Maybe You Don’t Have Because You Haven’t Had Hands-On Help

Do you know someone who can’t afford to go to university? Maybe they actually can afford it but simply haven’t asked for help.

An article in University Affairs, December 2009, references a study of low-income families and found that if individuals received help in filling out student financial aid forms, they were much more likely to submit the application and enrol in university or college. How much more likely?

29% more likely!

But it appears that the assistance must be hands-on help. Those in the study who simply received information about aid eligibility and tuition fees, but who didn’t receive any personal assistance, saw no difference in their enrolment rates.

Ok, Financial Aid Officers out there, are you giving hands-on help now?

Does Your Registrar Inspire Joy?

Earlier today, Seth Godin blogged about Upside vs. Downside, which I initially thought was irrelevant for Registrars’ offices. Initially. And then I pinched myself and woke up.

The question he raised is “How much time, staffing and money does your organization spend on creating incredible experiences vs. avoiding bad outcomes?”

I just spent a day in Vancouver at a Degree Partnership Symposium, hosted by the BC Council on Admissions and Transfer. At this symposium, three different presenters all said the same things: “Well, after we had this great idea, we took it to the place that kills all good ideas – the Registrar’s Office!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little sick of hearing that. I’m sorry, but if you are a Registrar who is best known as a killer of good ideas YOU HAVE A PROBLEM!

Don’t mask it with euphemisms like, “I’m just introducing a dose of reality,” or “Someone has to keep standards around here!” A Registrar must be a can-do person, someone who knows the ins-and-outs of the organization and can help good ideas navigate through the complexities and into success.

But too often Registrars protect or we are, as Godin says, “busy ensuring that a bad thing won’t happen.” If we continue down that road for too long, we will quickly become irrelevant – an office to avoid. We will soon be victims of restructuring or redesign.

Why can’t we be known as the place that guides good ideas to fruition? Let’s be known as people who are “aggressively investing in having a remarkable thing happen that will delight or move a customer”. What a joyful place that would be to work!

Testing for Admissions

Academica’s Top Ten (a great free service provided by Ken Steele) published a summary of articles on the Globe and Mail’s recent “Report on MBA Schools”. It seems that there is some debate about which test is supreme: the GMAT or the GRE. The GMAT, or Graduate Management Admissions Test is the oldest, most commonly known test used for admission purposes, but its ascendancy is being challenged by the Graduate Record Examination. A quick scan of schools websites shows me that schools generally indicate one or the other as being required as part of the admission process. Several schools indicate minimum score requirements as well.

Very few schools allow for both tests. Rather, they specify one or the other. I find that interesting and perhaps even less than customer friendly. Why not allow for both tests to be submitted as part of the application?

Oh, I can hear the reasons now. “It’s not a fair or equal assessment if some students do one test while others do another. You have to compare apples to apples.” Another says, “But we don’t have anyone trained to assess the other test, so this is the one we have expertise in.”

Horse puckey! These are straw men arguments.

First argument rebuttal: every school, every province, every state has unique course and degree requirements reflected on transcripts, yet we accept them. Why not one more test?

Second argument rebuttal: it’s easy to set a minimum standard for each test. You don’t need an expert to do it. Each testing organization provides their recommendations. And you can always ask a colleague what they do.

The real arguments? I bet it’s a case of that old “We’ve never done that before.” It might be, “I don’t want to have to put the work into researching and arguing for this before the admissions committee and senate. What we have works.”

Yes, but it’s just one more little barrier in a raft of barriers that will keep students from applying to your institution.

Just do it already!

How Do We Rank?

The Academic Ranking of World Universities report for 2009 has just been published. Only 4 Canadian institutions made the top 100 list as follows:

• University of Toronto (27th)
• University of British Columbia (36th)
• McGill University (65th)
• McMaster University (91st)

I’m not sure how much weight to put on this list. A few questions come to mind such as, “The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology beats out the U of T?” And another, “University of Minnesota – Twin Cities beats out UBC?” Have you been there???  And then sometimes you have to question the rankings overall, for example, giving McGill University 65th place is almost laughable. Come on folks! McGill, U of T, and UBC are about a whisker apart in quality, and they are world leaders in business and medicine, among other things.

The more I look at this list the less I care about it.

Yay! TWU Get’s A+

Satisfaction with Space to Register in Courses Necessary to Complete Your Degree A

Satisfaction with Helpfulness of Administrative Staff A

Satisfaction with Class Size A+

Trinity Western University, the school I work at, received another (4th year in a row) overall grade of A+ in the annual Globe & Mail’s Canadian University Report. You can check it out for yourself here: http://www.globecampus.ca/navigator/trinity-western-university/

The Office of the Registrar is pretty excited about this because a number of our efforts at service improvement are reflected in this report. While we don’t have complete control over any of the below list of graded items, we do have some significant part to play in all of them.

• Satisfaction with Convenience of Class Scheduling: B
• Satisfaction with Ease of Course Registration Process: A+
• Satisfaction with Number of Courses to Choose from: B
• Satisfaction with Space to Register in Courses Necessary to Complete Your Degree: A
• Satisfaction with Helpfulness of Administrative Staff: A
• Satisfaction with Class Size: A+

For more on this subject, check out this link:http://www.twu.ca/about/news/general/2009/4th-a.html

Institutional Strategy and the Registrar

The Summer 2009 edition of College and University, a journal of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers has an interesting article entitled, “Middle Management and Institutional Strategy”. The author, Sam J. Fugazzotto, does a very nice job of summarizing some of the differences between well-known middle-management positions such as those in a manufacturing plant, and middle-management positions in colleges and universities such as the Registrar. His main point is that organizations which succeed do so because they marry operational effectiveness (sometimes known as OE) with a unique strategy, and the Registrar is best situated to assist in managing both.

Typical manufacturing plants have a middle management with a ton of control. This is because senior management tends to focus on strategy, and directs middle management to achieve the strategy by directing, standardizing and measuring the operators’ work.

When I was doing my M.A., I was informed by one of my professors that “middle management is dead.” It appears they have been resurrected.

Enter a Monty Python moment: “And now for something completely different.” Middle management in higher education bears little resemblance to the manufacturing sector. First of all, we deal with faculty members who, along with their multitudinous degrees, seem to have their own ideas and are hard to influence (read “almost impossible to argue with and win”). Fugazzotto puts it strongly when he says deans, provosts and presidents “cannot unilaterally hand down strategy to as powerful a group of operators as college faculty.” No kidding.

But even faculty want strategy as recent non-confidence votes against college presidents by faculty unions  can attest. And the magnitude of change in our world is a call for strategy to institutions that wish to survive this decade. The trick comes in how to measure success of strategy, especially in academe which doesn’t have a strong history of measuring such things. I have personally heard multi-millionaire potential donors say that they will not support all the wonderful things we do in higher education if we can’t run an effective organization.

As you might have guessed, enter the Registrar. In my institution, the Registrar’s Office tracks almost all the information needed to determine success of strategy. In economic terms, we process about $20 million per semester in tuition and room and board fees. In people terms, we track admitted students, course and program enrollment, student success (grades), progress towards degrees, and graduation numbers. We know how many students drop out.  We know where transcripts are being sent to, so we have a pretty good idea of where our students are getting jobs and further education – or we know where they’re applying, at least. We can even tell you how many parking passes we sold this fall, and whether there were enough parking spaces to hold all the cars (btw, when did students start driving vehicles that are much nicer than faculty vehicles???)

Even further than this, Fugazzotto says, “registrars can combine technical and institutional knowledge in order to use technology strategically rather than making data systems an end in themselves.” We are “business process managers who deliver information and resources that support the academic missions of our campuses.”

What he’s saying is we are in a position to quantify most things in the academy. Therefore, we have great strategic value.

I feel much better now that someone has justified my existence!

Obsessing About Numbers

This is the time of year when staff and faculty really obsess about numbers. They contact our office multiple times every day requesting the latest update on how many students we have or don’t have. It usually begins with the innocuous little question, “What is our enrollment for fall looking like?”

Ahh, but don’t be fooled, little grasshopper. That innocuous question is just the toe being dipped in the water. Soon, you should expect a full-blown ninja-style cannon-ball leap: “What is the breakdown of the undergraduate headcount, compared to last year’s point-in-time data and comparative FTE, not counting the 5th year B.Ed. students?”

!!!

Data and the Registrar: there ought to be a course, and it should include crisis counselling, and maybe a good measure of post-traumatic stress syndrome counselling as well. We could call it Registrar 101: Data and Reporting.

Tracking important data is critical to the success of any college or university. The larger and more complex the institution, the more difficult it is to identify the most important data sets. It helps to tie the data to two things: money and outcomes (which might be the same thing). What numbers affect your bottom line? What numbers affect your reputation? What numbers affect your grant applications? What numbers are important to your supporters (internal and external)?

These are the numbers you need to track. Invest the time and money to research what numbers are critical, then build a dashboard you can update daily. Do yourself a favour – post the numbers somewhere interested parties can check without knocking on (down!) your door.

Inspiring UBC Video

This is a powerful video. Kudos to UBC!
http://www.aplaceofmind.ubc.ca/

Orientation Day Pictures from TWU

Hey, we had a great day on Saturday, meeting and greeting all the new TWU students and their parents.  Here are some pictures.

These packets contained a map, a few critical pieces of information, their parking pass (if they had a car), an invite from their Academic Adviser, and their schedule of classes and a few other things.

Entrance to the Office of the Registrar

TWU Registrar and Blogger, Grant McMillan

What can I say – the lights were bright and I was looking for shade.

Self-Serve Computer Stations

After you walk into our office (under the shade palm), you are greeted by some self-serve stations. There are 4 more to your right, as well.

Later in the day

The self-serve stations prove to be very popular and was well-used on Orientation Day.

Service Stations

These are some of our staff who serve students with registration, payment and other related tasks, such as buying a parking pass or getting a letter confirming they are students.

Registrar's Office area

Taken from behind the Service Stations and looking back at the entrance. You can see the crowds just beginning to form, although it never really did get too crowded, thankfully!

Welcoming Staff

These are some of the weloming faces students and parents meet in the tent. They are truly wonderful people, made up of full-time office staff, student workers and volunteers for the day.

Students at the tent

In the tent, students could pick up their packets and get information. We also had runners who would help with taking the new students and their parents anyplace on campus.

The "Ask Me Anything" girl

This young lady deserves the Moses award for being able to run around all day with her arms over her head! She would stop people and beg them to ask her any question they wanted. She was great.

Parents Tent

This is a picture of the parents tent, where they had information and free coffee for all the parents of new students. It was a great hang-out place for people to meet their future in-laws! Hey, we all know university is a great place to meet your future spouse!

The Mess Afterwards

And, once everyone had gone, we cleaned up everything and moved inside for Monday and the rest of Orientation Week.

Hands-down, everyone says this was the smoothest Orientation Day we’ve ever experienced. We were able to have fun with students and their parents and not a single upset person did we meet! Well done, everyone!

600+

The 600+ new students are all arriving at TWU now. We have a welcome crew on the road helping people park. We’re giving them their room keys and name tags in the parking lot and we have sherpas helping carry luggage to dorm rooms. Then they come to the Welcome Tent where we give them a package, which has their student ID card, their mail box key, their parking pass, their Academic Advisor info, as well as a map of campus and a schedule of Orientation Week.