By Isaac Deville, Reporter.
If you’re a Delta student, chances are you’ve learned that Delta’s enrollment is down. Additionally, you might know that retention is at 53%, meaning about half of Delta’s students do not finish a two-year degree. This leads to the inevitable question, “Why are retention and enrollment down at Delta?” It turns out there are many reasons for this problem.
No one knows these facts better than the Dean of Enrollment at Delta, Russell Curley. One of the problems he sees is the economy.
“The economy has an inverse relationship with Delta enrollment,” he claims. “When the economy is good, enrollment is lower. When the economy is bad, the enrollments tend be higher.” This means that at beginning of the recession in 2008, enrollment went through the roof. This was called a “windfall period.” Ever since then, Delta has been trying to get their numbers up. These last five years, however, have shown a decline in student enrollment.
But it doesn’t end there. Curley states, “It’s true our enrollments have been down about five years, and it will be down this year, but we think we’ve turned the corner by turning around those freshman numbers for the first time in five years. If we can continue that momentum, we’ll have a bigger pool, and that means we’ll have a better shot at the retention rates.”
But where does he get this momentum? The plan is as follows, “What we have to do is put together larger freshman classes for two or three years in a row and our retention will go up because it’s a bigger pool of returning students. Every time you have that bigger freshman class.”
This strategy seems to work, as Curley states, “Our new students are actually up. We’re up to almost 9% compared to a year ago.” There are also problems: “Overall we’re still shrinking a little bit, but we’re down about 2% overall. What that means is continuing students aren’t retaining as much as we’d like.”
To meet these challenges, technology is also being harnessed for the problem. Curley goes on, “We’re employing a new technology. It’s called CRM. It’s a software program that helps us track prospective students through the pipeline. If someone goes to Delta and says ‘I’m thinking about Delta,’ we can start communicating with them electronically through the CRM system. It’s mostly e-mails and there’s some traditional US mail and there’s a lot of telephone calls. We are better able to serve those prospective students and their families if they have questions about financial aid and about the program they want to study or if they want to change their program. It’s easier for us to communicate with them and it’s easier for them to get back to us.”
Though, overall, things look better. Curley says, “We’re pretty optimistic about this enrollment. We really want to see those freshman numbers come up, and it looks like they are. So we’re not quite there yet, but we’re starting to turn the corner. Hopefully we’ll see a positive number next year when compared to this year.”
Students have shown concern in different ways. One student, Benjamin Englehardt, says he has an idea on how to fix enrollment problems. He says, “[We need] more advertisement to the public about what Delta does and how great of a place it is.” He says further, “I’d like to see the faculty more involved with the student organizations. I feel like if they were a bigger part of those organizations we’d have more people coming to Delta with those student groups being larger.”
