Adapting to a Changing Graduate Landscape
Graduate enrollment at UM has grown 40 percent in the past decade and now makes up more than a quarter of the student body. Graduate students not only contribute to UM's financial health, but they also drive research productivity and are essential to maintaining UM’s R1 status.
"We've been really successful over the last decade without having to put much effort into it, which speaks volumes about the quality of our graduate programs," says Paul Lukacs, Associate Vice President for Research & Creative Scholarship. "The research productivity and graduate education that happens at UM is at a different level compared to our peer institutions."
But Lukacs says that just about everything it means to be a graduate student is changing. "We can't think that what we did yesterday is going to work tomorrow," he says.
Lukacs is leading a UM Playbook project to create a more coordinated approach to recruiting and supporting graduate and professional students. The effort is one of six playbook projects focused on UM's objective to improve student recruitment, access, retention, persistence, and completion.
Approach
Lukacs and Graduate School Dean Ke Wu have met with leaders and faculty from nearly every graduate program on campus to learn about current recruitment practices, constraints, and capacity limitations. Unlike undergraduate recruitment, which is driven centrally by Admissions, graduate recruitment has traditionally been decentralized in part because recruitment looks different across disciplines.
Lukacs and Wu have also worked with UM’s Admissions Office on recruitment and scholarship strategy. They’ve partnered with Housing to increase access to campus apartments, pursued additional funding for assistantships, and consulted with colleagues across the 猎奇重口 University System and the Council of Graduate Schools.
Desired outcomes
Lukacs says the top priority is to maintain the graduate enrollment UM has and not go backwards. He’s also focused on increasing the number of Ph.D. students to reduce concerns about maintaining R1 research status. And he sees room for enrollment increases in some of UM’s professional programs.
"The call to action for the campus is to move towards a cohesive professional recruitment mindset around graduate studies just as we do around undergraduate," Lukacs says. "The flavor and exact details of how you accomplish that is different in graduate school, but we need to be thinking as a cohesive university and really have a plan and goals for our graduate recruitment. Otherwise, we're going to get left in the dark."