SEMQ Volume 12, Issue 2 (July 2024)

As students reassess their calculus in making college choice decisions, SEM
professionals need to sharpen their pencil, be daring, and demonstrate an
openness to new ways of doing business. This includes practices that touch on
organizational change, internationalization, school counselor preparation,
student success, and graduate education. This issue of
SEM Quarterly speaks to how current SEM practitioners are increasing
our understanding of these topics and what we can do to enhance our practice.

We have long known that internal environmental factors affect organizational
change. John Haller, through a study using archival document analysis and
semi-structured interviews of two private Catholic institutions, found that
influential leaders, purposeful change, and organizational culture affect
organizational change. This is the third in a series of SEMQ articles
that examine organizational change at Catholic institutions in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.

Higher educational institutions are increasingly called upon to
internationalize. Shaimaa Nabil Hassanein provides a review of higher
education institutions’ use of concepts, definitions, rationales, approaches,
activities, and applications, and proposes a framework for internationalizing
the student’s journey, along with potential enrollment management practices
that contribute to institutional internationalization.

College admissions counseling is a process requiring school counselors to
develop and implement curricula educating students about the outcomes
associated with college attendance as well as specific steps in the admissions
and selection process. Tara Hornor and Aaron Oberman conducted a research
study that analyzed the curriculum of CACREP-accredited school counselor
preparation programs that found only one-third of the programs provide formal
training in college admissions counseling.

While enrollment management often focuses on student recruitment and
onboarding, it is essential that it also supports student success. Meng Ni and
Kara Haley-Shakya explored how students’ initial two years at college
influence degree GPA and duration of completion. By highlighting the
importance of the first two-year cumulative GPA and credits in forecasting
degree outcomes, they present implications that include improved academic
advising and collaboration between college and high school counselors.

Underrepresented students report a variety of barriers when considering
graduate education. Jeffrey Ragsdale, Maria Medrano, Rebecca Weston, and
Ambika Mathur describe and evaluate a nontraditional approach to the graduate
application process that involves identification of potential applicants by
graduate faculty and staff that resulted in an increase in Hispanic graduate
students enrolled, as well as an increased graduation rate among all Hispanic
students enrolled at the institution.

Jennifer McClure provides us with a look into the book,
Higher Education on the Brink: Reimagining Strategic Enrollment Management
in Colleges and Universities
(2022), which presents a compelling need for postsecondary institutions to be
daring and address the need for changes that have long been advocated and are
now critical to the survival of higher education institutions by integrating
SEM, strategic planning, and change management to achieve the critical
transformation.

The world is changing all around us. To do enrollment management in this
dynamic environment is to be entrepreneurial, creative, empathetic, and
attentive to the changing needs of our students.

Happy reading.