SPEAKER_01
Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. We're joined today by Dr. Boyd Bradshaw, the Chief Enrollment Officer at IUPUI, which is a partnership between Indiana and Purdue Universities, an institution that serves over 30,000 students.

These students may choose from among a combined 550 degree programs offered by either IU or Purdue. As you might imagine, there are a few cooks in the kitchen when it comes to the enrollment management function there. Dr. Bradshaw shares tips for establishing a modern strategic enrollment management structure within a decentralized environment. Give them a listen and enjoy.

SPEAKER_02
Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Owen Crane and I serve as a Managing Director and Principal here at EAB. I spend a lot of my time working with university leaders to help them both set and achieve their goals across a number of different terrains, one of which of course is enrollment.

And today I'm super excited to be joined on the podcast by someone who is on the front line of that work every day. My friend Dr. Boyd Bradshaw, the Chief Enrollment Officer at IUPUI, Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Welcome to the program, Boyd.

SPEAKER_00
Thanks Owen. It's a great pleasure to be here today and I'm excited to have this conversation.

SPEAKER_02
I appreciate you taking the time. Before we dive in, you know, Boyd, you and I talk a lot about baseball. For our listeners, Boyd's a Cardinals fan.

I'm a Braves fan. So before we dive in, I have to ask, Boyd, do you have any public reactions to the Atlanta Braves winning the World Series this year? And part two, any World Series projections for 2022?

SPEAKER_00
Well, because I disliked and dodged so much, I was excited to see the Braves get to the World Series and win it this year. You know, I can be a Braves fan as long as St. Louis is not playing.

But you know, my prediction is easy. It's going to be St. Louis next year.

SPEAKER_02
I love it. Well, hey, I appreciate it. I had to use this platform to ask that question, even though it was probably a little bit out of left field, if you will.

So anyways, back to it. This podcast was originally to be titled Enrollment Management in the Age of COVID. But I think Boyd, you and I are probably pretty tired of talking about COVID.

It was funny. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to facilitate a president's discussion at EAB's Presidential Experience Lab. And one president or chancellor specifically requested that we don't mention Omicron or COVID in any of our discussions.

And so that actually made for a nice conversation for the hour that lasted. And so we've made a little bit of a pivot today. And the theme for today's conversation is something very relevant in Boyd's world, specifically at IUPUI, which will be strategic enrollment management in a decentralized environment.

So Boyd's an expert here, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation. And there's a lot to unpack. So why don't we go ahead and get started? And first, Boyd, if you wouldn't mind, could you just kind of ground us in telling us a little bit more about yourself and your institution? The name IUPUI can sometimes be a mouthful.

So for our listeners and those that might not be familiar with your institution, can you just give us a little bit of background on yourself and your role at IUPUI?

SPEAKER_00
Sure, Owen. Yeah, IUPUI, you really have to put a descriptive to it when you talk about it. And just for context, I have been at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis for about six years.

I arrived back in 2016, and it has been a great experience for me. I do have over 20-plus years of higher ed experience as a chief enrollment officer at other institutions as well. But I would have to say that IUPUI has been one that has been one of my biggest and greatest challenges, but also one of the biggest accomplishments in the work that we do.

We offer two types of degree programs. We offer programs from degree programs from Indiana University and also from Purdue University. And as the theme of this being decentralized, we are as decentralized as you can get as a campus and even offering two different degrees.

And we also have two satellite campuses, one in Fort Wayne and one in Columbus, that we're responsible for as well.

SPEAKER_01
Thanks.

SPEAKER_02
One of the themes here is that your work clearly is very much in a decentralized environment. And at EAB, one of the things we talk about a lot is budget models and how to incentivize desired behaviors on campus. So whether your budget model is zero-based or incremental or full-blown RCM or responsibility center management for those unfamiliar with the term RCM.

One of the most important things that we tell our partner institutions is just to make sure that you're aligning your budget model to strategic goals. And so would you mind talking about in a world where you're in a decentralized environment, could you talk a little bit about IUPUI's budget model and how you as the enrollment executive use this budget model to try to incentivize growth at IUPUI?

SPEAKER_00
Sure. As you mentioned, being decentralized, our budget model also follows a decentralized approach, which is the RCM model, which you mentioned is responsible center management. And what that means to us as an institution, and for those of you that might not be aware, we have 17 academic schools.

Within the 17 academic schools, the tuition dollars that come in by credit hour goes directly to the schools. And then the schools are taxed on a certain percentage, and that's how the rest of the campus functions and operates. And so there's a great incentive for the deans and for the academic schools to bring in healthy enrollment that they can invest back into their schools.

And so it does create a type of competition that is a little more unique than a centralized model where everyone benefits from the enrollment growth. For us, it's particularly the schools that benefit the most in regards to the number of students, the longer the students stay, graduation, we're not just talking about recruitment. We have a lot of focus on retention as well on our campus, but it does create some unique challenges for us.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I want to dive in a little bit into the details on how you do that at IUPUI. I know that you recently gave a presentation at ACRO SEM conference down in Miami, and I'm told from some colleagues who are down there that it was very well received and that you actually shared a particular framework and a methodology that guides your work at IUPUI.

Could you tell our listeners a little bit more about that framework, how you developed it, why, and how it's going? Sure.

SPEAKER_00
I think, first, it goes back to how enrollment management was created within the structure of IUPUI. When I started back in 2016, we had actually moved from an enrollment services model to enrollment management and actually changed the name to the division of enrollment management. That was a key piece of educating the campus.

A lot of what I do on my campus is really to be a resource for the rest of the campus. One of the easiest things that we do, and some say, what might not be easy, but is to get the word out about our operation and defining what strategic enrollment management is all about. There's three key words that come in mind when I think about the definition of strategic enrollment management that a campus really needs to be familiar with.

We do provide services, but the term is not a service. It's a concept. The word key concept is important.

It's a unique framework in its comprehensive institutional planning. Many universities throughout the country have a strategic plan. Many of them have strategic enrollment plan.

What I have found in my experience is that one doesn't talk to the other. One of the biggest things that we have done at IUPUI is make sure that our strategic enrollment plan is aligned perfectly to our strategic plan. The way that has been done is that we have goal four within our strategic plan, which is called optimize our enrollment management.

That brings the entire campus together to focus on the optimization. It doesn't say to grow. It doesn't say to shape.

It's optimized, which gives us the flexibility to really react to what the market is telling us each year you're out. We use that as we move forward and we set goals. That is one piece of the framework.

The other piece I think that's really important, as you think about enrollment management and the evolution of this in CORE actually a few years ago, and it was a work that was done through Edge Adventures, created this maturity model. We have used it. You can go out and Google Edge Adventures and Role Management maturity model.

You can locate it. It is a model that shows how the evolution of enrollment management back in the 80s when it originated to where it's at today, where it's become more movement from operational, which is really that service piece of enrollment management to more of an integrated approach. I would say at IUPUI, we are more strategic than we ever have been, but we're not as integrated as we need to be in order to be successful.

One example of integration would be looking at the complete life cycle of a student from the time that they become interested through the time that they graduate and they give back in some capacity to the institution and making sure you have strategies at each stage of that funnel, both from the recruitment side and also from the retention side.

SPEAKER_02
Got it. That's helpful and very helpful context to have. One of the things that I hear from you and your peers, when you look at the student life cycle from all the way from the recruitment phase to being an enrolled student, a lot of folks are struggling with yield right now.

Any guidance or any observations just from the market right now and what you're seeing with universities who are struggling with yield?

SPEAKER_00
I think the pandemic really has had an impact and that I know that today we're trying to stay away from the pandemic, but also it is with us and it's going to be with us for a long time. I think a lot of universities throughout the country are looking at different ways to get students more interested so that your percentage would actually increase. We have seen with our data over the three-year period.

Compared to the pandemic of 2019 to where we're at today, we have received the right number of applications and the right number of admitted students. We have not yielded at the levels that we have before to be successful. For us at IUPUI, that is a must.

We can't meet our enrollment goals if our yield is not where it needs to be. We're not that fortunate as a campus. What we've done this year is we've created a campus-wide approach to yield where we've gotten our key stakeholders across campus, including all the schools, and we've identified yield champions in each of the schools to help assist us in making sure that we're all marching in the same direction.

We're more centralized in the approach than decentralized, where decentralization could cause us to go in different directions. We're trying to get everyone to move in the same direction. To today, right now, I would say we've been pretty successful.

We're trending well right now, but it's early in the enrollment cycle. Good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02
Speaking of decentralization in a world where you're pursuing growth, the area that I focus on, as you know, Boyd, is graduate and adult. A lot of folks and your peers really turning to the graduate and adult populations to backfill potential lost revenues that they might see in the undergraduate space, specifically because of demographics. You and I both know demographics doesn't mean destiny.

We need to think about market share. Back to the adult and grad piece, how do you all approach that growth piece in a distributed environment or decentralized environment? What does that look like? Is the accountability at the dean level again? Is it with the individual academic units? How do you help guide and set folks up for success in a world where graduate and adult enrollments are a key part of the revenue strategy?

SPEAKER_00
That is a great question. I would say when we talk about challenges and that enrollment management maturity model that I had mentioned moving from more of an operational to an integrated approach, that's truly integration when you start looking at different types of students. The grad, the adult student, I oversee as the chief enrollment officer at IUPUI the operations that supports undergraduate students when it comes to recruiting students, so the office of undergraduate admissions.

But if you take it one step further, I also oversee the office of the registrar and the office of student financial services, which is our financial aid in our scholarship office. Those two offices supports the entire campus. Undergrad, grad, professional school programs, all types of students.

Grad admissions only supports the undergraduates, so that is very decentralized. We talk about school being decentralized. Our graduate school is also part of that decentralization.

Then the adult market is also an area that we aren't as sophisticated or as centralized as we can be in recruiting those students. We are looking at different technologies and different ways to do that. I have an M and Trig on some of the work that you've done at A, B, E, A, B around graduate and adult.

Is there anything that you can elaborate on that you think, I guess, from a decentralized standpoint, where those types of tools might be helpful?

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that we find that a lot of your peers suffer from is exactly that, is that decentralization. When you're decentralized in the graduate and adult space, there becomes a lack of scale.

The degree of separation between the presidential mandate to grow, if you will, and the levels of separation between that mandate to grow and the individuals actually accountable for that growth at the actual recruitment and coordinator-type level, is often at the individual programs. With those degrees of separation, you lose scale. What EAB tries to do is we have an entire division within our enrollment services area called adult learner recruitment.

Our entire purpose there is to help university partners achieve scale, both in their audience generation and then their marketing recruitment to students at scale. We've invested heavily in the use of big data and consumer analytics. What that allows us to do is to really surgically find your students, students that would have the highest propensity to enroll at IUPUI, students that have the highest affinity for your institution and for your programs.

To be able to fill the funnel, both top, middle, and bottom, with those right fit students, anyone that would be right fit for your institution. We don't want to disqualify students because we think they're specific to a specific program or we don't want to prematurely disqualify someone. Then being able to engage those students at scale.

Again, I keep mentioning the word scale because what a lot of folks lose on is exactly that. We have an individual coordinator or someone who's sending drip campaigns. What we've found is that adult and graduate students are about as pragmatic as they come.

Being able to communicate with them at the individual level based on his or her individual barriers or motivators or the things that they value, where they actually are in their life as an individual, being able to articulate that to them at that individual student-centric way is really the future. What a lot of folks do is we apply data science to both the marketing and top, middle, and bottom part of the funnel. We also use what we call intent marketing, which gives us the ability to go one-to-one in a student-centric way with each individual student to facilitate an individualized campaign that is based on where he or she is.

What that allows us to do is combat that exact issue, which is that lack of scale.

SPEAKER_00
One thing that's unique about just internal for us, because my operations primarily for the recruitment of students is undergraduate, we actually partnered with our graduate school and hired one, and now we're going to be hired a second systems analyst to help manage our sales force, our CRM, working individually with graduate programs. We already had the infrastructure in place, in the knowledge in place. We didn't have the bodies.

What we found is that if you look at all the graduate programs across our campus, a lot of it's being managed by executive assistants, secretaries, when inquiries come in. There's no centralization of the inquiry. We are actually doing that now for the graduate programs.

It's early, but we are seeing an increase this next year in graduate. We want to continue to do that. Also, the focus on the adult market will continue to be an important part of our mix as we move forward.

SPEAKER_02
Boy, that's helpful. We've talked a lot about undergrad, we've talked about grad, we've talked about adult. One of the things that I think makes you and your role really unique is the fact that your title is Chief Enrollment Officer.

I really want to talk about, if you don't mind, what is the desire behind creating that unique title Chief Enrollment Officer? And part two, I guess, would be we've talked about your approach on educating campus. Could you talk a little bit more about those two and how they are tied to one another?

SPEAKER_00
Sure. When you think about the work that we do within enrollment management, and we all have different titles at different institutions, my title as the Associate Vice Chancellor places me in that senior level administrator at IUPUI. That Chief Enrollment Officer gives me the ultimate responsibility of making sure that we're meeting our enrollment goals, whether they're undergraduate students, graduate students, professional students, the mix of students, addition of new programs that we might bring on.

I'm inserted in all those conversations across our campus. And I forgot to mention earlier too, we're nearly 30,000 students. So we have a large number of students on our campus, and that includes our two satellite campuses as well.

And so that Chief Enrollment Officer is really key. It assigns that responsibility to me. So I do chair our Strategic Enrollment Management Council, which is made up of deans across campus as well as senior level administrators, or those enrollment stakeholders that are crucial to our success.

But what we do as a division, so when we went back and looked at our strategic plan, which as I mentioned before, you know, goal for the university strategic plan is to optimize our enrollment management. So we created six objectives to help educate the campus about what our role was in supporting enrollment management and ultimately aligns with my role as the Chief Enrollment Officer. One objective was to develop continued expertise in strategic enrollment management.

So we want the campus to come to us to get the information that is needed. We want to be able to share best practices of what's happening in the country. We don't want the deans or the other enrollment stakeholders taking the time to do that.

Let us do that as a division.

SPEAKER_02
And, Boyd, how do you share those best practices? Are you sending emails? Are you having, you know, I know we did a EAB plugged in and helped at a kind of a day-long retreat that you all have. Like, what is the forum through which you're sharing these best practices?

SPEAKER_00
We have a few different ways that we've done that. One that, and this may sound silly, Owen, but it's so important is we have to educate our team as well because, and that's where we start. And we have these lunch and learns once a month and we bring topics and we just have an open invitation to the entire division of enrollment management.

We have a large team. If you look at every employee that we have, including students, that's over 200. And we invite them to learn about different tactics, different trends out there in the country, what we're seeing.

But we have different forms where we share best practices. We are also in the process of using Microsoft Teams as a tool to allow, you know, articles, we post articles. We do all kinds of things to really encourage the campus to look at things.

We have also, you know, ways that we, you know, more intentionally provide information. We created a strategic enrollment management summit once a year. We've gone virtual because, you know, of the pandemic, but we had an in-person summit for two years and we invited the entire campus to participate and that was really successful.

So that's another creative way of us getting, you know, that knowledge out. I think the other objective that's key, and I won't read through all six because it'll take a while. And you can find these objectives on our website at dem.

iupu.edu. Is that service component? You know, we talked about enrollment services, but we really want to be able to provide excellent service to the rest of the campus. The campus relies on us for about every activity that relates to student success.

And we want to make sure that we are there for them. And we really try to ingrain that into our culture of what we're doing and also have that culture of more of a data-informed decision-making process. It's not just being data-driven.

It's really data-informed. And you know, you can be data-driven. You can sit on tons of data as an organization, but if you're not using that data to inform your strategies for decision-making, you know, you can't be successful.

And so we have a process that we've set up to actually do that. So those are just a few of the objectives that we put in place, but we have a total of six. You know, and if you, I can list them really quick, if you think would be good for the audience.

Sure.

SPEAKER_02
I've got one quick clarifying question. And then I think it would be helpful for the audience to go through some of the rest of them quickly. You talked about the importance of data, right? And there's one thing is having data, but the real thing is how do you actually take, make actionable decisions based on that data? When we talked about educating the campus, and I would draw that same parallel, which is educating the campus and other stakeholders is one thing, but actually activating those stakeholders to be actively involved in the enrollment management effort is a whole other thing.

How do you bridge that gap between, you know, educating folks and actually activating those folks to help be rowing in the same direction as it relates to enrollment management?

SPEAKER_00
You're very intentional about that. And, you know, I talk a lot about my role and, you know, if I'm sitting at my desk every day and I'm not out and about on campus, you know, meeting with deans, meeting with other senior level administrators or staff, you know, I'm not doing my job. And so I carry that with me.

And I think, you know, the way we close that gap is, you know, we are, we created an infrastructure within our division, enrollment management that really attacks the enrollment funnel. And, you know, from the time that a student is interested to the time that a student enrolls upon, you know, being recruited, you know, we created what we call the Office of Strategy and Insights. And we hired a data scientist to help us run that.

We also are lucky and fortunate at IUPU. I also have an office of institutional research that really helps and supports our efforts. And so we tag team together.

Although we carry the enrollment torch, we're tag teaming with the institutional research office on our campus. And so, you know, it is a collaborative effort when it comes to data. And we meet the data needs of a majority of the campus through our efforts.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02
That's helpful. Did you want to run through the?

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I'll just mention them really quickly. I mentioned the expertise in strategic enrollment management, excellent service and consultation, the culture of data informed decision making. And the other three are contribute to promoting student success.

So it really looks at that life cycle of a student. We also want to cultivate innovation, change and entrepreneur mindset. So that innovative approach in our work is important, is one of our objectives.

And then the diversity and the inclusivity principles that impact everything that we do. That is really important. And we try to apply that with every strategy anytime we have an idea.

You know, one thing I think if there's anything I want to leave the audience is, where it is that when you're looking at strategies, you really have got to have the data first. You really can't set your goals until you have your strategies in place. And that's kind of our rule of thumb.

Sure. We all want to gravitate to the strategy. And then, you know, we really need to use that data first in order to do that.

SPEAKER_02
Boyd, you mentioned data innovation, the entrepreneurial mindset to pivot real quick. But on that same note, there's a lot of innovation and data, you know, from outside vendors or groups. I mean, EAB certainly is innovating and providing technologies and capabilities to help folks think through tapping into new audiences or finding parents and even leveraging analytics and data science to help in your targeting and recruitment.

So there's a lot of data and innovation happening in this industry in general. Could you tell us, I'm curious what you think here. What technology or new capability that's out there do you think will be the most transformative in enrollment management moving forward? And then conversely, if you had to give your peers some kind of back to the basics advice, you know, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00
Great questions. And I think where I would start on that is, you know, you mentioned the word data analytics. And, you know, I just mentioned how we created that infrastructure within the division of enrollment management, which we did not have.

I think technologies tying the analytics to the marketing and the communication efforts and really studying how students come into the enrollment funnel from the time, you know, either as a prospect, as an inquiry or as an applicant, they have different needs and really truly understanding that. And it really goes back to, you know, your analytics, you know, what are you looking at? What system are you using in order to pull the analytics? We think of CRMs as communication tools. There's so much more than communication.

And so I think that, you know, universities that are investing the time and the resources into the data side, not just with staffing, but with the right tools, creating, you know, the right spreadsheets, for example, you know, the things that really make you, the dashboards are becoming key to our work and making sure that, you know, you have a dashboard that everyone can understand easily to pull the data into it. You know, that's a thing or some of the things that we're focused on. But, you know, also when I think of technologies, I really think of community.

And I really think it's time for us to really take a step back and really truly understand how we connect students to students. You know, there's a lot of different technologies out there. You know, some of us still use Facebook, which is one of our tools.

But it's going to become so much more important as we head forward that we are connecting students to students. And it's not just prospective students to prospective students, prospective students to current students. What platforms are we using? What tools are we using? You know, that's going to be really, really important as we move forward.

SPEAKER_02
That's helpful, Boyd. And back to the second part of the question, which is really, if you had to give some advice to your peers, you know, back to the basics, almost, you know, showing up to work with the hard hat and a lunch fail, what kind of advice would that be?

SPEAKER_00
You know, I, you know, when I gave the presentation at AcroSem in Miami, I had a slide that talked about lessons learned, you know, and we've learned a lot as we work through this process, particularly at IUPUI and the challenges that we face in decentralized environment. And I came up with this list. I think this would be a good time to share is, you know, you have to be able to meet the unique needs of your campus.

It's not everything's not in a box. And so, you know, one school might have a different need than another school. And so being flexible and being able to do that.

And if you can't do that, you know, that is something that, you know, can be a detour to success. I think data inconsistencies is a basic, you know, I talk a lot about when I started, I'd go around campus, talk about enrollment goals. If you would add every school, what their enrollment goal was, it was impossible.

And so setting realistic goals is really a key as well. And you think about basic and goal setting, you know, you've got to have a process in order to do that, that is consistent, that is campus-wide, you can't be doing that in silos, even in a decentralized environment. You also have to set aside time to plan.

Enrollment management is institutional planning. If you have a division of enrollment management, your campus, and all you're doing is operational type work, you know, you're selling yourself short. You know, you really have got to sit down, take time to plan, get your team around the table and plan with them.

And I think if there's anything, is that time to do that? And I always make a joke about this with my team, but, you know, those meetings that are so non-productive, you know, really to identify the space, the meeting space that you really need to be in. And be OK to say, no, I can't do that right now. We are really focused on this.

And this is what is going to be more important, have a larger return. In the end. And so those are types of things I think, you know, as you think about enrollment management and the planning, you know, you have to give yourself time to really do it.

SPEAKER_02
That's a fantastic recap, Boyd. I learned something from you every time we talk. And I know we're reaching the end of our time here together.

I'm sure we could talk probably all day about all things, enrollment management, decentralized environment and probably baseball if we had extra time. But greatly appreciate you taking the time to join us on the EVE's Office Hours podcast. And it's always good to talk to you, Boyd.

SPEAKER_00
Well, thank you. It's a great pleasure to be with you today. And just remember, St.

Louis Cardinals World Series Champs 2000 and 20. We're already here first. Thanks, Boyd.

See you, man.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you for listening. Be sure to join us again next week when we explore the effects of the pandemic on student persistence and success. Until then, thank you for your time.