Enrollment (2011 Strategic Plan)

The College is committed to increasing the size of its applicant pool while decreasing enrollment by recruiting more students with strong academic ability, a good fit for Hampshire, and the ability to afford a Hampshire education. This selectivity will decrease workload, increase retention, and paradoxically increase economic and ethnic diversity, as we offer more attractive financial aid packages to fewer students. To accomplish this goal, we will increase applications by 5-10 percent per year compounded for four years. These efforts aim to complement the work of the academic vitality initiatives in increasing retention.

Comments
Please include your thoughts on the importance of the initiative, how to frame the issue, things that may be missing, and any additional comments here (you can do so by logging into Hampedia and clicking edit):


 * This wording is too vague. If this means that by accepting fewer students the school could increase the size of financial aid packages, then this does seem like a good idea... But I worry about wishing to make Hampshire more selective and thus more elite. I did not apply to an Ivy league selective school because that is not the type of environment I wished to enter into, this will not breed a healthy mindset amongst the student body. We should strive to accept as many students as the school can appropriately care for, thus we should focus on expanding out campus resources before we increase the applicant pool. We should not increase the applicant pool until we deal with housing more students on campus and hiring more faculty. That said, if the applicant pool is increase with the addition of a specific screening process that appropriately assesses the ability of the applicants to succeed in Hampshire academics, that can prove to be beneficial to retention rates. Kasey Neiss F08
 * @Kasey: I think the importance of being selective is that it does allow for a better academic experience for all of us. In my experience from 5 years of community college, the quality of a class is at least half determined by the students. However, I really don't like the idea of finance-based selectivity (though it may be a necessary evil). I DO think we need to be very careful as to how we select students: for example, maybe the student who failed high school because they didn't fit in, or were bored, or whatever would thrive at Hampshire. We need to think of creative ways to determine this. I don't think it's impossible. Devin Morse
 * I believe that increasing the pool of applicants while keeping the same number of accepted students in principle will improve the college as a whole. However that assumes that admissions accepts students that are best for the school.  How that is done I believe should be under scrutiny.  I completely agree with the criteria given for what kinds of students should be accepted.  It should also be worth noting that this ties heavily in with New_Student_Residence_(2011_Strategic_Plan) as it may allow for more students to be accepted into our school.  If we do not grow the applicant pool enough before the New Student Residence is built then the opposite effect of what this plan outlines will occur.  Daniel_Homer