Good morning.  Today is the start of an experiment here at HESA: podcasting.  Basically, the idea is to replace one blog every few weeks with a podcast and – for those of you who only want their morning higher ed intelligence in prose form – an edited highlights package in text form.

For our inaugural pod, I asked York University’s Darran Fernandez (Assistant Vice Provost and University Registrar at York University), and the University of Alberta’s Melissa Padfield (Deputy Provost Students and Enrollment), to join me and Jonathan McQuarrie (Manager of Academic Planning at Higher Education Strategy Associates) for a chat about Strategic Enrolment Management  in Canada: where it came from, where it’s going and how it differs from the way it is practiced in the United States. 

The full podcast can be found with a full transcript here.  Thanks to our producers Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek.

On the differences between SEM practices and philosophies in Canada and the United States:

Alex: What’s your take on the difference between how SEM is practiced here and in the US?

Melissa: When I think of SEM, I think of the activation of our [institutional] mission through planful approaches to student enrollment management and class creation. Insofar as there’s a sustainability aspect to that, which there always has to be – can you afford to offer the programs you need to offer in the balance of where your funding comes from? That’s just smart because the student experience isn’t going to be managed in a positive way if you can’t afford the programs that you’re giving.

That said, I think we take a little bit more of that holistic view to it. In Canada, I think we really are talking about class building for the purpose of learning community, right? That’s the starting point and then developing a learning community.

Darran: The real thing that I think sometimes gets lost [in] strategic enrollment management is that middle bit of what happens once [students] actually come to our institution? What [do] we need to do to keep them here and keep them engaged and ensure that they remain connected to the institution in a deeper way?

… I see SEM to be inclusive of all those pieces. There’s been a history to focus typically at the front end of that piece (recruitment), and that being a lot where the energy goes. But… over time, colleagues in the [United] States and here in Canada have evolved to see it expand and have a greater focus on that middle bit of what it means to ensure that students remain engaged through various means outside of the classroom activity as much as inside.

Alex: There are really weirdly micro-considerations that go on in [class-building in the United States] that I don’t think happen in Canada. I don’t think that’s what you mean by creating a class. So, could you elaborate a little bit of what you do mean and how it’s different?

Melissa: Some of the reason we don’t get [as] granular [as the United States] is because we simply don’t have the data to get that granular. But I will say I’ve sensed a shift from admissions and class building being about exclusion to it being about inclusion … so, class building becomes a situation of creating structures, financial supports, and support structures, so once students get here, we are be able to steward and help success for a more diverse set of students.

… I go back to activate your mission: what’s the mission of your particular institution and what kind of students help you to activate that mission and help evolve your institution forward?

For us, we’re talking about making sure we have Indigenous students that hopefully are as prevalent here as they are as part of the population in Alberta, right? Can you be a globally relevant institution without a significant proportion of international students? I think it’s hard to. Can you be a nationally relevant institution without a national voice where you have students from across the country? Harder to do. Can you be stewarding your province where you are located if you don’t have a good percentage of local students? Also, hard.

On making SEM a whole-of-institution affair.

Alex: what is interesting about what you have talked about so far as you talked about strategic enrollment management is increasingly becoming a whole-of-institution affair, right?  When you have that many people in the room, how do you get them to play nicely together and to have someone take responsibility to get it all done because it’s very fragmented, right?

Jonathan: when you’re talking across so many different sectors and different sort of stakeholders in different groups, et cetera, you need to develop some common languages and some common respect for each other.

… Right now, it’s really just impressing on faculty the fact that the Registrar, the schedulers, the administration folks have expertise and frankly have a body of scholarship that’s emerging. So, they’re trying to talk a little bit more in a peer-to-peer way, because the issues are becoming so complex and so challenging to navigate; the academic imperatives with the administrative imperatives with the student supported imperatives.

Melissa: it’s really hard to do this given the way our organizations are structured. I think it’s really hard to do this in a way that is respectful to the benefits of collegial governance, but also attentive to the fact that you kind of need a higher-level actor that’s accountable.

Trying to do the marriage between the benefit of really trying to bring along a collegial governance aspect to something that still needs higher level accountability is where the tension exists.

Darran: I would say if you were to do a broad-based poll to ask some professors if they even knew what the three letters [i.e. SEM] meant, you may not get very much. But, when you break it down to what SEM actually means, most could definitely see themselves within it. So, how do we ensure that the sort of understanding of our codified language around strategic enrollment management is understood more broadly in our institutions? That is, I think, where we’ll see the greater benefit as opposed to us needing to attach ourselves to three letters.

Melissa: Well, and also how you make sure that we don’t corporatize SEM? Because if SEM starts to be interpreted by folks in our campuses as if it’s part of corporate culture which we’ve got a lot of people highly resistant to, then it gets diminished, right? But when you frame it the way that you were talking about it, Darren, around SEM is really everybody’s accountability around creating an optimal environment within which our missions thrive and get activated.

On the drivers of cross-institutional collaborations in SEM:

Alex: Melissa, a second ago you were noting how the culture was shifting around a more integrated approach to SEM. Why? What’s pushing this?

Melissa: I think our conversations on equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility have actually shifted people to want to be more intentional about these discussions. I think when we’ve seen internationalization and bringing more international students in, that has started to change the conversation around SEM. There’s more attention there – both to international student numbers, but also international student quality and making sure we have the right supports in place. So, I think we’ve got that. And then, you know, to be frank, funding arrangements and the balance of where money comes from and making sure that we create a good optimal learning environment that’s sustainable means we need to retain the students we recruit and means that we need to make sure that we’ve got a balance that can keep programs sustainable from a financial standpoint. So, pressure is everywhere.

On the sustainability of current SEM practices:

Alex: Is this kind of balance inclusivity/increasing supports and bringing in extra students) a luxury? Is SEM going to get pushed back to the “hey, go find the dollars because we just we’re desperate for the dollars?” Darran, how do you think that that that institutions will react in a crunch to this kind of thing?

Darran: You know, people will have the visceral, guttural reaction to what we do. Maybe I just wear a lot of rose-colored glasses, but my hope is that institutions, regardless if it’s a university, college, institute, or other place of higher learning, turn back to their values that they are trying to guide how their strategic or academic plans work and say “how can we then shift according to these core principles that we have?

We hope you enjoy the inaugural One Podcast to Start Your Day. To hear the full conversation or read the entire transcripts, use the links above, and if you have topic or guest suggestions, let us know.