Graduate Admissions Disruption and Diplomacy: The Graduate Admissions—Graduate School Partnership in the Age of Digital Funnel Management Kurt W. Jefferson Paul Bolton
Spalding University Journal of Higher Education Management, 36(2), 132-138 (ISSN 2640-7515). © Copyright 2021 by the American Association of University Administrators. Permission to reprint for academic/scholarly purposes is unrestricted provided this statement appears on all duplicated copies. All other rights reserved.
The case study of Spalding University, a small private doctoral teaching institution in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, classified as a “Doctoral/Professional University” (D/PU) institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, helps us understand how an institution with 1850 students (which includes over 850 graduate students) transitioned from a primarily day, undergraduate-centered enrollment model to a more “blended” model of admissions and enrollment management due to the intentional transformation of the graduate education and graduate admissions areas from 2018-20. The evolving model moved funnel management more deeply into a more centralized system in digital space away from the previous decentralized paper/hard copy graduate funnel administrative approach. This article will discuss this transformation and suggest that although the immediate graduate student yield was not large, the creation of intentional blended admissions processes began to assist in moving graduate and online education (and its admissions process) in the right direction with increased enrollments, a new digital and data-driven culture, and greater acceptance of the new graduate admissions system (ipso facto) among staff, faculty, and students on campus. Background Spalding University, a historical Roman Catholic university founded in 1814 as an all-girls grammar school by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in rural north-central Kentucky and later having opened a senior college campus for women in Louisville, Kentucky in 1920, has 27 academic programs (17 of those are graduate degree programs). Spalding sits in the historical heart of urban Louisville about a mile from the Ohio River (to its north) and about three miles from Churchill Downs (the world-famous racetrack and home of the “Kentucky Derby” on the south edge of the urban core of Louisville). Louisville is the fifteenth fastest growing and the twenty-ninth largest metro area (1.2m people) in the United States. Spalding, which started graduate programs in 1983, is the most diverse private institution in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Twenty-two percent of both its undergraduate and graduate students are minority students. In December 2017, the institution hired a Dean of Graduate Education, Kurt W. Jefferson, to begin to administer graduate education from a more holistic perspective and to give graduate programs more of a voice in the various areas of the university. This was part of a strategy carried out by the President (Tori Murden McClure) to “flatten” the organization as deans of colleges were done away with and only two academic deans (in graduate and undergraduate education) were left alongside the Provost to oversee, at the senior administrative level, the academic area of the university. In doing so, the Office of Graduate Education (OGE), called “the Graduate School” at most institutions, was created in order to make intentional linkages with graduate academic programs in various schools of the university (still run 132
