Campus Ecologist

Volume IV, Number 4, 1986

STUDENT-INSTITUTION FIT: LINKING CAMPUS ECOLOGY TO ENROLLMENT MANAGEMENT

Contributed by Terry E. Williams

The important task of managing student enrollments in higher education involves much more than marketing an institution and the recruitment of new students. Hossler 11984, 1985) and Kemerer and others (1982) agree that effective enrollment management requires a coordinated, campuswide focus not only on the recruitment effort but also on strategies to retain students. An important concept related to campus ecology, known as student-institution fit, both affects and is affected by an institution's recruitment and retention efforts. Admission officers for years have been concerned with fitting, or matching, entering student characteristics with institutional needs, believing a good match will result in satisfied graduates. However, enrollment managers today need to consider an interactionist-based process that will significantly increase the fit between students and institution (Williams, 1986b).

Clarifying Fit

A growing body of theory and research strongly suggests that the degree of congruency, or fit, between student characteristics and the ability of the institution to respond to those characteristics could lead to increased student satisfaction, academic achievement, and personal growth (Walsh 1978; Huebner 1980; Lenning, Sauer, and Beat 1980). Since these conditions are linked to student retention, these findings motivate enrollment managers to examine the nature of fit between student and institution.

In understanding student-institution fit, one should consider three sets of variables: characteristics of students, characteristics of the institutional environment, and the effects or outcomes resulting from the interaction of the student with the environment. Student characteristics include such personal attributes as goals, abilities, needs, interests, values, and expectations. Institutional characteristics include a wide array of physical, academic, social, and psychological variables that together comprise the campus environment. Finally, interactions between students and campus affect students' physical behavior, their cognitive filtering of what they are experiencing, and in the affective domain, their perceptions and attitudes toward the campus environment. These interaction effects constitute an important student-institution relationship that affects student satisfaction, academic achievement, and persistence in the institution. When student goals, needs, interests, values, and expectations are adequately met within the campus environment, then from the student's perspective, a certain degree of fit or congruency exists. Likewise, when the student's academic and social abilities mesh well with campus expectations, fit between student and institution is also believed to exist.

Student-institution fit is directly related to the concept of person-environment interaction which suggests that both the individual and the environment shape each other. This perspective emphasizes not just how to assist students adapt to their campus environment but how to adapt the environment to students. Several reviews of theory-based models of person-environment interaction hold particular value for enrollment managers (see Walsh 1973, 1975,1978; Huebner 1979, 1980; and Williams 1984).

A Model for Optimizing Student Institution Fit

To systematically increase the fit between student and campus, I propose a five-step process model. The model serves as an important starting point for any enrollment management team in that five sets of tasks are proposed that facilitate both the assessment of current levels of fit between student and campus and the design of strategies for optimizing fit. The five steps include: assess student characteristics, assess environmental characteristics, identify fit between student and institution, evaluate degree of fit, and design environmental interventions (see Williams 1986a).

I.) Assess the Student. This step requires the institution to systematically collect a wide variety of demographic and perceptual data on students at the time of matriculation. Several types of demographic data can be compiled by accessing campus records. Perceptual data about student attitudes, values, and expectations should be collected either with assessment tools designed by the institution or with nationally normed standardized instruments. Traditionally, objective data have been routinely collected on new students, but little seems to be done to assess student attitudes, values, and expectations at the time of entry. Enrollment managers should know what goals and expectations students bring with them to the campus in order to ascertain whether these goals and expectations are realistic ones that can reasonably be met within the campus environment. A major source of new student dissatisfaction often arises as a result of unfullfilled expectations.

This first step also involves determining campus factors that have significantly influenced the perceptions of entering students, especially focusing on environmental referants for goals that may be unrealistic. Institutional findings may result in immediate action to reduce the number of misconceptions being communicated to prospective and current students.

2.) Assess the Environment. Enrollment managers must also clearly understand the campus environment before they can assess its impact on students. Researchers have proposed varying ways of conceptualizing campus environments (see Astin 1968; Banning and McKinley 1980; Blocher 1974, 1978; and Moos 1974). Even though each approach is unique, each focuses on four broad environmental domains: academic-intellectual, physical, psychological, and socialcultural.

3.) Identify Fit. Identifying fit between student and campus includes recording where apparent matches and mismatches occur. It is typically easier to identify mismatches between student and campus because they often become apparent when students reveal academic, social, and other personal adjustment problems. A reporting system which channels information from all parts of the campus regarding the nature and frequency of student problems to one central location should be established. This step also includes the ongoing collection of student perceptions about their campus environment. A special focus should be directed toward determining the environmental referants that students indicate most influence their views. It is also important to identify what students seem to enjoy most about the campus and those environmental factors that appear to match well with student needs, goals, interests, and expectations.

4.) Evaluate Degree of Fit. This step involves evaluation and analysis of all data collected. The objective is to inform decision-makers considering whether to proceed with an intervention that would reduce mismatches between student and campus. an important assumption here is that not all mismatches can or should be corrected through interventions. Recorded matches and mismatches could be placed on a continuum that indicates type and intensity of impact of effect on the student or institution. This continuum could range from very negative to very positive impact. The enrollment management team should consider several factors that affect the direction and intensity of the impact. These factors could include: a) number of students affected; b) levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction arising from the match or mismatch; c) the correlation between a match or mismatch and student persistence or attrition; and d) the degree the match or mismatch supports or impedes the institution in fulfilling its educational goals.

5.) Design Interventions. In this step an enrollment team considers not only interventions focusing on assisting students to adjust to the campus environment but also interventions focusing on adapting or changing the environment to meet the needs, interests, goals, and expectations of students. Several interactionist based models are available that focus on environmental intervention. These are valuable to enrollment managers as they design interventions (see Huebner and Corrazzini 1976; Kaiser 1978, Miller and Prince 1976; Morrill and others 1980).

Conclusion

Substantial evidence supports the notion that a good match, or fit, between student characteristics and the institution's ability to respond to those characteristics leads to greater student satisfaction and academic achievement. Enrollment management thus demands that campus planners understand not only student characteristics and campus characteristics but also the behavioral, cognitive, and affective outcomes resulting from the interaction of students with their campus environment.

Editors Note: Terry E. Williams is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in Higher Education at Loyola Unil~~ersitv of Chicago. References for the article can be found on the back page Resource References: Campus Ecology and Enrollment Management.

QUOTES ON ECOLOGY

"Asking whether behavioral variance is due to either situations or persons, or how much variation is contributed by persons and how much by situations (an additive approach) is analogous to asking whether air or blood is more essential to life or asking to define the area of a rectangle in terms of length or width... The appropriate and logical question is 'How do individual differences and situations interact in evolving behavior?' ".

Endler, N.S. (1975). The case for person-situation interactions. Canadian Psychological Review, 16, 12-21.

Quote found in: Evans, G.W. (1982). Environmental Stre.ss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Page 243.

"... the typical ecosystem approach involves several routine steps: (I) some effort at gaining institutional or area support for the project; (2) the establishment of a working group ('planning group' or 'team') composed of representatives of the major constituencies in the setting; (3) the design of the project, including instrument construction (most of these assessments design their own survey instruments for use in the project); 14) data collection, typically done using a sampling technique; (5) data analysis; (6) interventions based on data, often including the dissemination of analyzed data to the original respondents or to subunits responsible for the various area assessed; (7) a reassessment of the environment after interventions have been made and some period of time has elapsed since the original assessment. (page 12).

Huebner, L. (Ed.). (1979). Redesigning Campus Environments. New Directions for Student Services, No. 8. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

THE CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT

Jackson (1986), reports that except for the bedroom, there is no other single enclosure in which elementary school children spend more time than in their classroom. While this relationship no longer holds true for the college student, the physical impact of college classrooms remains important.

An ecological (person-environment fit) framework for the study of the classroom is presented by Ahrentzen, Jue, Skorpanich, and Evans (1982). These authors focus on the elementary classroom, but their taxonomy for the study of stress in elementary school settings has value for the collegiate experience as well. The following taxonomy is presented by the foregoing authors (1982, page 246):

Personal Attributes: Past classroom settings experience