Admissions has received a lot of requests from faculty and staff across our campuses related to reporting. Although it has been customary to receive regular reports from admissions every two weeks for the upcoming fall semester starting in November, please be patient this year as we work our way through several reporting challenges. For example:
- Vermont State University is using a single instance of SLATE (Admissions CRM). Thus, we do not have an efficient way to benchmark against historical data because we now have an unduplicated count of total of applications. In the past, one student could have been counted as three applicants if they applied to Castleton, NVU, and Vermont Tech. This year each student will be counted as one applicant.
- Our intention is to share a regularly run admissions report with department chairs, program coordinators and other campus division leaders on a regular basis beginning later in December or early January. If possible, we will do it sooner.
- Due to the incredibly heavy lift of all the transformation work and bringing the operations of three admissions offices into one and three financial aid offices into one in a very short timeframe, sending out admissions decisions and financial aid offers to new students has been delayed. We are not yet admitting new students but hope to provide an update shortly after Thanksgiving as to when the first students will receive their acceptance letters.
Also, we would like to remind everyone of the new structure of admissions and marketing. We no longer have campus-based recruitment teams. We have program-focused recruitment teams. This means, for example, that admissions staff based at Randolph may assists nursing students who intend to enroll at Castleton, while staff at Castleton may work with students seeking to enroll at Lyndon, etc. Once academic programs have completed the approval process, admissions staff will be able to be thoroughly trained on their assigned programs. We are marketing Vermont State University and its programs, not individual campuses.
Finally, a friendly reminder to all that we are going through this transformation together. This is not a “business as usual” kind of year for admissions, marketing, and financial aid. There are so many dependencies on other campus departments for us to be able to perform our jobs well and with the highest level of integrity. We know that you are all working incredibly hard too to help get us there and we appreciate all that you are doing. Therefore, please be patient with us and understand that we are doing the very best we can to successfully recruit the inaugural class of Vermont State University.
