One of the ways in which UMUC provides a variety of services to all its students is through its Student Success Center, which is a subset of the institution’s Student Affairs Division.

Vice Provost for Student Affairs Matthew Gaglione explains that the Center was developed by UMUC senior administration for two primary purposes. One was to take a hard look at customer service and how all UMUC staff interact with students. The other purpose required working toward meeting preset enrollment goals set by the institution.

The Student Success Center is comprised of an enrollment management team; a graduate advising center; an undergraduate advising center; and a variety of other support areas, including admissions processing, the registrar’s office, a degree audit team, student services, and a career and cooperative education center.

"One of the tenets (of the Center) was to establish more outreach where advisors would be in touch with students on a regular basis," says Gaglione. Part of this outreach plan entailed coming up with a strategy for contacting students referred to as "stop-outs" and "drop-outs" - those who had not enrolled during a recent past semester - "to try to find out why they weren’t enrolling and what we could do to help them enroll."

The strategy started with a personalized e-mail sent out by advisors during the middle part of the semester, well in advance of the subsequent semester registration period. The email basically reminded students to return and offered advisement assistance, starting with three options to respond to the advisor: by appointment for a face-to-face meeting, by answering the e-mail or by telephone.

"We contacted those students we thought were interested in coming back and had the greatest potential," says Gaglione. "We filtered out students in terms of their prior performance. Students in good standing academically and closest to completing their degree requirements were the first group of students we contacted.

"The reaction we received from a number of students, especially those who been out for a while, ran the gamut of ‘don’t bother me’ to ‘Wow, I’m so pleased you contacted me; I was going to call you.’"

Gaglione adds that, overall, "the experience has been very positive for the advisors," not to mention very positive for the institution. Fall 2002 enrollment goals were up 2.3% over institutional targets. At the stateside undergraduate level (UMUC has three primary segments, so to speak, stateside, Europe and Asia), the institutional target was 109,151 credit hours for Fall 2002, and that figure was surpassed by 2,465 for a grand total of 111,616 credit hours.

"We haven’t gone full board in terms of contacting students on a more structured, regular basis," says Gaglione. This was our first go around, and the results have been positive. As we come up with other approaches and more strategies, without becoming troublesome or obnoxious [through over contact], I think we can increase our numbers even further."

www.umuc.edu/students/ssc/ssc_home.html