November 2006

Recruitment & Retention - November 2006 - Full issue PDF
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Emphasizing Convenience No Longer Enough, Online Education Report Says
“At the moment there seems to be no sense that the market has an obvious cap to it,” says Richard Garrett about distance education in the United States. But according to a new report issued by the higher education consulting firm Eduventures, institutions are going to have to become savvier about marketing their online programs if they want to capture their share of the demand.

Webcasts Help Incoming Students Put Faces to Names
The University of Pennsylvania is using technology to help students make personal connections even before they arrive on campus. Through a series of live webcasts, incoming freshmen in the College of Arts and Sciences can register for classes and communicate with campus advisors face-to-face without leaving home.

Two Major Steps to Addressing the Sophomore Experience
Nearly all universities are familiar with the sophomore slump, the unique aspects of the second-year experience that leave sophomores at risk for inappropriate behaviors, falling GPAs, and persistence difficulties. This is the problem that a committee at Miami University in Ohio has set out to address. The university is currently considering two major recommendations from the committee designed to make this second year a more positive experience.

Community College Honors Colleges
In September, we summarized six recommendations from Transfer Access to Elite Colleges and Universities in the United States: Threading the Needle of the American Dream, a report on improving low-income community college students’ transfer rates to highly selective four-year institutions. One of those recommendations includes creating honors colleges at two-year institutions. Here, we focus on two examples of such honors colleges.

Partnership Helps Students Transition to Tech University
By Madeline Mercado Voelker - Michigan College/University Partnership (MICUP) Unlock Your Future Program, Department of Educational Opportunity, Michigan Technological University
A Michigan Technological University program demonstrates a strategy for improving students’ transition from community colleges to four-year institutions.

The Reach of Harvard’s Early-Action Decision
There’s no denying that Harvard created a buzz recently by announcing that would it drop its nonbinding early admissions program next year. Harvard’s announcement was soon followed by Princeton University’s and the University of Virginia’s announcements that they would do the same. But the effect might be limited to only a small part of the higher education world. In addition, changes over the past few years indicate that this latest news is part of a maturing in thinking about early admissions, rather than an unexpected and irrevocable rejection of it entirely.