paid.

“In terms of recruitment of students, we still have a lot of work to do and a lot of work to go, (and) a lot of work to be done, but I think we’re happy with the progress that we’ve made so far,” Howard said.

“We have made, if I count, between Aug. 1 and recent times … 86 different processes of change within our admissions office,” Howard said.

Some of those changes include:

¯ Having a larger recruiter presence in community colleges.

“Community college students traditionally don’t make decisions until they’re at graduation,” Howard said. “So now they’re back out saying, ‘Hey, we’re here, and we’re looking forward to you coming to Fredonia.”

¯ Colleges typically make their offers on Jan. 15; Fredonia has bumped up its offer date to Nov. 15

¯ It used to take approximately 30 days to respond to a completed application; this year, the college has gotten it down to four days

¯ Acceptance letters and financial aid packages are now sent out as one letter

¯ The campus stopped reading every application.

“Our admissions staff was spending close to 80,000 hours reading applications. Imagine if you spent half of that recruiting. If you met our threshold, we’d let them in anyway, so let’s just get them admitted and get connected with their interest group and major,” Howard stated.

“Are we there? No. Are we much farther along than I anticipated when coming in in August? We are,” Howard said.

From the admitted student reception, there was a 65 percent yield. Enrollment from Buffalo-area residents is up 16 percent, and enrollment from international students is up 15 percent. Howard also stated that this incoming Fall 2017 class was the most diverse yet, reporting 31 percent enrolled ethnic minorities.

But, how is the school doing on local enrollment possibilities?

“We haven’t spent as much time as we should have,” Howard admitted. “That will change. That is in part because in the past, we awarded admissions counselors for bringing in applications … (but) there’s not a lot of applications here.”

Locally, Provost Terry Brown said that the college will be working more to bring local kids to the campus at other times to show off the amenities and make them want to come back for more.

“(We will be holding) more summer camps, have more kids on campus, have various camps … and start to increase more, because students want to keep going,” Brown said.

They’re also hoping to get into the schools more, starting at an earlier age.

“Eighty percent of entering students make up their mind prior to senior year, so we need to start working with them sooner,” said Howard.

Going hand-in-hand with recruiting, though, is retention: keeping the students that the college gets — so the college is working hard at making improvements across the board to make students was to come and stay at Fredonia.

“What’s important is to make sure that these students feel that they are challenged and supported. They feel like they belong here, and they know that we’re helping them with an attitude that we know they can do well,” Brown said. “We want to set a high bar for our expectations for our students, and consistently set a high bar, but give a high level of support to help make that.”

According to Brown, the top three reasons students do not return to a university, and Fredonia specifically, are financial, academic and personal.

There’s not a lot they can do academically — tuition can’t be lowered, but the Excelsior Scholarship will be coming into play; or personally — not a lot of students are willing to come forward with their personal problems, though the college will do what they can to help when they’re made aware of them. The campus is working on things such as making classes more available, streamlining the advising process, and re-working the curriculum so that more intensive classes aren’t lumped together in one semester.

The college may also, hopefully, one day be offering more programs, although that’s further down the line.

Fredonia is historically known as a music and education college, and, with the new Science Center, is an up-and-coming STEM-focused college, as well. The college does find, though, that they are lacking in some popular areas.

“A lot of high schools students, they want to go into health programs or engineering, and we do not have those programs,” Horvath said.

All-in-all, the college is happy with where they are, and are excited to see what its further efforts will bring the university, and the impact its attempts will make on the future college attendees of the area.

“We were not just going to focus on being another part of the system; we were going to focus on developing strategies that were consistent with institutions that were growing, and that’s a different way of looking at things, and I think we’re beginning to see some of the results of that,” Howard said.

“One of our responsibilities as a regional public university is to encourage college-going in general,” Horvath added. “So if this kind of outreach to younger students gets them to go to college, even if they don’t choose Fredonia, I think we helped fulfill an important mission in promoting education in our region.”

“Part of (this) is a leader willing to say, ‘Here’s what you’ve been doing the past two years; you’re doing the same thing. Was it working?’ They had to say no. So what Cedric did was inspire people to ask the questions: ‘What could we do in our processing that would be different? How can we approach things in a different way?'” Horvath added.

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