Better data analysis is allowing the Graduate School to track graduate applications and admissions more closely, and the trend is encouraging.
President Rawlins, above, greets guests at the reception including Wallis Friel.Tori Byington, an enrollment and policy analyst for the Graduate School, said that as of April 23, systemwide graduate student applications were at 4,921 — up from 4,406 on the same date in 2006 and 4,006 in 2005.
Increasing graduate applications by nearly 1,000 in two years is a huge step, said Howard Grimes, dean of the Graduate School.
“A priority of the Graduate School is to increase the quality of our graduate students while growing strategic programs.” he said. “You need more applications from high quality students to achieve these goals.”
During the last year, Byington has been working with graduate program staff in departments across the university to create a data set that allows the Graduate School and individual departments to look at historical trends for applications, admissions and enrollments and make plans for future recruitment and retention efforts.
“They haven’t had this data readily available before,” she said. “We need to chart all of our graduate activities over time, so we can make better decisions.”
Faculty more savvy
Sabreen Dodson, principal assistant to the chair of physics and astronomy, said that department has been working to create a similar database over the past five years. Working back and forth with Byington on the Graduate School database, she said, “is another tool to confirm that we are on the right track.”
“Any department that is interested in recruitment and retention is going to find those numbers helpful,” she said.
Dodson said that being able to track various aspects of graduate education over a 5- or 10-year period has spurred faculty members to look hard at department policies and procedures.
“I think the faculty have become much more savvy about recruitment,” she said, “and more faculty members are getting involved.”
Developing a reliable, detailed and comprehensive database is just one aspect of recruitment best practices, Grimes said. The Graduate School regularly offers recruiting workshops for faculty and departments where best practices are presented, he said, “and we will continue to move aggressively towards even more competitive practices that allow us to attract the best students.”
Crucial contacts
Matt McCluskey, acting chair of physics and astronomy, said recruitment data is much more extensive than who applies when, and whether that student is offered admission. For instance, he said, each professor who writes a letter of recommendation for a graduate application is entered into the database, allowing the department to track which professors are involved in encouraging students to apply to WSU.
“Some of our best students really come from professors who are former students of our faculty,” he said. With an up-to-date database, WSU faculty can keep in contact with faculty at other universities, informing them when their former students have passed their prelims or achieved other notable milestones. That kind of contact can only help in future recruitment efforts, McCluskey said.
Enrollments pending
While campuswide recruitment efforts this winter and spring appear to be successful, the jury is still out on enrollments.
For instance, according to the Registrar’s Office, in 2006 there were 491 graduate students enrolled on the Pullman campus for fall 2006 as of May 1. This year, as of May 1, there were 505 graduate student enrollments for fall 2007 on the Pullman campus.
The biggest increase systemwide so far is at the Vancouver campus, where graduate enrollments are up 31 percent over last year, from 89 to a high of 117. Tri-Cities is showing a drop from 62 graduate school enrollments on May 1, 2006, to 52 on the same date this year.
Actual enrollment will be higher than those figures, Byington said, because many graduate students do not register until the week prior to the start of classes.
Tracking trends
Without a reliable data set, she said, comparing enrollment figures and identifying trends is complicated at best and nearly impossible at worst because different departments (and different institutions) have different methods of classifying students. Classification can depend on whether a graduate student is full time or part time, enrolled in self-supporting or state-funded courses, part of an interdisciplinary program or subject to myriad other classifications.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) is probably the most useful tool for charting enrollment trends across institutions, since every institution receiving federal support must report enrollment data using standardized methods, Byington said.
Using those figures, there were 3,320 graduate students enrolled systemwide at WSU in fall 2006, up from 3,219 graduate student enrollments in fall 2005.
