Faculty and Committees Launches the Strategic Enrollment Plan
Ada Lambert | September 22, 2022
Over two years ago when the pandemic hit, many schools across the world were affected. The education world grappled as regulations shifted and cases rose, trying to find ways to keep students learning and thriving.
There was no guarantee that the pandemic would improve or that students would be able to receive the same kind of education that they had access to before. In the midst of the panic, many institutions opened the discussion of ‘what’s next for us?’
At Warren Wilson College (WWC), faculty began to work together to figure out how to keep the community safe while providing ways to stay integrated on campus. According to WWC Provost, Jay Roberts, the faculty were asked to engage in these efforts by pitching ideas on how to keep students enrolled and encourage more students to apply.
From this brainstorming, the Board of Trustees and former President Lynn Morton began a series of committees to plan for the possibility of dropping enrollment rates. The project was initially called All In For Our Future, which later transformed into what is now the Strategic Enrollment Plan. Roberts was an integral part of this process and helped kickstart the planning involved.
“As COVID-19 started to settle a bit more, we had a better sense of what the impacts were going to be and it morphed into an, ‘okay, we seem to be in a bit of a steady state, the world's not forever going to be in turmoil,’” Roberts said. “We wanted to gather the good discussion and ideas that came out of that All In For Our Future and do something with them. So that's where this name Strategic Enrollment Plan came from.”
The Strategic Enrollment Plan was developed to promote enrollment growth at the college by creating and expanding majors, starting new extracurriculars, enhancing sustainability, redesigning the WWC website and initiatives in new programming. There were many different action plans proposed across the community by faculty but only some of them made the cut for the 2022-23 school year.
Roberts said that 50 action plans were submitted during this process, but with resources and budget in mind, they had to decide which plans were plausible for the school.
“There were about 15 to 20 plans left after that,” Roberts said. “We asked everyone to develop an action plan for that particular idea. That involved the basics, like ‘how much is it going to cost? What do we think student interest would be? And what would that mean in terms of growth and enrollment?’”
A key initiative in this overall planning was to pull together all the elements of experiential learning in a stronger, cohesive way, so students are able to engage more in the immersive learning that WWC offers.
“I've often said ‘learning happens everywhere,” Roberts said. “It doesn't just happen in the classroom, learning also happens on the sports field, It happens in your work crew and in your service projects Learning happens everywhere, so the benefit of a small place like Warren Wilson is that we can capture that, and kind of help students make sense of it first year to fourth year.”
Getting involved as a student in large-scale decision-making for an institution is not always made accessible, especially if there aren’t enough resources provided by the college. At WWC, many faculty are aware of this and try to provide ways to allow students to put their input in.
One resource that Roberts has provided is a course called The Future of College, which meets once a week in the fall semester.
“The idea is for students to come up with their big ideas/concerns about their experience at Warren Wilson,” Roberts said. “At the end of the semester, the students pick a research project about something they want to improve here, and they do a presentation where we have board members and faculty and other folks who get to listen to that.”
For faculty, this meant designing a plan with ample reasoning and persuasiveness. Chair of the creative writing department, Rachel Himmelheber, took this opportunity to promote more staffing for the creative writing major, which made the list for this academic year.
“My role in this was advocating for two positions that we used to have to be reinstated,” Himmelheber said. “We're hiring for a new poet next year and we are also going to have what is called a BEEBE Fellow, a position that a lot of the MFA program can apply for. It will be a nice way to bring the MFA and the undergraduate creative writing together more.”
In addition to new programs, The Center for Academic Engagements will be providing more resources for neurodivergent students and prioritizing different learning styles to accommodate needs that generally are overlooked in traditional education systems.
“We think we can be a place for academically motivated students who happen to come with learning differences, but can really succeed here,” Roberts said. “So having a center that's expressively organized around supporting all learners, and acknowledging that there's not one type of learning. We all kind of come at this with a range of ways we learn and assimilate information.”
WWC is also aiming to offer more appealing majors to students who may not be interested in some of the traditional centers of focus at the college.
Paula Garrett, chair of the English department, promoted the idea of a new communications major during the decision process, with initiatives to diversify the english and creative writing offerings for those who enjoy the journalistic side of writing. Garrett also wanted to put emphasis on a major that is nationally recognized as an enticing area of study for students of color.
“We know that the communications major is a very attractive major for students of color,” Garrett said. “We want to continue to diversify this campus — and if we're going to do that, we need to offer some majors that are really attractive to students of color.”
Along with the new communications major, the data science major being created has similar implications. Instead of applying all focus on one subject, they will be integrating racial justice into the curriculum to make sure that the systemic issues between race and data are not overlooked.
“Data science can also be, what do we understand about data in regards to racial justice, to advance our aims around making a more equitable society for all.” Roberts said. “So we're going to be focused on data science, with an emphasis in sustainability and racial justice instead.”