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Remember the Ginsu knife commercials? They promised that you could slice and dice your way to master chef status. But when you tried it at home, you didn’t get a gourmet meal. The knife was just a knife.

Enrollment management reporting can fall prey to the Ginsu knife syndrome. If you don’t know what your goals and objectives are, even the most sophisticated tools won’t produce the results you want.

The Higher Education Digest interviewed Ed Mills, Executive Director of Student Services Administration at Cleveland State University to get his perspective on enrollment management reporting. Under Ed’s leadership, Cleveland State University is putting together a one-stop student services solution that uses ERP software to support its data-driven decision-making.

Ed Mills: Most administrators spend their time analyzing the data, trying to figure out what they can learn. Instead they should be asking what they want to accomplish in the future. For example, if a university wants to raise enrollment and admit students with higher grades and better test scores, it needs to set incremental goals to achieve that enrollment management plan. While this sounds like common sense, in reality, most schools don’t work toward the future; they spend most of their time analyzing the past.

Mills: Monitoring could happen daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on the time of year, the metrics and the goals the university wants to achieve. For instance, during the week before classes begin, administrators might look at last minute enrollees, adults returning to school, and students making last minute decisions. In this case, administrators will check the data daily. Once the semester’s underway, the staff might check drop and add data weekly. And for semesters over six months away, monitoring monthly may be sufficient—unless a discouraging trend emerges.

Mills: Monitoring is dynamic. It has a certain inherent logic, but often the logic gets lost. It’s the classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees. It’s easy for this to happen when numerous reports are generated that don’t reflect the current goals and the interim milestones associated with them.

The key is to:

If you have meetings to determine how the university is progressing toward its recruitment goals and your stated objective is to review last month’s enrollment data, eyes are going to roll back into participants’ heads.

Mills: Building enrollment goals and objectives in a vacuum. Goal-setting is a collaborative process that needs to involve deans, program directors, administration, senior staff, and students. It might take longer, but the repercussions of having only two or three people setting goals for the whole institution can be far worse.

For example: Let’s say a university decides to increase the number of early childhood educators. At the same time, another department recommends reducing the childhood education offerings, since there is a dwindling job market for graduates of this program. But Admissions never hears this message and continues recruiting as many potential early childhood students as it can, causing a scheduling nightmare.

This opens up a question that’s being debated on many campuses: What is the responsibility of the university if it is educating students who can’t find jobs, and why did this miss-alignment occur? The reason for this problem is that individual unit goals and objectives were developed and carried out in a vacuum.

Mills: Keep everyone in the loop. Align all programs. When all departments understand the integrated enrollment management plan, the marketplace, and student needs, everyone can do their part to insure success. The faculty creates additional course offerings, the advisors brush up on necessary academic and marketplace requirements, the student service staff create co-curricular programs to support these targeted students. Everyone contributes to the institution-wide goal.

Mills: Process mapping helps identify cross functional issues that individuals may not be aware they are creating.

With process mapping you can identify the appropriate sequence of events, who is involved and accountable, and what events trigger the next sequence of events. If one part of the process gets behind—like the posting of summer school grades, financial aid distribution can be delayed for a few days. This allows the time to ensure that the student’s grades match the financial aid requirements—and mistakes are reworked so that embarrassing situations are avoided.

Mills: Process mapping can be integral in training staff about new processes and procedures. A process map provides a tangible representation of the sequence of activities, so individuals can see the entire process and how they each fit in. Training is one of the most often missed opportunities on campuses. Typically, a department head will announce a new procedure or practice in a memo. Then nothing happens differently and the situation gets ignored. To actively train people about a new process, sending a memo is not enough. Conducting meetings or training sessions using the new process map is an active learning approach. It is rather ironic, considering that while a university is in the business of assessing the learning of students, it is often failing to offer the same assessment and training for its own staff.

Training is the best investment the university can make in its staff. The problem is that the right hand is not telling the left hand what is going on, coupled with human nature’s inherent resistance to change.

Process mapping is also useful in finding gaps in service and in outlining procedures, which makes it easy to change the process sequence from a cross functional standpoint. Process mapping is a collaborative activity involving everyone and it highlights issues and opportunities.

Mills: We get everyone actively involved and develop teams for evaluating the processes, objectives, and goals. Remember the old adage "People can’t help what they don’t know"? Make sure everyone knows the enrollment management plan.

Always ask, at the end of each meeting, who else should know about it. Never finalize a process without asking this question.

Keep it simple. A ninety page enrollment and recruitment program with fifty reports to review is as helpful as having no report at all.

Mills: Take the time to have one-on-one meetings with key department heads. Find what their hot buttons are. In other words, determine what is important to them. Give them the information they want to hear.

For example: If the head of early child development wants more classes, come back with the data showing how many students are enrolled and the capacity for adding new students.

If you want an effective campus-wide enrollment management program, set clear goals and objectives, get everyone involved, demystify reporting procedures, and use process mapping to help you find gaps and overlaps in service. Without these elements, even the Ginsu knife of reporting tools can’t create a useful information feast.