The 1999 Academic Senate for California Community Colleges paper, The Role of Academic Senates in Enrollment Management, presented principles for effective faculty participation in developing policies and making decisions that affect course offerings. In 2007, an Academic Senate resolution called for an update to that paper, to provide senates with information that reflects various changes in the colleges and their operations since the earlier paper. This paper responds to that resolution by highlighting what has changed in the colleges in the last decade and providing guidance to local senates and faculty in general about issues and options when they participate in the development and implementation of enrollment management policies and procedures. This paper is not intended to replace the earlier paper, but rather to supplement it.
Recommendations for Academic Senates
- The academic senate should create a forum to review the policies and procedures for enrollment management at the college/district. In the next section there are suggestions about the content of such discussions.
- Academic senates should consider the recommendations from the 1999 paper the Role of Academic Senates in Enrollment Management, which are re-printed in Appendix A. Those recommendations are still relevant and can help to inform local enrollment management conversations.
- Academic senates should make the case for why faculty should participate both in enrollment management policy development and decision-making. Title 5 §53200 says that the academic senate’s roles include responsibility for recommendations about academic and professional matters, curriculum, educational program development, standards and policies regarding student preparation and success as well as processes for planning and budget.
- he academic senate should initiate changes to the current enrollment management policy/processes if any of them are not providing students with an education of the highest quality.
- The academic senate should clarify with others which decisions should be primarily the purview of the academic senate versus those that an enrollment management committee (with academic senate representation) should decide.
- In any enrollment management or scheduling procedures, general questions such as the following should be asked:
- Who is making the decisions about scheduling classes, including delivery mode and length of the courses? What is the faculty role? Why are courses scheduled in a particular mode or time frame? Is the decision based on academic judgment?
- Where and when are enrollment management and scheduling decisions made—-in silos that do not communicate with one another, such as in administrator meetings and faculty department meetings separately? Or are decisions made in a concerted, thoughtful, data and policy-driven manner?
- What class schedule produces the most success for students? The answer can vary for different populations of students and for different courses; only faculty can make the pedagogical determination. Local senates can make the case that because these questions are “academic and professional” in nature, they should fall to the senate per Title 5 regulations.
- What effect on learning and student success might occur in any given scheduling scenario?