As the higher education marketplace gets more competitive, Syracuse University officials are developing a plan with the hope of attracting the next generation of high-achieving students.

Chancellor Kent Syverud announced the creation of the strategic enrollment plan in his Jan. 17 address to the university community. Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly and Dolan Evanovich, senior vice president for enrollment and the student experience, will co-chair the steering committee responsible for developing the plan. They will begin meeting in mid-February, work through the fall and then the plan will guide the university’s enrollment goals for the next five years, starting in 2018.

“I think it’s really in our best interest to study the marketplace, to understand where the challenges and opportunities are, and for us to continue to attract high ability, diverse students who have a great experience here,” Evanovich said.

Both Evanovich and Wheatly addressed a changing market for students as a major factor in the need for the new plan. That includes what other universities are doing, but also where the students come from, Evanovich said. While SU’s traditional market for students is in the northeast, he said, the population of young people is growing the fastest in the south.

“There are changing demographics that are happening across the country and there are more competitive markets for students,” Evanovich said.

The two main goals of the plan that Syverud stated in his address were increasing diversity and academic quality, which both Evanovich and Wheatly described as important in making SU a competitive school.

While the plan’s development has not officially begun, Evanovich said he expects the committee — which will be made up of deans from all colleges, student government leaders and key faculty members — will be asking and addressing questions directly related to these goals.

To address diversity, he said the group will identify targets for new student enrollment across a variety of categories, including the number of graduate versus undergraduate students, international students and overall student body size.

SU will become more competitive by improving its academic quality, Evanovich explained. The steering committee will try to identify the strengths of the university and of different colleges, such as entrepreneurship in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, and where those strengths could be applied to make marketable and exciting new programs, he said.

Sam Gorovitz, a member of the University Senate’s Academic Affairs Committee, said the university should first look to reduce enrollment before pursuing other goals. He said the increasing student enrollment — which is the largest it has ever been — has become a problem.

“Faculty are widely concerned about the fact, it’s an undeniable fact, that we have … students here that we can’t serve well,” Gorovitz said. “So, we have reduced the quality of the education we provide because of our enrollment actions.”

Rather than putting money into pursuing students who are “beyond our reach,” Gorovitz said the university should focus resources on improving resources for students already here.

Evanovich said the plan is intended to improve academic quality by bringing attention to it and bringing various departments together to determine what will bring new students to SU.

“At the end of the day,” Wheatly said. “We look at where the students who do not come to us go, and we need to compete with some of those elite institutions.”

Published on February 1, 2017 at 9:39 pm

Contact Delaney: dovanwey@syr.edu