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UND ASKS CITY FOR $1 MILLION

GRANT WOULD BE USED TO BOOST UNIVERSITY ENROLLMENT

Liz Fedor, Herald Staff Writer

UND administrators plan to combat an enrollment decline by asking the city of Grand Forks for $1 million to fund recruitment and retention efforts.

Bob Boyd, vice president for student and outreach services, said  he'd like the City Council to give UND $200,000 a year over the next five years. These funds will be used to subsidize UND's marketing programs.

Boyd told City Council members that UND is preparing a $ 1 million funding request for a recruitment and retention initiative. However, he stressed that UND leaders are still  seeking $3.4 million from the council to pay for installing infrastructure on the University Village site.

Boyd and other UND staff members have developed a five-part campaign for attracting and keeping students on the Grand Forks campus. This five part campaign can be broken down as follows:

  1. New market development: This includes $100 leadership awards for transfer students and students from northwest Minnesota. The program  would be expanded to include students from Minnesota and those transferring to UND from other colleges.
  2. General marketing: Money would be used to pay for development of a CD ROM marketing promotion. A prospective student would be mailed a CD to learn more about UND. 
  3. Telemarketing: About $26,000 would be spent during the first year of the grant to hire a staff coordinator, who'd supervise the calling of prospective students. We actually would establish a student calling team, Boyd said. Personal contact over the telephone ends up being incredibly effective, Boyd said.
  4. Student retention: UND intends to offer first-year seminars for students who need extra help to succeed. Some of them find UND quite intimidating, so they need some support, Boyd said. He also talked about the need to intervene and provide special tools to aid at-risk students, who had average grades in high school.
  5. Enrollment Innovation Fund: Boyd said UND planners essentially want to set aside some a pot of money to implement programs that haven't been developed yet.

Reference: Grand Forks Herald, July 1, 1998