SUNY-ESF enrollment increases 11.6 percent

SUNY-ESF’s Academic Governance reviewed rebranding efforts and an increase in student enrollment at its monthly meeting on Tuesday.

The environmental college accepted 633 new students this fall, an 11.6 percent increase from last year, according to data presented by Erin Craig, SUNY-ESF’s associate provost for enrollment and marketing. The data also showed that the number of first-year applications jumped from 1,830 to 2,080 — an approximate 10 percent increase — in one year.

This fall also saw SUNY-ESF’s most diverse incoming class, Craig said. The percentage of minority students increased by 3 percent, while underrepresented minority students increased by 2 percent from last fall. In an effort to improve the applicant pool, Craig added, SUNY-ESF will have two open houses this fall, one on Sunday and one on Nov. 3.

“We’re really trying to drive as many visitors to campus as possible,” she said. “We know that if we get them here, their likelihood of applying and enrolling just increases exponentially.”

Craig added that her department is strategizing on how to increase enrollment in some of SUNY-ESF’s under-enrolled programs, including chemistry and landscape architecture, since most incoming students enroll in environmental and forest biology and forest and natural resource management programs.

The university also worked with Thorburn Group, a Minneapolis-based branding agency, over the summer to develop a new brand foundation and improve the university’s visibility outside of its primary market. SUNY-ESF hopes this plan would increase student enrollment, potential partners and donors, according to its initial Request for Proposal.

This work involved conducting market research, creating brand messages and forming a new communication strategy that maintains a consistent university identity, per the RFP. After conducting technical evaluations and proposal demonstrations in July, SUNY-ESF selected Thorburn Group to complete the branding project in 12 weeks.

“A branding foundation is so much more than just a tagline or a logo,” Craig said. “It really is important that we look at it as a key idea of which we’re trying to articulate key messages — our shared narrative. That’s what we’re trying to achieve here.”

Craig said she’s hoping to bring Thorburn Group to campus to give a comprehensive breakdown of its market research findings.

Efforts to address SUNY-ESF’s marketing needs are not new, Craig said. The efforts started when former President Quentin Wheeler submitted a funding request to the State University of New York. In 2017, SUNY-ESF was awarded $190,000 through the Performance Improvement Fund to support online programs that would increase its enrollment.

Other business

• The Committee on Instructional Quality and Academic Standards announced that the university is moving forward with using IASystem, a course evaluation software, to conduct both paper and electronic end-of-course evaluations. Kelley Donaghy, associate chemistry professor and SUNY faculty senator, said this system will help the university gather course data with extra demographic information.

• The Committee on Curriculum presented four new courses which are part of SUNY-ESF’s new online B.S. in sustainability management program. The courses are: Sustainable Systems Thinking: Ecology, Economics and Society; Human and Social Dimensions of Sustainability; Ecological Dimensions of Sustainability; and Introduction to Spatial Analysis and Geographic Information Systems. All courses were approved by the committee on Oct. 4 and voted on and approved by AG on Tuesday.