Northwest College is diving into a new strategic plan to try and improve enrollment and retention at a time when the college is dealing with a small downturn in enrollment this fall, coupled with a larger downturn in students living on campus. 

Retention is actually a strength of the college — it’s nearly a 70% rate — but Vice President of Student Services Tom Havron wants to make it even better — he wants to hit 75% — as a way to help boost enrollment. 

At September’s college board meeting, he said he worked on a similar plan while at a small southeast Kansas college also looking at ways to boost enrollment without paying an outside firm thousands to come up with an enrollment plan. 

“That wasn’t feasible for the institution I was working at, and so we said, ‘let’s do this homegrown. Let’s try to get together and talk about where our strengths and weaknesses are, what we can do moving forward,” Havron recalled. “In that work at that institution, the nine years I was there, that was probably the most fulfilling thing that I did there, because you get a bunch of people that are passionate about what the institution is and where we want to go.”

In the past year, he’s shepherded the same process through at Northwest College. 

That’s included gathering faculty, staff, administrators and students together to form a committee, which then broke off into subcommittees to address individual facets of the three main pillars: Champion student recruitment efforts, enhance student retention efforts, and improve access for all college stakeholders. 

“We had a great group of people who were able to be there often and talk about these things,” Havron said. “And it very quickly became obvious to me that this was going to be a great project, because we were pulling from people from all over campus to be able to talk about things that we’re really going to put some juice into our efforts and see what we need to do to be able to make this institution strong.”

Trustees were unanimous in praising the draft plan, from it being done in-house to avoid more cost in uncertain financial times, to its focus on not just solving the enrollment issues, but in connecting more with the community. Chair Denise Laursen said she’s heard from many business leaders over the years as to what the college can do to help them. 

“I was really excited to see, like [Trustee] Tara [Kuipers] said, how much of reaching out to the community is in this strategic plan,” Laursen said. “And I really appreciate that. And when I saw the enhanced community partnership … that was like the cherry on top.”

Trustee R.J. Kost’s recommendation for how to increase enrollment is also already being enacted in part. He suggested the college reach more of the students at the alternative high schools as a degree or certificate program would be beneficial and attainable — Havron said students from both Shoshone Learning Center in Powell and Heart Mountain Academy in Cody had actually recently met with college representatives. He said one of the principals noted how it opened more of their student’s eyes to college being an option. 

NWC President Lisa Watson is fully behind the plan, and said she’s seen from those involved how it’s ignited a passion for solving these issues and raising enrollment. 

“Our purpose for being here is to educate our students and to put them on a better path. And there’s just a lot of roads that can lead a student to stray, whether it’s their personal life or maybe it’s their finances, maybe it’s where they’re living … they’re not sure what they’re interested in,” she said. “And so really looking at what we’re doing, looking at the data that’s here already, and asking ourselves … if we’re close to 70% retention, though we’re not there, but we’re just looking at that high level number, and we’re not digging down, there might be a disconnect, you know, maybe programmatically we’re not even aware of, or something that we’ve done in a design that we think is helping the students, actually hurting them and making it harder for them.

“So those are the things where, who better to know how we operate than ourselves and to work on some of those improvements.”