Chancellor Donald J. Reaves
The 2000 motion picture, The Perfect Storm, told the story of an ill-fated fishing vessel, the Andrea Gail, and its crew that fell victim to a storm of monumental proportions that resulted from the convergence of forces of nature. The combination of the perfectly aligned forces and the failure of the Gloucester, Massachusetts –based crew and its systems to meet the challenge at hand resulted in the sinking of the ship.
Recently, the university found itself confronted by a storm; a storm of monumental proportions that, like the storm of movie-fame, was known to lie ahead. The university’s storm, while lacking the 78 mile-per-hour winds and the 30-foot seas, was no less ferocious, and the results were no less disastrous. The perfect storm at Winston Salem State University was an enrollment management storm.
The recently completed enrollment management season saw the convergence of several phenomena – the largest first-year class in the history of the university, the increased demand for on-campus housing among returning students, the failure of antiquated practices, the generally poor performance of the crew, and other contributing factors. All of these factors together converged to overwhelm systems and processes, with the result being that we failed to provide an acceptable level of service to our students and to their parents.
There is a small amount of good news that I will talk about first. The good news is that demand for admission to the university is stronger than ever, as evidenced by the significant increases in applications, admissions, and enrollments. Applications to the university which totaled 4,102 were up more than 25 percent over last year; 2,873 students were admitted, an increase of 693, or 26 percent over the previous year; the matriculation rate, which is the percentage of admitted students who chose to attend rose from the historical average of 41 percent to 47 percent; and the 6,444 students who were enrolled at the end of the second week is an all-time high. Moreover, the class was admitted under the university’s higher admissions standards that went into effect for this academic year. But that’s the end of the good news, with kudos to the admissions and registrar’s offices and their leaders.
One might legitimately ask why we didn’t see the storm that lie ahead and prepare ourselves for its inevitable fury. The answer lies in the history and culture of this university. Winston-Salem State University takes pride in the fact that it provides easy access to a college education for qualified students. The university has historically provided open access, not open admissions, to students seeking a college education, many of whom are first-generation or legacy students. To facilitate this commitment, the university has used a rolling admissions process to admit students, processing and admitting students throughout the year, as their applications are received, often time’s months after the admissions processes at other universities have shut down. Such was the case this year, and it had been projected that we would admit about 1,000 first year students. Through the middle of June, enrollments were tracking nicely, on a course that appeared headed for the projected number. But unlike previous years, the enrollments did not stop, and by the middle of July the numbers had swelled to the breaking point. On July 15 the university did something that it had never done –– it closed its doors. For the first time in the history of the university qualified students who applied to the university were not admitted.
Here is where the similarities with the movie begin to appear. The larger number of students added stress on the entire university. More of everything was needed – more beds, more class sections, more faculty, more textbooks, more food, more, more, more. And like the movie, we were not prepared, with virtually every system and every process failing to respond to the task at hand. Financial aid and billings and receivables were two disasters of unprecedented proportions, and housing services was only marginally better. Some areas did respond better. But for the most part, we as an institution failed miserably. For this I apologize to our students and to their parents. We should have done a better job.
The enrollment management season that just concluded was my first as chancellor of Winston Salem State, and while I did not like what I witnessed, I was nevertheless afforded the opportunity to see what worked and what did not. Here lies another similarity. I remember watching the movie with high hopes and great exhilaration, and I was really saddened when the ending was not the happy one that I had assumed. And I remember how disappointed I was. I experienced that same disappointing feeling again, here! I have told those who would listen, or had to listen, that the end of the second week of the new academic year was the low point for me in my short tenure at Winston-Salem State University. Virtually everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, and I felt as if our ship had sunk. But unlike the movie, wherein the ship sank, the crew was lost and the credits rolled, we get to do it again. We get to rebuild the ship and set sail once again, and that is exactly what we are going to do, and we are going to do it with a single-minded focus that will dismantle current processes and replace them with modern and technologically-current approaches to serving students.
To that end I have taken two significant first-steps. First, I changed the reporting relationship of the assistant vice chancellor for enrollment management, and second, I convened a working group under the leadership of the executive vice chancellor for management and strategic initiatives that will review the entire enrollment management process and recommend changes that will improve significantly the performance of all of the offices that are involved in the process. Enrollment management will report to the executive vice chancellor until a new provost is named and we can make a final decision about where it fits best in the organization.
In addition I have asked for a review of the housing assignment system. That review is needed to make sure that the demand for housing, which is likely to continue to rise, is managed in a way that treats all students fairly. In addition, we will examine housing rules and regulations that add a layer of unnecessary management complexity to the process.
The most immediate affect of the larger first-year class was felt in student housing. While the university does not guarantee housing for any student, the decision was made, in keeping with the long-standing practice of providing on-campus housing for first-year students, that all first-year students who were seeking on-campus housing would reside on the campus. The result was that some returning students who had been assigned housing lost those assignments, and were reassigned to one of three local area hotels. It should be noted, however, that the only reason that students were housed in hotels is because they had been assigned an on-campus bed and were subsequently displaced. Going forward, with less than 2,400 on-campus beds, the university will maintain its commitment to housing first-year students on the campus, with the result being that until more beds are added to the inventory, many more returning students will need to secure housing in the surrounding community.
The similarities with the movie continue, and just as was the case on the big screen, the storm subsided and the waters calmed. We were able to get students registered, everyone was assigned a bed, whether on campus or nearby, classes got underway, and there is a semblance of normalcy on the campus.
Unlike the movie where the ship sank from the weight of the forces, we are intentionally dismantling our ship, getting rid of the old processes to make way for new ones that will improve customer service and better serve our students. We also have the luxury of bringing on a new crew, as we inevitably will, to take control of some of the most important operations.
During the process of building a new enrollment management system some old customs, traditions, and practices, will likely have to give way to new ones. It is unlikely that the university will be able to continue to admit students on a rolling basis. With the expectation that the demand for admission to the university will remain high, and that admissions standards will continue to rise, it is not unreasonable to expect that the old process that provided open access will have to give way to a process that judges a student’s preparedness for admission on a relative basis. What this means is the best students will be selected for admission from a pool of students until a class of a desired size and composition is attained.
The effort to revamp the enrollment management process has just begun. Our review of what happened has revealed that systems and processes across the university failed. We also learned that the problems were not confined to those offices that have specific enrollment management responsibilities, but other offices, including those under the auspices of the provost also contributed to our failure. This revelation has lead to the conclusion that the effort that will be required to repair the process must be a campus-wide effort. And if we are to be successful, and I have no doubt that we will, then hopefully our efforts will lend themselves to repairing the damage that was done to the ship and to the relationship between the university and its most cherished assets, its students.
Donald Julian Reaves
Chancellor
