A few weeks ago, I gave an overview of the academic realignment work that’s been happening on campus. During the same time, Zora Mulligan and the Enrollment Steering Team have been developing strategies to drive enrollment growth.

As you probably know, increasing enrollment includes bringing in more new students and ensuring our current students are successful and stay at Missouri State.

Last fall, activities focused on recruitment and included:

• Creating the MoState Access Scholarship for Pell-eligible students.
• Establishing the employer partnerships unit.
• Moving the enrollment management and services team under Zora.
• Moving dual credit and transfer, articulation and nontraditional student services from outreach to enrollment management and services.
• Creating a culture that recognizes the critical role all members of the campus community play in recruiting students.

And I have good news to report! It looks like we’re on track to increase the number of new students coming to Missouri State this fall. Great job, everyone!

Improving retention

But bringing in more new students alone won’t ensure our overall enrollment growth. We must also keep our current students.

This spring, the Enrollment Steering Team has focused on retention, with an emphasis on improving advising.

The team did a tremendous amount of research to reach a recommendation on how to improve advising on campus. They:

• Spoke with experts and campus stakeholders.
• Reviewed qualitative and quantitative data.
• Researched what our competitors are doing.

Proposed new advising model

Using all that information, the team recommended a new advising model. Under the proposed changes, each college will have a centralized advising center. For colleges with new advising centers, most freshmen and some or all sophomores would be advised by staff. Upper-level students would be advised and mentored by faculty.

The Academic Advising and Transfer Center will continue to advise undecided and Bachelor of General Studies students.

The team is also evaluating an early alert system that would help us identify students who are at a greater risk of failure so we can help them earlier.

Looking ahead to 2023-24

During the next academic year, we’ll be implementing these changes. We’ll also adjust salaries for advisors to bring them up to market level. We’ll define “advising” clearly and celebrate good advising.

Everything each one of us does is important. Whether it’s making our campus attractive, getting middle and high school students excited about our academic programs when they visit campus, teaching our students or helping our students or each other, we’re all part of recruiting students and helping them be successful.

Thanks for all you do for Missouri State.

Clif