April, 2008

Recruitment & Retention - April, 2008 - Full Issue PDF
…

Crisis Planning at Rivier College
By Linda M. Jansky
Although Rivier College had been engaging in crisis planning since the fall of 1993, nothing could have prepared us for what happened on April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech. Our hearts and prayers were with members of the Virginia Tech community in the weeks that followed. Rivier participated in the national moment of silent prayer on Friday, April 20, and the “maroon and orange effect,” with hundreds of ribbons being worn throughout the day.

Should We Require Self-Disclosure in the Admissions Process?
By Stephanie F. Hughes and Carolyn Reinach Wolf
Prior to the April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, shooting deaths on campus were considered a relatively rare phenomenon, with eight campus-related out of a total of 41 school-related shootings since 1966. Since then, however, there have been a total of seven campus shootings, four of them perpetrated by students targeting fellow students and faculty.

Improving Retention through a Partnership among Academic Affairs, Student Life, and Residence Life
By Jeffrey Buller
If you look at the strategic plans of most colleges and universities, you are likely to see the goal “improving retention” high on the list of immediate objectives. Not only is it far less expensive for institutions to retain the students they have than to recruit ever-larger classes of new students, retention can also be in the students’ own best interest.

Connecting with the Pre-PSAT Crowd
By Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti
For many colleges and universities, the question is not should we market to pre-PSAT students but rather how do we reach them and when? “Before students take the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), identifying, segmenting, and marketing to them in a direct and personalized way is quite difficult to do affordably. After they’ve taken the test, your message can get swallowed in a deluge,” writes Ronald Ladouceur, senior vice president and executive creative director of the marketing firm Media Logic, in a white paper titled “Reaching Out and Making Contact Pre-PSAT.”