Enrollment Management

Units within Enrollment Management

The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point has embarked on an effort to build a strategic Enrollment Management Plan. Managing the university’s enrollment proactively rather than reactively has become essential to improving student success. In the absence of such planning, academic departments’ ability to effectively plan for future scheduling of classes and available seats is compromised, resulting in the students at UW-Stevens Point experiencing rising difficulties with lack of seat availability in high-demand courses, inconsistent advising, and increased time to degree. In this way, crafting an effective Enrollment Management Plan will create a foundation for the university’s larger effort to foster greater student success.

1. To strengthen the financial wellbeing of UW-Stevens Point. Public higher education is funded more and more by tuition, fees, and auxiliary revenues and less and less by the state. Given that most of the funding needed to operate UW-Stevens Point now comes from its students, it is more important than ever that the university manage its enrollment strategically, considering carefully the number of students it can serve and the number it needs to serve in order to provide the best possible education. This kind of management is as much about financial planning as it is about determining the size and quality of the student body in any given year.
   
   
2. To meet UW System degree attainment targets. UW-Stevens Point is participating in UW System’s More Graduates Initiative, designed to produce at least 80,000 new graduates in Wisconsin by 2025. As part of this initiative, the university submitted a More Graduates plan for producing our portion of these degree-holders. UW-Stevens Point’s plan is based on improving our freshmen-to-sophomore retention as well as persistence beyond the second year, and generating modest growth in the number of underrepresented minority students, non-traditional students and transfer students enrolled at UW-Stevens Point. Achieving these goals will require the development and implementation of purposeful strategies designed to retain and enroll students, and to make appropriate adjustments in these strategies year-by-year as we track our progress.
   
   
3. To facilitate the implementation of the university’s new General Education Program. In the midst of rising enrollments and financial constraints, UW-Stevens Point is also engaged in significant curricular transformation. In particular, the implementation of the new General Education Program in the fall 2013 semester will create a number of challenges involving the freshmen registration process, the relationship between general education and department-level academic programs, consistency in advising, and coordinating enrollments and general education seat availability demands across disciplines. In addition, the recent approval of a university Strategic Plan raises questions about the alignment of UW-Stevens Point’s academic program array with these newly established priorities. Enrollment management will play a crucial role in helping UW-Stevens Point to navigate these transformations.