Dr. Steve McKellips has worked in enrollment management positions for nearly 30 years and has overseen admissions, financial aid, the registrar’s offices, and international admissions/immigration services since 2014. He holds a PhD in communication from the University of Memphis and a master’s in communication from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Forensic Enrollment Management (FEM) represents a new way to look at enrollment management decision-making at the university level. FEM concentrates on learning the revenue position for each student and applying a relative revenue impact to the most common institutional statistical outputs. The goal is to identify how much revenue an institution must produce to make ends meet, while understanding what strategies are available to decision-makers that can produce revenue-positive outcomes to challenges that an institution faces.
Once the financial data is available, FEM can be used to follow student persistence, retention, graduation rates, and even student indebtedness to establish patterns and which can be addressed creatively to produce meaningful change. Institutions have many different ways to evaluate financial efficiencies, but none are more important that the ability to pay its bills effectively, and FEM focuses its efforts on making sure the university knows where its revenue is throughout the student’s progress toward their degrees.