Two administrators at Cal Poly Pomona recalled the impact of COVID-19 on enrollment and retention at their institution in a recent Zoom call with Diverse. In spring 2021, they were reviewing the latest enrollment data and were taken aback. “All of a sudden, when we were looking at our projections, we were at 80 percent of our goal. It was [such] a drop that we had to double-check our numbers,” says Jessica Wagoner, senior associate vice president of enrollment management and services at Cal Poly Pomona. “We were looking at possibly one of the worst retention rates we had seen in a while," says Wagoner. "We were able to regain those students, but it was not easy.”
Jessica Wagoner
Santiago-Gonzalez, assistant vice president of strategic initiatives for student success, says an artificial intelligence texting robot, “Billy Chat,” came to the rescue. The school’s chat bot guide to help students through the re-enrollment process also helped administrators determine what problems students were encountering so that they could develop solutions. The student success team launched an interactive campaign led by Billy Chat, asking students to respond to a series of questions on why they were not registering.
“We found administrative things we could do better,” Santiago-Gonzalez recalls.
“A majority of the [unregistered] students said that they did not know what to take; a lot of them were fall 2020 cohort students that had never been to campus or never met with an advisor,” she continues, explaining that the constraints of COVID-19 — keeping students off-campus and preventing personal interaction with classmates and advisors — were at the core of re-enrollment issues in 2021.
“For example, we onboarded students virtually, so the students didn't have casual conversations they typically would have with other students, like in cafeteria; we found that hundreds of students thought they had registered but because they had never gone through our registration system, they forgot to hit the enrollment button — something simple like that.”
Wagoner also pointed out that “some [issues] were financial or mental health crises.” She told the student newspaper, The Poly Post, in November 2020, “We know that this pandemic is hitting first-generation, low-income students the hardest. We have a huge surge in financial aid requests.”
