At the April 23 meeting of the Board of Trustees, Jason Slade presented a summary of Strategy 2: Enrollment and Student Success: Advance enrollment and student success by removing barriers and ensuring every learner experiences the coordinated support needed to persist and achieve their goals.
Objective 1: Integrate and strengthen a unified, data-informed enrollment ecosystem that aligns all student services, PRMC, and academic programs around shared priorities to ease the enrollment and success pathways and increase the college attendance rates with key local audiences (high school and adult learners) and select national audiences.
- Success Indicators: Increase the application to enrollment rates and the number of dual-enrolled students.
- Year 1 Focus: SWOT analysis of the “enrollment ecosystem. NMC website redevelopment. New digital marketing campaign aligned with website redesign. Feedback from dual-enrolled students and parents; based on feedback, begin refinement of enrollment ecosystem.
Objective 2: Build a coordinated communication and information system that ensures important details stay accurate, visible, and accessible throughout the student journey. Shared dashboards, portals, and consistent messaging will reduce confusion, strengthen follow-through, and improve decision-making across NMC.
- Success Indicators: Student awareness of key college journey deadlines and milestones. Student actions taken based on calls to action (on-time payment, registration, advising meetings, etc.).
- Year 1 Focus: Identify communication touchpoints across time for students from orientation through completion, assessing and mapping current communication. Define greatest pain points (poor process completions) in communication with students. Develop implementation plan for new student-facing dashboard.
Objective 3: Create a coordinated advising system that ensures every student chooses a clear path early and stays on track to complete it. Integrated advising touchpoints, career exploration, faculty collaboration, and technology tools will support informed decisions and continuous progress.
- Success Indicators: Advising engagement. Career decision rates.
- Year 1 Focus: Work with academic areas to determine advisor assignments of adjacent/pathway majors. All eligible faculty and staff complete Canvas course and practicum workshops. Create new advisor assignment process and schedule.
Objective 4: Expand learning options and clarify stackable pathways so every student, especially adult, rural, and part-time learners, can advance toward employment or further education.
- Success Indicators: Create new credit/noncredit “blended pathways.” Increase the number of students moving from noncredit training to an academic program.
- Year 1 Focus: Inventory of current credit/noncredit opportunities per strategic pathway, based on the Hot Jobs report, NOMIAC-identified clusters, and NMC strengths. NOMIAC will survey and leverage industry and community resource expertise to inform strategic blended pathways at NMC and throughout our 10-county region. Develop 1-2 blended pathways during year 1.
The full memo can be viewed here. Next up — Strategy 3 (May Board of Trustees meeting).