2003 Action Plan - Priorities

Recruitment & Retention of Students

Enrollment Management

Various initiatives to enhance enrollment, including transfer student recruitment and retention and graduation initiatives, will be made and their effectiveness assessed. There will be a balanced commitment to recruit and retain all students - freshmen, transfer, non-traditional, international, and graduate students – and to maintain or increase diversity and quality of the student body. Very large numbers of applications are processed each year – in excess of 42,000. An analysis of the applications will be made to determine how many students are “stop-in/stop-out”. If the number is large then policies will be evaluated to minimize the amount of processing needed by the Admissions office and the student.

Recruitment

We will continue to attract a diverse group of students who have higher SAT and GPA qualifications than previous classes. A minimum Freshman Index of 2500 will be used for recruitment of new freshmen, an increase from 2400 for fall 2002, and a minimum transfer GPA of 2.3, the same as used for fall 2002. Recruitment goals by admission-standing category are 2400 freshmen, 250 joint enrollment students, 2300 transfer students, and 2500 graduate and professional students for fall 2003. In addition, another 5000 students will be recruited during the year. Credit hours should increase 20,000 above FY03 and average hours per student per semester should stabilize at 10.9. In particular, a goal is to continue to admit a larger percentage of freshmen students with FIs greater than 2700. [Increases have occurred each year since fall 1996, with 48% in this category fall 2002 – goal for fall 2003 of 50%]. More effective allocation and increases in the number of presidential assistantships would assist in attracting highly talented students. Transfer student recruitment will be focused in particular on programs where there is upper division capacity.

Retention

We will continue to increase retention for our diverse group of students. A goal is to increase first-year and second-year retention rates to 82.0% and 67% for the entering fall 2002 class. Benchmarks for year-to-year retention of transfer students will be established. We will analyze success rates of transfer students from various institutions and increase our interaction with faculty and programs of those institutions that provide us with the majority of our transfer students. Increased emphasis will be placed on departmental responsibility for retention of their majors.

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