Stone Soup and Strategic Enrolment Management
Learn More at Upcoming Sessions
—From the desk of Brier Albano, Associate Vice-President, Student Success
I remember exactly where I was sitting in my Grade 1 class when I first heard the story of stone soup. I also remember the story perfectly. It tells how a traveller arrived at a village with no money for food. The villagers felt unable to share because they had so little, so the traveller announced they could make soup from stones. The traveller started to show the village how to make the soup. Slowly, each villager, although they had very little, contributed different things to the pot until they created a meal the whole village could share, eat and enjoy. The next day, each kid brought in something, and we made stone soup together as a class.
The story has a number of interesting elements to it. The first is the instinct to keep what we have to ourselves when we feel we don’t have enough—we save our time, our resources and our opportunities. Next, it tells us that when we all bring something different to the table, we can create something amazing to share. Finally, it tells us that a great story can bring people together.
You may not have heard much about strategic enrolment management (SEM) before—or you may have heard a lot about it in the same old stale way. At the end of the day, SEM is enrolment stone soup—and it can feed us all!
SEM, at its core, is a way of rallying behind an enrolment goal to help everyone in the college community see their role in creating an amazing experience at Selkirk College. It tells us how each piece fits together to create the Selkirk College story: a story that a student, community member or employee takes out into the world and inspires someone else to be a part of it too.
When we think about SEM, we think about everything.
We Think About the Experience in the Classroom...
Instructors are at the core of everything we do. They recruit new students as they create an environment where their current students are engaged and excited to meet the learning outcomes of their courses. When a student is engaged in learning, it bubbles over into the stories they tell and how they respond when someone says, “Selkirk College.” No one recruits you better than someone you know! A great example of this is our Forest Technology Program. Graduates are working in industry and telling more students to come. They hire Selkirk College students because they know the program’s quality firsthand.
We Think About the Experience in the Hallways...
A Grade 10 student looking for the bathroom remembers when they walk up to a desk and are greeted with a friendly smile and support. A community member looking to take the bus or use the gym remembers their experience when they ask where they can get a cup of coffee or if there is somewhere to grab a bus pass. I recently ran into an instructor leading a community member to the Mir Centre by walking them to the location closest to the entrance. That matters. It may not feel like SEM but it is SEM.
We Think About the Experience in the Community...
How are our students showcasing their talents so our community could not imagine the West Kootenay without them? When you say you work at Selkirk College, do people get excited and tell you a story about their great experience? What was the last story you told about the amazing research coming out of Selkirk Innovates, or how much fun it was attending the Career Fair & Open House? Did you visit the open house and tell employers how excited you were to see them there?
Last month, an instructor at Made for Trades took a picture of a student in one of the heavy machines at the student’s request. He sent the photos to the guidance counsellor so they could pass them on to the student’s parents. No one would have known, except one of those students was my kid! So cool. I should really send him to Selkirk College!
Learn More at Upcoming Sessions
In March and April, I will visit campuses in partnership with our Communications & Public Engagement area to talk about SEM and the Selkirk College brand. Maggie Keczan, director of communications & public engagement, and I partnered in our presentations because brand and SEM work together well but differ in their use and development.
We hope to see you at the sessions so we can connect more, and I am especially excited to share our SEM goals and strategies and get ideas for the tactics that may be the most important to consider for us to see Selkirk College at its best!
Let’s bring our best together, not just for SEM but for our students and colleagues. We’ve got the same magic as that traveller, and we can certainly make an amazing meal from what we have.