by Stuart Colcleugh
Illustration: David C. Chen / Veer.com

Kate Ross, SFU’s new registrar and senior director of student enrolment, arrived at SFU last January during what President Michael Stevenson has described as a “near crisis” in the university’s efforts to attract and retain new and existing students. “It was serious,” agrees Ross, “and we’re not out of the woods yet.”

After years of high demand resulting in perennially packed classes, SFU is scrambling to address a shrinking Grade 12 population, fewer international students coming to Canada, competition from other schools, a clunky application process, and a red-hot job market.

To tackle that near crisis, Student Services staff hosted a university-wide enrolment summit in fall 2006. “It was pivotal in elevating institution-wide understanding of the recruitment problem and identifying the processes and procedures necessary to fix the problem,” says Nello Angerilli, associate VP-students and international.

Since then, the university has completely reorganized and revitalized its Student Services department, powered by more than $1.3 million in additional funding. The department has doubled its staff of academic advisors and nearly doubled its applications processing and financial assistance staff. It has also deployed a university-wide enrolment management process to better coordinate recruitment and retention initiatives in collaboration with all of its internal stakeholders.

Angerilli says Student Services, which is responsible for virtually every aspect of student life, is now taking its programs and services to a new level. “We’ve moved students and their success back to centre stage at SFU, with a more student-centric approach to managing the university.” Ross’s first priority was streamlining the student application process, improving yields at each stage – from prospect to applicant, applicant to offer, and offer to registrant. The key was to personalize the process so students had someone to connect with and support them with their applications.

“Our system was unnecessarily complicated and unresponsive,” she says. “We were acting like gatekeepers instead of facilitators, and we had three months to turn things around.”

Ross’s team immediately began assigning a personal “go-to” recruiter/advisor to every applicant, shepherding them through the process and resolving systemic bottlenecks such as difficulties paying application fees. For the most promising prospects, they encouraged faculties to follow up with early offers of admission.

As a result, “we were able to turn around a deficit in applications at the beginning of the cycle to a rate that was two percent above target,” says Ross. “That’s a dramatic turnaround, but we hope to do even better over the next three to five years.”

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Student Services “funnel,” Nancy Johnston’s team was wrestling with an even thornier problem: retaining existing students through to graduation. Historically, of all the new students who enrol each year only 70 percent graduate with an SFU degree.

“It’s like a very big hole in the side of a bucket you’re trying to fill,” says Johnston, SFU’s senior director of student learning and retention. “We employ all these recruitment strategies and monetary incentives, offer the right courses, hire the best faculty, remove financial barriers, and recruit the best and brightest students. And in the end, 30 percent of them leave — 22 percent in the first year alone.”

Although SFU’s retention rate is “quite average for North America,” she says “it’s not good enough in a competitive environment.”

Her staff also produced a higher-quality undergraduate recruitment brochure, improved their online recruitment “viewbook,” and improved admission guides.And the department’s communications team partnered with SFU’s Learning and Instructional Development Centre to make the university’s goSFU student portal easier to navigate.

Working with other department divisions and the library, Johnston’s team focused on new and better academic support programs. Her academic advising group teamed up with SFU’s new Student Learning Commons group to create Student Success, a pilot program that assists applied science and international students who have academic difficulties and who would otherwise be required to withdraw. The team also launched a new prospective-student web page and added more Blueprints academic advising sessions.

And senior director Tim Rahilly’s student and community life team delivered a record performance this semester, welcoming more than 2,500 new students through its orientation programs at all three campuses and filling all the university’s residences for the first time. “We aim to engage students with our campus communities even before they start classes,” says Rahilly.

The department has a new student union building on its wish list, along with increased funding for student athletics and recreation. “Our athletics structure needs to be fixed,” says Angerilli, “especially the financial aspect.”

But the bottom line, says Johnston, is that SFU can, and must, do a better job of serving its students. “Even top schools like MIT and Harvard, with some of the brightest students anywhere, have unbelievably good academic support programs to ensure high completion rates. We owe our students nothing less.” aq

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