AC Director Bob Bontrager interviewed in the AACRAO MemberLink

Bob Bontrager - AACRAO Consulting Director

Bob Bontrager is Director of AACRAO’s Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) Conference and AACRAO Consulting.

In this interview, he talks about his roles within AACRAO, the SEM Conference coming in October, and some of the latest trends in Strategic Enrollment Management.

Hi Bob. Thanks for sitting down with me today. I’d like to start off with a question I’ve asked for past Memberlink interviews. How did you get started in this profession?

Well, I was on track to go into counseling in a college setting. I got that idea from a dean of students at my undergraduate institution who I admired. I went to graduate school at Arizona State in a master of counseling program with a specialization in college student development.

I finished my M.A. and did enough counseling to realize that role wasn’t quite right for me. While completing the masters, I became aware of the area of enrollment management. I started a doctoral program and chose an enrollment management topic for my dissertation.

At that time I was working as assistant registrar at Arizona State . I worked for a registrar, Enos Underwood, who was excellent on customer service and a great mentor on how to live life as a professional. I still rely on what I learned from Enos and believe my persona as a professional was very much formed by his leadership.

Once I completed my doctorate I landed a position as director and then vice president for enrollment management at Eastern Mennonite University . That was great experience, working in the trenches of SEM at a small private college, where you really have to work hard to make yourselves known to prospective students. From there I went to Oregon State University (OSU) where I worked in enrollment management for nearly thirteen years before joining the AACRAO staff. I’ve been involved with AACRAO since 1985.

Can you tell me a little bit about your role with AACRAO?

I direct the Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) Conference and AACRAO Consulting (AC). In addition to working with those two specific programs, my role is about finding ways to bring together AACRAO’s SEM initiatives in a more coordinated way. Increasingly I look at how everything interrelates.

I think there is additional value we can provide by bringing the many pieces together – like how the SEM Conference relates to other activities like AC, as well as webinars, web courses, publications – all the many important products and services AACRAO provides to the SEM community. I would like to get to the point where we are looking at a three-year timeline and considering everything AACRAO will be doing with SEM and identifying more opportunities for coordinating activities and having one support the other. We talk about being strategic when it comes to enrollment. It is the same set of concepts with regard to AACRAO SEM services.

Can you talk more about enrollment and some of the advice you give to institutions?

My most common advice is to encourage institutions to extend their planning horizon. Most places are only looking at the period between now and next fall, with the goal of enrolling a few more students than they did last fall. But institutions need to look out ten years and ask what they want enrollment to look like. What would be the ideal enrollment picture, both in terms of the aggregate number of students and, more importantly, the desired mix of students? It’s the difference between getting whoever you can and planning for your desired future.

That’s a paradigm shift in terms of the way most schools view their enrollment goals. At the places I’ve worked, I’ve found the “desired future” approach to be a lot more fun, not to mention more successful.

What is the number and mix of students you need to fulfill your mission? That is the fundamental idea. I often see disconnects between missions and goals. You’ll look at an institution’s mission statement and then look at their enrollment planning. Often target groups are identified in the enrollment plan but not in the mission statement. That usually means the institution is looking at finances. There certainly are financial realities that must be faced, but setting enrollment goals needs to be more than a monetary decision.

Enrollment goals must be a reflection of mission. To do otherwise compromises mission, which ultimately undermines enrollment efforts.

Can you talk more about SEM and some of the trends you’ve seen lately?

Similar to my prior comments, I think the most important thing is to look beyond just the numbers. I think institutions tend to get hung up on numbers in and of themselves. They lose track of mission and the ironic part is that it is mission alignment that is the key to achieving your numbers.

Focusing on mission allows institutions to be truer to who they are and their own distinctiveness. To the extent that institutions have a distinctive mission statement, it is one of the single most important things that sets them apart and attracts students in a competitive marketplace.

One of the unfortunate things that has been happening is a movement in the opposite direction. People tend to be more generic in their approach, which creates confusion for students. It blurs the lines. For example, in the last 10 to 20 years we’ve seen increasing instances of liberal arts colleges that historically focused on undergraduate education offering graduate programs and changing their name to “university”. Or community colleges beginning to offer bachelor’s degrees. There are local circumstances that make those changes legitimate in some cases, but often the institution seems to be chasing after some sort of prestige factor. They are attempting to broaden the scope of what they offer to attract more students. In the end they sort of lose who they were to begin with. Those schools may increase enrollment, but may or may not improve their financial situations or more effectively fulfill their missions.

This is your fourth year managing the SEM conference. What are some of the biggest changes?

What we’ve really tried to do is attract additional people to the SEM conference by offering more focused content. This is building on some of the work my predecessors had done. We see community colleges more interested in SEM today than five or ten years ago. So this year, for the first time, we have an explicitly defined community college track that is expanded from prior years.

We have also expanded our content for Canadian institutions. We’ve had a number of Canadians attending the SEM conference and have worked to find ways to expand content that is applicable to their unique context. This year, we have two keynote speakers from Canada : Martha Piper and Dick Hardt. We also will be offering a pre-conference workshop that is focusing specifically on SEM in Canadian institutions.

And, there’s the Executive Symposium on October 29. We’ve been trying to find ways to bring more presidents and provosts into SEM. In order for an institution to be successful with SEM, and for enrollment managers to be successful in carrying out their tasks, there has to be some level of awareness and buy-in from top-level leaders on campus. When that is not the case, it is really tough to make progress. The Executive Symposium brings more of those leaders into the conversation.

What do you think about this year’s keynote speakers?

Martha Piper has a very impressive background and will bring a great deal to the opening keynote address. There is a growing awareness of SEM outside the U.S. , particularly in Canada . The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a nationally recognized university with a lot of interesting things going on.
As a former president, Martha represents the best of SEM thinking from a role that is far removed from admissions. While she was at UBC and in the years since then, she has done work with the International Baccalaureate program and around related issues of student preparedness. She’s interested in what it means for students to be well-prepared and to be successful in university. She understands that it is more than just looking at an SAT score or whether the student was a high school valedictorian.

Dick Hardt represents an area that’s somewhat outside the core topics of SEM. But it hits on many of the issues that institutions are dealing with as they seek to communicate effectively with students in an increasingly on-line environment. It’s about the institution’s message and building a relationship with a prospective student. The only way an institution can do that is if they know who their prospective students are. Increasingly, this is happening in an online arena where the issue of identity is becoming more and more important.

How do you operate effectively in this area while adequately protecting your students’ identities? Dick Hardt will deliver a provocative address that speaks to those issues. It also will fulfill one of the many goals of the SEM program, which is to bring speakers who push the envelope beyond standard SEM topics.

David Conley is speaking at the Executive Symposium . He’s a long-time colleague from University of Oregon and has really done some leading-edge work around student-preparedness and rethinking traditional paradigms.

It’s interesting that if you look at higher education, for all of its emphasis on the creation of new knowledge, we are very tradition bound when it comes to assessing student preparedness. This is often in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. And so we rely heavily on standardized test scores and high school GPAs in our admission assessments, even though research tells that there are other measures and variables we can use that will allow us to predict more accurately whether students will be successful at our institutions. People like David Conley and Martha Piper are helping educators rethink assumptions about what constitutes demonstration of knowledge, mastery of academic material, and ability to succeed in college.

Can you tell us more about your work with AACRAO Consulting (AC)?

Well, first I’d like to focus on some of the things that differentiate AACRAO Consulting . First and foremost is its association with AACRAO. Because AC is part of a nonprofit association, it really enables our objectivity and sense of trust. That’s very powerful. It’s the single most differentiating thing we bring to our consulting practice.

Over the years as an AACRAO member, I was aware of AACRAO’s positive reputation, based on a broad sense that AACRAO could be trusted to provide accurate, practical advice. In my new role with AC, I’ve had many more opportunities to get feedback about that reputation from people both within and outside AACRAO, and the strength of that reputation has been reinforced over and over again.

I’ve heard this from both the clients and the consultants who have chosen to work with us. And what I’ve found surprising is how often I hear it from the consultants, who are veterans in the field and have strong reputations themselves. They have other consulting options either on their own or with other consulting groups. But they all said it makes a difference to them that it’s AACRAO they’re working with.

Our consultants and clients feel better about getting consulting from an association whose mission is providing service to members. AC is providing a member service and the reality is we can offer our services at very competitive pricing and value.

What I’ve personally really appreciated is working with our senior consultants, this group of a dozen successful and respected enrollment managers who are of common mind about how you most effectively do this work. These are folks who understand that it’s not strictly about numbers.

In terms of communicating with and recruiting and retaining students, it’s about the relationships we are able to develop with them. We don’t view ourselves as outside experts who will come in and tell you what to do. We come in with a fresh set of eyes and give you additional perspectives to consider. We want to work in partnership with the existing expertise on campus, from those who have a far greater understanding of that campus, and then jointly reach a set of actionable recommendations that the institution can implement. Just like enrolling students, effective consulting work is based on our relationship with the client institution.

You mentioned earlier that you are trying to build more ties between the SEM Conference and AC. What are some of things you’re doing?

Well, in the past we’ve said that if you have a SEM plan, send it to us beforehand, and we’ll have an experienced enrollment manager look it over.

We’re still offering that service. However, we are also offering an incentive for institutions that bring 10 or more people to the conference. We will have an AACRAO Consultant meet with your people prior to the conference and help you think about what you’re planning to do at the conference.

We’ll help you organize your team and plan what sessions you should attend. We’ll then meet with you throughout the conference to help your team get the maximum value from the conference, and go away with a clear action plan for when you return to campus. In the past, we’ve seen some huge teams – 16 people at one point. So we thought this would be a useful enhancement to reinforce the importance of the team approach.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I do want to mention that this year we’re continuing something we started two years ago, offering a mid-conference workshop spread over two session slots on Tuesday morning. It’s being offered at no additional fee. This year’s topic is on building an effective SEM Organization with Jay Gough. It will be a great added feature to this year’s conference.

Related Resources:

Strategic Enrollment Management Conference
October 28-31, New Orleans , LA

Executive Symposium
October 29, New Orleans , LA

AACRAO Consulting

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Posted on July 12, 2007