Clayton Smith is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor after serving 12 years as Vice-Provost and Dean of Students. Over the course of his career, Dr. Smith has amassed significant knowledge and expertise in the area of enrolment management.
How did you come to be focused on strategic enrolment management?
Well, I started off my career with three degrees in political science and public administration. There wasn’t too much happening in that field and so I ended up working for my local university, thinking that that might be a good place to start and I’d eventually get back into the political side of things. Of course, I never left. I developed a real appreciation and respect for the work that we were doing at that university and that led to a whole career in this field.
”I don't like the word “retention” a lot. I prefer “student success” because it's not really about retaining students, it’s about facilitating their success with us and making sure that what we do connects with what their goals are.”
At what point in your career did you start to realize that strategic enrolment management was meaningful to you?
So, I had started at the University of Maine in Augusta, which is a regional, quasi-community college that had a strong distance learning program and lots of nontraditional learners and this was in the 1980s, when to be honest with you, we're still trying to figure out how we were going to survive the downturn in the first-year student bubble in the post-Vietnam era.
As a result we were looking at different kinds of learners, nontraditional students, displaced homemakers - people who didn't do things the traditional way. I thought we were doing something really important that the region, the community, and the people could really benefit from. It was the connection to improving their lives that drew me deeper.
“In other words, if we could re-organize ourselves and operate more in a team-like way instead of individual silo departments, we would achieve what we needed to achieve.”
Did you find that the role of SEM grew within the institution or was it always sort of a priority?
Well, when we started, the term strategic enrolment management didn't exist - it was all about admissions and recruitment and that sort of stuff. But what we learned along the way is that institutions that just chose to recruit students through the front door, through their various recruitment and marketing and those kinds of operations, were sometimes ineffective institutions. Those that started to work together, collegially, collaboratively, up and down and all around the institution were the ones that started to become the real effective players in the higher education landscape. This idea that if we could work together better we could achieve more - and that's really what SEM is all about.
How does retention fit into SEM?
In the early years, essentially the idea was that if we could combine the admissions, the financial aid, some first-year orientation stuff, we would have it under control. In other words, if we could re-organize ourselves and operate more in a team-like way instead of individual silo departments, we would achieve what we needed to achieve. But what we learned along the way is that while that might be true, that we could up the number of students coming into the institution, at the end of the day reputation is tied almost completely to completion.
And so if you have a lot of students coming into your institution, but you have few students coming out, your reputation will not improve. So faculty, administrators, staff and particularly students started to pay attention to this whole idea that if we could improve the quality of the student experience through student retention, we would be able to better help students achieve their goals and make a difference in the society when they graduate. So student retention merely became a tool, and I have to admit - I don't like the word “retention” a lot. I prefer “student success” because it's not really about retaining students, it’s about facilitating their success with us and making sure that what we do connects with what their goals are.
I actually think the idea of retention is holding people back. And that's not what we want to do. We want to propel them forward. And the other thing about retention that's risky and the way it was initially discussed is they talked about it much like we talked about bringing together the front line operations. They were all staff offices - but the real work of the institution is in student life. It's in the classroom. It's in all of those kinds of things and it's not about just getting them there and keeping them there - it's about really ensuring that students get what they're looking for.
”I think it takes a whole institution. It takes the whole village to facilitate student success.”
Can you speak a bit on the difference between SEM in the US and Canada?
As it turns out, I've done some research in this area about a decade ago with another colleague Susan Gottheil. I co-edited a book called SEM in Canada and because I had come from the US, we were looking into the differences and the similarities between here and the States. We're in the process of doing a second study now, a decade later, to see if any of that's changed.
So the thing that we learned early on was that while it might be true that the senior leadership of the institutions would identify SEM as that thing that's going to bring in more students, in reality, how SEM has played out in Canada has been more on the student success and retention side. People started to use it as a way to bring together the complexity of our higher educational institution to support students.
And so getting them in the door was the dominant approach in the US, but making them successful has been the dominant approach here in Canada. They're a bit different, they do overlap and I would be neglectful not to say that the US has moved more towards student success and student retention in recent years and the Canadians have moved a little bit more toward optimizing the front door, but they're still a little bit different.
So if you had to give institutions a fundamental piece of advice, what would it be?
I think it takes a whole institution. It takes the whole village to facilitate student success. It comes back to this very idea that if you think about it like an orchestra - we have different instruments playing different melodies. By themselves, they might be important. But if they can only play harmonically together we get music that we could never possibly get with just one playing well or another playing well. I think that that's really the driver to institutional success.
What is your role at AACRAO?
I am a senior consultant with them and I've been basically consulting with colleges and universities for the past 20 years, helping them apply SEM to their respective institutions. I'm also the director of the AACRAO SEM conference, which is held each fall.
What does the future of SEM look like?
You know, it's interesting. I asked that question when we were doing the recent study and so what we did is we asked 24 enrolment managers across the country, and by and large, all of them said that SEM is here to stay. It may not go by the name strategic enrolment management because that sounds like a business term in an educational context. It is the idea of working together better and in collaborative and synergistic kinds of ways for the purpose of achieving student success and institutional health.
Those are the things that make SEM important now and probably a decade from now.