Town Hall Examines Realities Behind Enrollment Data, and Strategies to Build Student Retention

An Enrollment Management Town Hall held March 29 at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) touched on critical issues of student retention and success, and invited feedback from the BMCC community.

The College has seen an enrollment decline of 21% in the last 10 years — including a plummet from 2019 through 2021 that is related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This aligns with an overall drop of 25.3% enrollment in CUNY community colleges in the same period, and a 37.1% drop in community colleges, nationally.

Aggregating the data for BMCC enrollment and retention patterns reveals that Black and Hispanic men represent the largest percentage drop among student groups at the college. This and other critical issues were examined in a panel discussion held in BMCC’s Theatre 2 at the 199 Chambers Street campus and live streamed to community members who were not on campus.

BMCC President Anthony E. Munroe defined the focus for the day’s event. “Today, we are coming together to hear from you,” said President Munroe. “We want to start a deeper discussion that will begin the ongoing process of creating a plan of action to address our enrollment challenges. This plan has to be inclusive, comprehensive, forward thinking, flexible and responsive to our students, community and key constituent groups.”

BMCC is in the process of developing a Strategic Enrollment Management Plan, or SEM, the president said, as part of the larger set of BMCC strategic and operational plans.

“The BMCC SEM plan will provide overall direction for strategic enrollment management and include broad goals and strategic initiatives that can provide guidance on how initiatives, collaboration and concepts are designed and executed,” he explained.

Institutional priorities strive to raise student success inside and outside the classroom

The Enrollment Town Hall discussion was led by Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Erwin Wong, Acting Vice President for Enrollment Management Sanjay Ramdath and Dean of Institutional Effectiveness and Strategic Planning Christopher Shults.

The speakers focused on a set of institutional priorities that serve to ensure that BMCC students succeed “inside and outside the classroom,” said President Munroe. The priorities are to:

• Increase enrollment, by enhancing admissions and advising and addressing retention and transfer barriers;
• Improve alignment between academic programming, student demand and workforce needs through program review, enhancement of online offerings and expansion of short-term programs;
• Reduce equity gaps through greater support for culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy and expansion of comprehensive academic and basic needs assistance;
• Expand access to comprehensive academic and student supports that are associated with greater student outcomes;
• Cultivate career preparation, exploration and development opportunities for credit and non-credit student populations, and
• Engage and partner with corporate and philanthropic partners to support academic programming, strengthen career development and grow financial resources.

Audience members, both in-person and remote, were invited to respond to the institutional priorities, as well as to a set of questions posted in a PowerPoint during the Town Hall.

These questions invited reflection on student program choices that could be leveraged to build retention, and what adjustments could be made to student services to strengthen student outcomes.

Campus leaders explain student realities behind the data

Acting Vice President Sanjay Ramdath reviewed PowerPoint slides showing community college enrollment from 2011 through 2021. Dean Shults drilled down on that data, explaining the value of disaggregating data in order to understand which populations are being impacted the most.

Referring to data gathered and organized by BMCC’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness and Analytics, Dean Shults said, “What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is that the percentage of our student population that is Asian has gone up, as Black and Hispanic has gone down.”

There are a lot of reasons community college populations have decrease, said Senior Vice President Wong. “Economically, we are hearing from students that they’re leaving the community college because they need to find work, they’ve lost their job — there’s a true economic problem there. We’re really hard pressed to figure out then, what we can do academically, to help our students get back on path.”

As Senior Vice President Wong explained, part of the BMCC strategic plan and mission stresses the importance of working with the community, students and departments to raise students’ academic success.

“It’s not going to be business as usual,” said Senior Vice President Wong. “Whatever we’ve done in the past, we can’t expect to continue to do and get the same results. We need to ask, what do our students need in order to be prepared to earn life-sustaining wages, to create a career path and move on and transfer to senior college.”

Community members raise important points

BMCC Professor James Blake — who serves in the BMCC Counseling Department, founded the BMCC Honor Society of Black Student Scholars and co-founded the BMCC Each One Reach One Mentoring Program — mentioned he has taught at BMCC for more than 50 years as he took the stage to speak out on three points related to improving student retention at the College.

These included creating a program to reach students who “stop out” of the college, and to take advantage of the federal government’s allowing of a financial aid “warning semester” instead of suspending students’ financial aid as soon as their GPA goes below 2.0.

Professor Blake’s third point related to the fact that, as he explained, BMCC freshman often do not understand college rules and regulations or what services are available to them — and this impacts greatly on their success. To address this problem, Professor Blake suggested that BMCC reenact the practice of giving one college credit to students who attend, upon entering the college, a comprehensive seminar covering those areas.

Another audience member who approached the mic was a student, Luna, who serves as a coach and wanted more support assisting other students with their onboarding at the college.

In addition to live questions and comments from the audience, the Enrollment Management Town Hall livestream audience submitted questions in the chat column that were addressed by the panel.

These touched on factors that impact student retention such as the balance between online and in-person classes, the availability of microcredential programs, the expansion of cohort models, ways to support students with federal work study positions and MetroCards, recruitment of international students, support for non-traditional students and more.