California State University-Dominguez Hills

Connecting Recruitment, Retention and Student Success

Strategic recruitment, admissions, financial aid planning, enrollment, retention and graduation are interconnected stages of a single student lifecycle. Attracting students is only the beginning. Our responsibility continues through enrollment, persistence, degree progress and graduation.

We have advanced this work at three levels: rhetorical, tactical and strategic.

Establishing a Shared Framework- Rhetorical

Through enrollment summits and campus-wide discussions, we introduced the concept of 52 weeks of recruitment and retention. This framework reinforces that enrollment is a year-round, university-wide responsibility shared by faculty, academic leaders, enrollment management, student affairs and other campus partners.

At the same time, we worked to demystify core concepts about enrollment management, including yield and melt, in order to help campus partners identify ways of aligning current practices and innovations with the kinds of leading indicators and analysis that can cultivate and sustain a robust student pipeline through every stage of the life cycle.

Translating Strategy into Action – Tactical

Our Rapid Action and SEM Plans translated this framework into the coordinated action needed to increase new student applications, yield rate, reduction in summer melt, promotion of continuing-student registration and retention, increase mean unit load that helps promote student momentum and ultimately, timely graduation.

We are in the early stages of working to make these efforts that have been largely tactical more seamless and strategic. Part of what we are learning is the importance of validated data points at each stage of the life cycle so we can better track cohort-specific enrollments and make more comprehensive projections. These same data points spanning the entire student experience make it more possible to deploy cohort-specific interventions, targeted communications and make more timely decisions as a campus.

This effort to connect what can often be siloed efforts and evidence has been a critical feature of the work. Student momentum is more than taking enough units. It’s taking the right courses at the right time each term to make meaningful progress toward the degree.

In this way, we are working to better connect the campus enrollment strategy directly to advising, course availability, academic planning and student support as well.

Organizing around the Student Lifecycle – Strategic

Our broader strategy is to organize services, processes, technology and communications around the student life journey. Students should not need to understand the University’s organizational structure to receive timely and coordinated support.

Cross-divisional collaboration, particularly with faculty and academic leaders, is essential. We developed an enrollment toolkit for department chairs and Associate Deans that includes recruitment information, enrollment-funnel data and continuing-student registration trends. These data also support more student-centered course scheduling by helping departments identify demand, enrollment patterns and barriers to degree progress.

"Attracting students is only the beginning. Our responsibility continues through enrollment, persistence, degree progress and graduation."

We ask three core questions ourselves in this strategic work. Firstly, what do we know about our students at each critical stage of their journey? Secondly, how do we organize services and support around their identified and anticipated needs in a way that puts them first? And finally, what should a seamless student experience look like from recruitment through graduation and beyond? And how does that seamless experience look for each group of students we recruit, from first-time first-year students to transfer students, to graduate and post-bac students and to our returning students?

Lessons Learned and Next Steps

These are the major lessons we have learned. The first is that working across artificial and real silos requires shared accountability, transparent, accurate and timely data, consistent communication and coordinated action. This can begin with a core group of leaders committed to working closely together and fostering productive relationships across their teams so student needs are addressed collectively rather than separately.

The second is that data create the greatest institutional value when they lead to more confident action. That means identifying not only the data we need, but also our theory of action and the metrics that can show whether we are on the right track. Using these leading indicators to identify trends is crucial to sustaining improvement.

Finally, short-term interventions, whether successful or not, can inform longer-term institutional change when we build a theory of action and track what we learn along the way. The work is complicated, interconnected and dynamic, making sustainable enrollment growth dependent on sufficient academic capacity and student services over the longer term.

Our next step is to integrate data, communication, academic planning and student support more fully and strategically, enabling partners across campus to connect their efforts and drive improvement with greater coherence. The goal is a seamless pathway from students’ initial interest in CSUDH through enrollment, persistence and graduation to career and graduate or professional opportunities that create meaningful impact for students and the communities we serve.