The Role of Academic Senates in

Enrollment Management

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges

Adopted Fall 1999

1999 - 00 Educational Policies Committee

Hoke Simpson, Chair, Grossmont College

Lacy Barnes-Mileham, Reedley College

Elton Hall, Moorpark College

Kate Clark, Irvine Valley College

Mary Rider, Grossmont College

Ian Walton, Mission College

Robert Porter, Saddleback College, Student Representative

1998 - 99 Educational Policies Committee

Janis Perry, Chair, Santiago Canyon College

Linda Collins, Los Medanos College

Eva Conrad, Moorpark College, CIO Representative

Elton Hall, Moorpark College

Mary Rider, Grossmont College

Hoke Simpson, Grossmont College

Kathy Sproles, Hartnell College

Ian Walton, Mission College

Table of Contents

Abstract 1

Introduction 2

Background and Scope 3

Current Regulation and Statute 4

Enrollment Management and Emerging Themes in Higher Education 4

Enrollment Trends in California 6

Enrollment Management Considerations 7

Enrollment Management Strategies 9

Role of the Local Academic Senate 15

Recommendations for Developing and Evaluating Enrollment Management Plans 16

Summary 17

Glossary of Enrollment Management Key Terms 18

Bibliography 20

ABSTRACT

This position paper of the Academic Senate provides the background and scope of enrollment management as it is defined and practiced by educational institutions. Emerging themes in higher education, and enrollment trends in California, are used to frame enrollment management considerations. A variety of strategies for managing over- and under-enrollment are presented. The paper concludes with the role of the academic senate in developing and evaluating enrollment management plans. A glossary of enrollment management key terms is included at the end.

INTRODUCTION

Whether in times of scarcity or abundance of student demand for courses, faculty must become involved in the development of enrollment management decisions that protect students’ access and nurture their success in the learning environment. An expanding student population that is increasingly diverse must be assured access to college and opportunities for success. This paper will focus on academic implications of enrollment management. The paper seeks to equip faculty with essential terms and concepts and to clarify the role of academic senates in enrollment management decision-making.

The paper reviews relevant regulation and statute, and provides the background and scope of enrollment management as it is portrayed and practiced by educational institutions. Enrollment management considerations are framed by discussions of emerging themes in higher education and enrollment trends in California. A variety of strategies for managing over- and under-enrollment are presented. The paper concludes with observations on the role of the academic senate in developing and evaluating enrollment management plans. A glossary of enrollment management key terms is included at the end that will assist local academic senates in consulting collegially in enrollment management issues at the campus and district levels.

Faculty have long seen the need to shape the critical discussions that inform enrollment management decisions. In Spring 1998, the Academic Senate passed the following resolution:

S98 17.02 Enrollment Management

Whereas there are many community colleges that are currently unable to meet their growth targets for enrollment, and

Whereas enrollment management and establishment of floors for class sizes have a serious impact on student success, and

Whereas the administration of many community colleges are developing plans to control enrollment by such activities as creating contingency plans for using 4000 and 5000 accounts to pay for enrollment shortfalls, creating mega-divisions that temporarily generate increased enrollments and freezing block grants and new hires,

Therefore be it resolved that the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges direct the Executive Committee to write a position paper that contains guidelines for local academic senates to assure that they are thoroughly involved in decision-making involving enrollment management.

BACKGROUND AND SCOPE

Two papers recently adopted by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges provide valuable information and recommendations that can be applied to the development of effective enrollment management plans at the local level. In fact, Program Review: Developing a Faculty Driven Process, adopted in April 1996, and Program Discontinuance: A Faculty Perspective, adopted in April 1998, are essential resources for informing the discussion about enrollment strategies. A central theme of both papers is the need to develop a local academic senate position regarding issues that are intrinsically curricular, involving student access and success. While some faculty may not always recognize it, enrollment management is also such an issue.

In A Guide to Enrollment Growth Management in the California Community Colleges (1992), the Community College League of California (CCLC) defined enrollment growth management as “strategies used to address the problems created by the enrollment or potential enrollment of too many students to be served by the available resources.” While CCLC focused on over enrollment, currently enrollment management also is used to address declining enrollment. For colleges that are actively seeking additional students, the term “enrollment management” is synonymous with marketing, recruitment, and retention efforts. Michael G. Dolence, in his book, A Primer for Campus Administrators (1996), describes the term as follows:

Strategic Enrollment Management is a comprehensive process designed to help an institution achieve and maintain the optimum recruitment, retention and graduation rates of students, where optimum is defined within the academic context of the institution. As such, SEM is an institution-wide process that embraces virtually every aspect of an institution’s function and culture.

The public universities in California have historically managed over- and under-enrollment by raising or lowering the academic standards for admission. Since community colleges are committed to open access, scheduling and course offerings have been used as the principal mechanisms for controlling or enhancing growth. It is clear that enrollment management increasingly is being utilized to address a broad range of college policy and processes including matriculation, curriculum development, instructional delivery and style, and student services. All of these must be placed within the proper institutional context.

Local academic senates are in a position to frame and articulate the philosophical context of enrollment management from a faculty perspective. As such, this paper defines the term as follows:

Enrollment management is a process by which students enrolled and class sections offered are coordinated to achieve maximum access and success for students. All enrollment management decisions must be made in the context of the local college mission and educational master plan in addition to fiscal and physical considerations.

CURRENT REGULATION AND STATUTE

When seeking to make recommendations on or revise local policy, it is important for local academic senates to refer to established Education Code statutes and Title 5 Regulations. While there are no regulations that address enrollment management per se, the following statutes and regulations that govern matriculation, admissions and priority registration can be informative:

Education Code §76000, §§78031-32, Admission to College refers to who can be admitted to community college in and outside of the established district and how inter-district recruitment can take place.

Title 5 §55520 ff: Describes matriculation regulations which preclude using “any assessment instrument, method or procedure to exclude any person from admission to a community college.”

Title 5 §56232 ff: Provides for priority registration for Extended Opportunity Programs and Services (EOP&S) students.

Title 5 §58106 identifies factors that justify limiting enrollment. These include: prerequisites, health and safety considerations, facility limitations, faculty workload, availability of faculty, funding limitations, constraints of regional planning and statutory or contractual requirements.

Title 5 §58108 permits enrollment priorities based on “special registration assistance” for disabled and disadvantaged to provide equal educational opportunity, and a priority system for student enrollment that is established pursuant to legal authority of the local board of trustees. Further, the regulations identify that no registration procedures shall be used that result in restricting enrollment to a specialized clientele. Enrollment priorities may be established pursuant to legal authority by the local board.

Local academic senates need to be mindful of the potential impact of enrollment priorities on different segments of the community and on students with differing educational needs and priorities.

ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT AND EMERGING THEMES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The appearance of enrollment management as an administrative technique in California community colleges coincides with an extended period of educational under-funding. The low level of per student funding, which became characteristic of the California community colleges in the last two decades, negatively impacted the participation rate of California adults in community colleges and has set in motion difficult choices relative to educational offerings. The removal of requirements for district residency in the early 1980s created a free flow system in which neighboring districts compete for enrollment. State mandated caps on enrollment have functioned to regulate the flow of students through the institutions, while funding for growth and cost of living increases have not kept pace with the increasing needs being experienced at the local level. Enrollment management should be placed in this context: a set of strategies to address how to apply often inadequate resources toward realizing the multiple missions of California community colleges.

While state funding of California community colleges began to rise again in the mid 1990’s, reflecting the improved state economy, the chronic under-funding of the California system has left a legacy of institutional inadequacies. The techniques of enrollment management have been honed as methods not only to modulate enrollment but also to manage institutional priorities.

Two themes emerge in current California higher education literature: (1) the continuing importance of student access and success and (2) the newer mantra, productivity and efficiency. Faculty must provide a definition of these terms as they relate to enrollment management. The mission of the community college system is to provide an “open door” to anyone who can benefit from a college education. To assure that the door is open wide enough to accommodate and support everyone, community colleges provide a comprehensive curriculum of transfer, vocational, general education and basic skills courses.

Recent demographic projections of a coming “tidal wave” of new students (estimated by the California Postsecondary Education Commission at nearly one-half a million in the next decade) have led to predictions that California institutions will be overwhelmed. According to this argument, the state simply will not be able to accommodate all of these students with the same traditional approaches. Faculty (both in California and nationally) have been encouraged to modify programs and offerings in order to compete effectively with private proprietary schools or distance education consortia which are cited as threats to the continued survival of community colleges. Fears of a “market share war” are sparked as a means to convince faculty that their future is uncertain unless they are more “market driven.”

These contradictory injunctions—we will be overwhelmed by demand as the new tidal wave hits, versus we are losing students and will be left in history’s dustbin—are both cited in support of turning to increasingly business-minded approaches for the management and rationing of educational opportunities. The concern for compressed calendars, year-round schooling, increased reliance on technology mediated instruction to reduce the need for “bricks and mortar,” are all examples. While these can be critical and appropriate strategies for ensuring that working students and their families are accommodated, faculty must raise the essential question of the educational needs of students and communities and not be stampeded into hasty reforms for the sake of productivity and market share.

Faculty have been increasingly told they must become more concerned with expanding the capacity of their colleges and the number of students “produced.” This is most evident in the output approach utilized by the Partnership for Excellence originated by the Chancellor of California Community Colleges. The Partnership measures are largely capacity measures (numbers of students completing degrees and certificates, or the number or rate of students successfully completing courses and persisting term-to-term). These speak to the numbers of students moving through our institutions, rather than the quality of the education they experience while there.

Similarly, we are told that private proprietary institutions are more “flexible” and able to “deliver” education more efficiently. They cater to student “demand” to get through faster and with a minimum of “extra” requirements. Here the pressure to move students through—as contrasted with making the most of their opportunities while there—is based on a posited competitive shortage rather than an overabundance of students.

Faculty should be cautious in responding to such generalized injunctions toward increased productivity and capacity in the name of enrollment. While access must be safeguarded, indeed enlarged, for it to be meaningful, faculty must insist that it be access to quality educational experiences.

Curricular decisions need to be made on the basis of the best educational interests of the students and communities we serve. While economics of enrollment and productivity are central to access, without a grounding in a core commitment to excellence, promises of access are potentially bankrupt.

ENROLLMENT TRENDS IN CALIFORNIA

Enrollment in California community colleges is affected by the state’s economic cycles. During good economic times (such as 1979-82, 1987-1992, and 1995-98), the colleges received additional funding and were able to increase enrollments. However, during the most recent recession (1992-95) the community colleges’ systemwide cut over 9,000 course sections and reduced enrollments by about 160,000 students. As Thomas J. Nussbaum, Chancellor of California Community Colleges, stated in Important Historical Data, Trends, and Analysis Relevant to Full-time/Part-time Issues—A Working Paper (1999), “…The overall historical context depicts a significantly underfunded system that has been forced to reduce access during times of economic downturn.” In Chapter One of The Challenge of the Century (CPEC 1998), Recommendation 1.8 indicates that the Governor, Legislature, and respective governing boards should prioritize access if rationing is required in the future because “…the State does not provide sufficient resources to support access for all who could benefit from postsecondary education.”

According to The Higher Education Update (98-5) the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) “estimates that demand for higher education is expected to increase by nearly one-half million students by the year 2005—a figure that appears to be beyond the capacity of our higher education institutions to accommodate through traditional means.”

There is no argument that the centrality of education—particularly beyond high school—is the essential component that will guarantee California’s future success. There is also no question that faculty have played the key role in the delivery of the skills and knowledge that are required. What faculty do in the classroom has always had a powerful impact on the making or breaking of students’ college experience. In the future, what faculty decide outside the classroom may be as important for students who otherwise would be denied access. Community college faculty, like members of other professions, must take on expanded decision-making roles and responsibilities to ensure enrollment opportunities are available to all of California’s citizens. It will be the decisions made at the local community college level that will determine whether the unsettling recommendations made by CPEC are ever necessary.

ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT CONSIDERATIONS

Other enrollment management considerations include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following items:

Enrollment Cap, Growth and FTES Goals

Enrollment is also influenced by the state establishment of an enrollment cap and the funding mechanisms affected by the cap. An annual cap for community college growth is set during the state budget development process. When enrollment caps limit funded enrollment, enrollment management is practiced whether or not an enrollment management policy is in place.

Each college locally sets a growth target, or FTES goal, usually on an annual basis. This target (and actual local growth from previous years) is often used in multi-college districts to allocate annual funds from the district to each college. Within the college, the desired FTES for a given year will form the backdrop or parameter for expected course and section offerings. While faculty have generally not participated in discussions of growth or FTES goals, these goals are critical to the level of access at the college. These agreed upon goals are integral to curriculum and program planning, as well as tied to budget decisions. As such, local academic senates should work with local administrations to establish the process and criteria by which these larger parameters for enrollment management are set. This can occur both at the district and the college level.

Full-time and Part-time Faculty

Local academic senates and collective bargaining agents should note that enrollment management generally has profound implications for faculty employment. The reform bill AB1725 noted that the use of part-time faculty in the community colleges should not be primarily to effect cost savings, but rather should be for programmatic reasons, to enhance or bring special and current expertise to programs which might otherwise not be available. This tends to be particularly important in occupational programs which need to incorporate current business techniques or technologies on a regular basis.

However, despite AB1725’s legislative intent that 75% of course offerings should be taught by full-time faculty, California community colleges have come to rely on increasing numbers of part-time faculty. Part-time faculty generally are the most vulnerable to contraction and expansion of course sections, as full-time faculty generally retain rights to “bump” their part-time colleagues in case of contraction. Part-time faculty lost due to layoffs may not return to the college when opportunities again appear due to expanded enrollment. Retention of quality faculty cannot be maintained when poor decision-making related to enrollment creates continued unpredictability in program offerings over time. Thus, poor enrollment management undermines program quality and adversely impacts part-time faculty in particular. It is in the interest of all concerned—faculty, administrators, staff, but most especially students—to strive for the most accurate projections and scheduling practices possible.

Administrative Productivity

Efficient and effective administrative structures are critical to ensuring that taxpayer dollars are directed to meet the educational needs of the community. While enrollment management techniques historically have focused on faculty productivity, local academic senates also need to raise issues of management and classified productivity. Containment of administrative costs is a critical component of enrollment management, as the relative funds available for instruction, library and counseling services for students are inversely related to administrative costs. Faculty are encouraged to work collegially with administrators to define and effect appropriate measures of administrative productivity and outcomes to parallel those for faculty. Just as instructional cost considerations must be weighed in educational planning and budget processes, so must the allocation and effectiveness of administrative and staff FTE. Without such consideration, enrollment management approaches lack the comprehensiveness that allows for a sustainable college economy.

The state stipulates that a minimum of 50% of apportionment funds in a given district must be devoted to direct instructional costs (including instructors’ salary, benefits, and instructional aides). While this minimum acknowledges that indirect costs (such as registration, administrative overhead, and plant maintenance) are a necessary component of college budgets, the Academic Senate has consistently held that 50% is a low standard. A well-functioning college would devote proportionately more to instruction.

Alternative Revenue Resources

It is also critical to note that enrollment management techniques historically have been focused on managing existing resources. Both administrators and faculty need to consider additional revenue sources, and academic senates must assume their responsibility for developing the processes by which such funds will be allocated (Title 5, §53200.c.10). In addition to expected general and categorical funds, colleges increasingly need to seek bond measures, grants, partnerships and endowments in order to expand access and maintain institutional and educational integrity. Administrators are most well positioned to seek and provide institutional support to pursue such outside funding. Given the workloads of faculty, administrative support is essential if grants and other funding sources are to be available for faculty initiated projects to improve student success.

Collective Bargaining Issues

Enrollment management plans should include the input of the two faculty entities that best represent the interests of all faculty—the local academic senate and the local bargaining agent. While academic senates are to be the keepers of the academic missions of their colleges, unions can protect both the integrity of the faculty governance system and protect working conditions of faculty so that quality education can occur. When unions negotiate working conditions/due process rights, the welfare issues of the faculty, they create protections for academic freedom, curricular improvement, and a quality learning environment.

To delineate the functions of unions and academic senates as they relate to enrollment management, it is useful to think about the connection between process (union) and standards/criteria (local academic senate). For example, consider the arena of class cancellation during times of financial exigency. The process for notifying affected faculty of the class cancellation or for establishing bumping rights in cases of faculty reassignment is often the purview of the union, but developing criteria to determine which classes will be cut is often the purview of the local academic senate.

The following subjects inherent in enrollment management are generally considered within the scope of collective bargaining and can have a significant impact on working conditions:

· Timelines for notification of faculty that classes will be cancelled.

· Class changes that affect right of assignment.