Ep. 96: A President’s Perspective On Recruitment, Retention, and Leadership

it makes me wonder then if you could sit down with every, I'll say college admissions and marketing professional in the country, right? For say 30 minutes, like what would you want them to understand about how most presidents think about like new student enrollment, new student recruitment?

I may have a different perspective on that because of my background in enrollment management.

You know, a lot of times in enrollment, all we're thinking about are numbers.

I You know, trying to meet our goals, enrollment goals for the year, budget goals, whatever you may call them.

But really focusing on creating a culture on campus that's conducive to meeting enrollment management goals.

And that really starts from the top up.

So as the president, I feel like that's my role in making sure that everyone on campus knows that recruitment and retention are part of everyone's jobs.

And making sure that they're excited about that.

It's not just another duty as assigned.

It's part of creating that culture that students want to come to that college campus because they feel welcomed and they feel a sense of belonging and connection.

So talk to us about how you do that, because I couldn't agree more, right? Recruitment and retention are everyone's job, you know, and students, you know, again, they don't necessarily need a single person to get help from or advice from.

They need it from whoever's willing to give it.

That could be anybody, right, from the person picking up trash around campus to the person in the dining facility, right? Somebody in the residence hall or somebody in advising.

So what are some things you've done there at Texas Wesleyan to start to intentionally create that culture that you talked about where everyone understands like you have a role in this?

That is a challenge as well.

I've talked about some challenges.

It's really shifting the culture and the mindset of the university.

And it takes some time.

Some of the things we have done, first of all, is codifying the university's core values.

You know, when I started here four years ago, we didn't have identified core values.

So we brought 50 individuals from across campus, faculty, staff, and students, and we held a value summit so that we had different perspectives to identify what the university's core values were.

And so from that, then you have a foundation to build that culture on.

And just reinforcing the core values, reinforcing values, That positive culture of connection and getting students involved on campus and attracting them to our university, we reinforce it in everything we do, every email that I send, every event that we host.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we held an academic year kickoff event for all of our faculty and staff, and we had a guest speaker from Southwest Airlines, come in and speak about culture.

I thought it was interesting.