Immediate Strategies in Enrollment Management

• Restructuring of Enrollment Management Department
• Collaboration Between Admissions and Recruitment and Institutional Research
• Competitor Analysis - Other CSUs and UCs
• Dual Admissions: CSUCI's Enhanced Transfer Success Pathway Program

Restructuring of Enrollment Management Department 

Updated 6-30-2023
When examining our recruitment and admissions strategies and associated data points, it is clear that we have work to do in relation to developing a more targeted, intentional, and strategic admission and recruitment plan moving forward. In addition, while CSUCI has had a Communication & Marketing department, a closer examination of this work indicates that we have never had a high-level, strategic marketing and branding plan to inform and promote our work. As such, we are engaging external consultants to develop a scope of work that prioritizes an assessment of and recommendation for an organizational structure that will meet our immediate enrollment crisis and position us for future growth and the development of tactical plans for admissions and recruitments. This assessment will build on the current interim structure in which three units, Admissions, Recruitment, and Financial Aid have been intentionally organized to ensure a targeted approach to supporting the immediate enrollment needs of the campus. I am confident that our work with the external consultants will achieve the desired shifts and planning tools necessary to have a positive impact on our new student enrollment, including the yield of our incoming Fall 2023 cohort.
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Collaboration Between Admissions and Recruitment and Institutional Research

In Spring 2022 we hired a Director of Institutional Research (IR) after having been without one for three years, and we recentralized the IR team after it had been decentralized in 2018. IR plays such a significant role in evaluating and assessing our student success initiatives to help inform decisions on resource allocations. Equally important, however, is that we are now utilizing IR to identify the main data points to inform our recruitment efforts. For example, at a high level, with limited staff and resources, we cannot possibly connect with every single prospective student. Therefore, our Admissions & Recruitment team is working with IR on two high-level, critical questions: Are we focusing on the high schools where we have a historically high yield and to ensure we maintain this pipeline? Or are we targeting the schools where our data suggests that we should have a greater yield and ultimately expand our pipeline?

What we do know is that across the board, when examining all 12^th grade students across high schools in our region, we have work to do in increasing the number of students who apply to CSUCI. The highest rates hover around 22%. A more specific example involves our application and admissions data from Oxnard Union High School District (OUHSD). Our data analyses indicated that for every 100 seniors in OUHSD, only 10 applied to CSUCI, and of the 10, only 2.5 enrolled as first-year students. In addition, of the 10 who were admitted, 3 enrolled at a local community college, but we only see 1 of those admits return as a new transfer student.

When examining yield rate from local high schools, the highest yield rate (18%) for FTFT at CSUCI for Fall 2022 was recorded among schools located within 20 miles to campus, and the lowest rate of 4.2% was recorded for schools located beyond a 200-mile radius from the campus. As such, it is imperative that our immediate outreach and recruitment efforts focus primarily on local schools, as well as additional schools located within a 100-mile radius from campus. Recent data from Fall 2022 indicated application increases from Ventura County (a minimal .5%), Riverside County (2.6%), and Santa Barbara County (8.5%), but decreases from Los Angeles and San Diego Counties (10%) and Kern County (25%). More specifically, we saw the largest increases in applications from Channel Islands High School (56%) and Dos Pueblos Senior High (40%).

The various comprehensive data sources we are using to develop a more targeted and intentional recruitment plan include High School Enrollment Data and our newly developed Admissions Funnel Dashboard. As you will see when examining our admissions dashboard, we are excited about how the targeted use of data will better inform our recruitment efforts and further increase our efficiency and effectiveness when combined with the integration of our marketing and communications plan. We have hired a new Director of Admissions and Recruitment who recently started in January. They have the breadth and depth of data necessary for an overarching approach and philosophy towards recruitment and admissions, but at the same time, the first order of business will be to utilize these data to inform a more specific outreach and recruitment plan (including a model predicting yield from application data to identify applicants on which to focus efforts) – with specific emphases on where we allocate and prioritize our precious staff and time resources and specific targets and metrics for local schools. 
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Competitor Analysis - Other CSUs and UCs

A significant aspect of our more targeted admissions strategy involves a thorough and comprehensive competitor analysis to inform this work. The Superintendent for the Ventura County Office of Education recently remarked on Ventura County’s great need for a diverse and well-educated workforce but noted that we lose college students from the region because of the limited number of academic programs that CSUCI offers. Without growing our academic offerings, it is difficult to compete with other universities in the region and their wide variety and number of major offerings. We are working very hard to change this. Our Academic Master Plan, submitted to the Chancellor’s Office in early January 2023, included 18 new degree proposals, and we anticipate submitting up to 9 additional degree proposals later this year. Alignment of academic program offerings with regional employment needs is an essential component to CSUCI’s vitality in the region (see Industry Projections 2018-2028 and Occupational Projections 2018-2028). 

According to the Cal State Admissions Dashboard, 39% of students admitted to CSUCI for Fall 2021 chose to enroll in other CSU’s, 8% went to UC’s and 18% went to California Community Colleges. The top 5 destinations for our admitted first-year students are as follows: 1) CSU Northridge; 2) CSU Channel Islands; 3) CSU Los Angeles; 4) CSU Long Beach; 5) UC Santa Cruz. CSUCI is the only institution within the CSU that loses the majority of its admitted first-year students to other CSU’s. Our goals in upcoming years will be to: (1) increase brand recognition and brand perception of CI within the communities we serve, and (2) build a pipeline of prospective students, gauging their interest in CI starting much earlier in K-12 student lifecycle (i.e., middle- and elementary school).

With regards to our transfer student admissions, the figure below shows the market share estimations as percentages of all ADT and associate degrees from each college who transfer to a local CSU or UC campus. CSUCI is the leading destination among local 4-year public institutions for transfer students from Oxnard and Ventura Colleges. However, these data indicate the need for focused recruitment efforts at Moorpark College and Santa Barbara City College, while continuing our efforts and improving outcomes with Oxnard and Ventura Colleges. 
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Market share estimates of transfers from local community colleges

Dual Admissions: CSUCI's Enhanced Transfer Success Pathway Program

Our data clearly suggests that we must do a better job of increasing the number of local transfer students enrolling at CSUCI. While we are working to determine how our limited academic major profile has impacted our numbers, we are in the midst of our planning process with our local community colleges to develop and facilitate a dual admissions pilot program with a target implementation date of Fall 2023, which is an enhanced version of the CSU Transfer Success Pathway (TSP). We received a $75K grant from the Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC) to hire a consultant to lead this collaborative work with CSUCI and the four community colleges in our service region: Moorpark College, Ventura College, Oxnard College, and Santa Barbara City College. This collaborative, cross-institutional work occurred throughout the Summer and Fall of 2022 and will continue throughout this Spring to ensure implementation in Fall 2023.

Through the TSP, CSUCI will expand and strengthen our collaborations with community colleges in our region, working to promote successful undergraduate educational experiences for students whose goal is to earn a baccalaureate degree and for whom enrollment in a two-year institution better meets their immediate needs following high school. Our enhanced TSP will provide participating students with high-touch and personalized guidance and support from the start of their community college experience in preparing for the academic demands required for success in upper division coursework, upon transferring to CSUCI. The purpose of the TSP is rooted in research findings indicating that dual admissions make community college participants more likely than their peers to achieve their A.A. sooner with a higher GPA, and much more likely to transfer to a four-year college with their A.A. completed and to graduate with their B.A. (Nicholas, Musoba & Khurana, 2021).

Reasons for these advantages, which CSUCI’s enhanced version of the TSP will explicitly build upon and encourage, include: (1) validation of a university identity, with participating students seeing themselves in a four-year degree program starting at the two-year college “rather than seeing themselves as two-year students who might transfer someday” (p. 917); and (2) the benefit of a guarantee that a seat would be awaiting them upon transfer, with students finding “a promise to be much better than a hope” (p. 917).

With thanks to support from the Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC), we are currently exploring additional philanthropic support that would place things like belongingness, connectedness, and building navigational capital in higher education at the forefront for regional TSP participants—with funded activities extending benefit to other CSUCI students as well. In addition, our focus will also be in increasing visibility of STEM degrees (Biology and Mathematics), Business Degrees (especially Economics), Early Childhood Studies, and Psychology. Our short-term action plan includes the following components:

• Partnership with faculty on promoting programs (e.g., special off- and on-campus events; an advising buddy system with faculty available to answer questions and help transfer students in their majors at community colleges; peer-to peer-mentorship programs between current CSUCI students and community college students; possible club competitions/events on campus)
• Using National Clearinghouse data and/or a local data sharing MOU with our local community colleges, develop a proactive communication and outreach plan in collaboration with our community college partners for admitted students who decided to continue at local community college.
• Explore the offering of selective B.A. and B.S. degrees at community college campuses, with CSUCI faculty teaching evenings and weekends at community colleges, eliminating the needs for students to commute to the CSUCI campus
• Expansion of outreach activities for specific degrees (e.g., Environmental Management at Moorpark College has high enrollment but low application rate to CSUCI; work with associate degree students from Santa Barbara to increase interest in Information Technology program)

Perhaps most importantly, while our enhanced TSP is designed to increase new transfer enrollment and success, it ultimately serves our region more broadly by concurrently promoting increased enrollment at our local community colleges, facilitating completion of their associates degree, and addressing the regional needs noted earlier.

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