Through groundbreaking initiatives and strategies, OEM and our partners were able to bring in the most diverse and qualified class in the history of IU Bloomington. While our recruitment efforts are designed to reach all prospective students, our commitment to diversity informs our recruitment of underrepresented students. Our pioneering 6Cs diversity recruitment strategy builds on our collaborations with campus partners and schools, and these combined recruiting and marketing efforts have resulted in strong, sustained enrollment. This year, we enrolled 1,186 underrepresented beginners—a record number and a 38 percent increase over the last five years. Our 6Cs strategy won an Innovation Award at the 2015 Eduventures Summit—further recognition of our hands-on commitment to recruiting and enrolling underrepresented students.

Our status as a founding member of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success allows us to ensure that students, parents, high school counselors, and community-based organizations are aware of this free service that increases access and helps students find their perfect college match. We continue to collaborate closely with other founding partners to jointly host activities that increase awareness of the valuable resources available through the Coalition platform.

One such resource is the Coalition Locker, an online storage space that allows high school students to store and organize the classwork, personal writing, and other files they’ll need to showcase their talents when applying to college. We’re connecting students with this service and promoting it during college preparation sessions.

Our Apply Now digital marketing campaign, designed to reach in-state underrepresented students, expanded significantly during its first full year following a successful pilot in 2015. As a result of the campaign, 143 students signed up for more information about IU and increased their probability of applying to IU Bloomington.

In an effort to make it even easier to commit to IU, we used a digital advertising campaign on Google, Twitter, and Facebook which resulted in 601 paid deposits—a 280 percent increase over the pilot campaign in 2015. Students and parents find these ads to be a useful reminder and an easy method to pay their deposits.

In 2016, we piloted our Belong campaign, encouraging admitted students to use the hashtag #IUBound to let us know of their interest in attending. Admitted students and their parents (39,013 in all) received the campaign email and almost a third of those viewed the campaign website’s landing page. We also sent more than 20,300 postcards to admitted students.

Through our virtual reality (VR) campaign, we increased our outreach to all in-state students. For our pilot VR campaign, OEM sent cardboard viewers to 7,952 prospective students, resulting in 2,261 virtual visits to IU Bloomington with an average time of more than eight minutes per visit.

Prospective students took advantage of our ample visit opportunities, including Discover IU Day, Red Carpet Day, Hoosier for a Day, and the new IU Transfer Days. Admissions also piloted an Enhanced Visit Day program for special group visits, hosting 685 students from 10 schools and organizations. In addition to these official visit days, we hosted 3,553 students on group visits from high schools, community-based organizations, and faith-based organizations.

By providing more gift aid than ever before, we are doing the work to make IU Bloomington more affordable. For students receiving scholarship offers, we hosted 16 scholarship events (including receptions), in eight markets. We saw record attendance at most of these events. Our event in Dallas, Hoosiers Meet the Mavericks, included Mark Cuban and helped us to successfully recruit 22 new Hoosiers. Scholarships’ Mindset for Success campaign encourages 21st Century Scholars to enroll at IU. We also introduced a new event this year, 21st Century Scholars Day, which provided campus resources and programming for 123 admitted 21st Century Scholars and their families.

Our financial support to students was enhanced this year with the development of the Bicentennial County Scholarship and the redesign of the Pell Promise award. The Bicentennial County Scholarship provides a need-based scholarship of up to $2,500 annually to incoming beginners from 25 of Indiana’s counties—those from which we’ve enrolled the fewest students in the last 10 years. We enrolled 82 students who accepted $197,000 in scholarship funds.

The Pell Promise award is available to any in-state student who receives a federal Pell grant. It pays for tuition and mandatory fees beyond those covered by the federal Pell grant or any other gift aid. Our redesigned Pell Promise award eliminates the need for a student to meet an SAT/ACT requirement. This has tripled the number of students receiving the award, with a total of $1.3 million going to the beginner class.

In partnership with Student Life and Learning, we’ve introduced the Cox Civic Scholars Program, part of the largest IU scholarship program on the Bloomington campus. This program supports students’ community engagement efforts and training in leadership development and social justice. All 16 of the inaugural class of Cox Civic Scholars commit to creating positive social change.

Students earning the highest IU Academic Merit Scholarships received an IU-branded striped flag as part of our You’ve Earned Your Stripes campaign. This campaign was designed to encourage them not just to show off their stripes on social media, but also to enroll at IU. This fall, 922 of these students enrolled at IU Bloomington, compared to 859 in fall 2015.

This year, more beginner students are receiving gift aid from IU Bloomington than ever before:

• For the second year in a row, we have over 800 21st Century Scholars enrolled in the beginner class.
• Beginners included the largest group of Hudson and Holland scholars in the history of the program, with 450 students and 9 percent growth over 2015.
• We have a fourth year of more than 1,000 Hutton Honors College students.
• 2,681 beginners received Provost’s, Dean’s, Distinguished Scholar, or Global Engagement Awards.
• Total beginner IU Bloomington gift aid equaled $37.3 million, representing a record.
• 4,375 students, or 57 percent of the beginner cohort, received gift aid, also representing a record.

As part of our commitment to providing easy-to-understand financial information to students and parents, we’ve redesigned our financial aid notification. The new award letter provides information in a more user-friendly format. The letter is broken down by gift aid and self-help aid, and provides an estimate of remaining costs after all aid is applied. Additionally, we’re including financial aid basics and a guide to receiving aid, and we’ve created an interactive student cost estimate worksheet that allows students to easily see what they’ll pay to go to IU.

We’ve provided students with a new way to ease their financial burden as they begin a semester by allowing them $500 of early-access funds that can be used to buy textbooks, course materials, and other items. This $500 can be accessed via the student’s CampusAccess account and is then billed to the student’s bursar account, where it can be paid with financial aid, scholarships, grants, or any other accepted payment method.

We are constantly looking for new and significant ways to better the experience of incoming and returning students wherever possible. In partnership with Residential Programs and Services, we offered the new Roommate Finder, allowing admitted students to connect with potential roommates in a safe environment. More than 1,600 students found a roommate using this tool.

First Year Experience (FYE) has expanded New Student Orientation (NSO) program offerings to create a more complete experience for all new undergraduate students, both domestic and international. FYE provides expert leadership for orientation, working collaboratively with the Office of International Services to develop and implement the program. We emphasize affordability and engagement in financial literacy, participation in the arts, IU’s culture of care, multicultural understanding, and inclusivity. We’ve strengthened the educational programming at NSO and enhanced CultureFest and other Welcome Week programming.

To supplement these initiatives, we’ve implemented a program called Experience IU. It’s designed to help students explore new interests, meet new people, and prepare for a successful transition to their sophomore year. We’ve created a smartphone app by the same name, which keeps students updated about upcoming events. The app allows students to see a full schedule of events, build their own personalized schedules, and find venues using their phone’s GPS. We’re encouraging students to attend two programs in each of the five Experience IU categories, and providing incentives to those who attend more events.

We’re working hard not to overwhelm the students and include absolutely everything, but give them a snapshot of what’s available in each area.

Sarah Nagy, senior associate director, First Year Experience

During orientation, we created and staffed a temporary Student Central location in the Wells Library to better serve students and their families. By the end of orientation, we had answered questions from more than 3,500 people.

At Student Central, we’ve expanded our call center service by adding 11 hours of additional phone and email service per week. This benefits our families in western time zones and helps us serve students better during our busiest times. Additionally, as part of a broader campus-wide project spearheaded by the Office of the Provost, we’re launching a new Student Central website this fall to increase self-help options for students. The Student Central site has been redesigned, streamlined, and written in plain, accessible language. It communicates about college costs and makes students’ financial options clear. The new site includes a 24/7 “Ask Student Central” virtual advisor, which includes 515 answers to the questions students and parents ask most often.

We’ve sharpened our focus on the onboarding support offered for students starting their academic careers at IU Bloomington in several new ways this year. First, we’ve worked with campus partners to make improvements to the registration process that level the playing field for new students. As part of the pilot, nearly 3,000 first-year students were pre-registered for one or two courses germane to their major prior to NSO, which resulted in a smoother registration process for both students and advising staff. We also provided support for enrolling international students in classes selected as part of the IU2U program.

In a changing labor market with more emphasis on careers and outcomes, we’ve added students’ academic majors to their diplomas. Particularly for students who receive a degree, such as a Bachelor of Arts, that does not name their discipline, including a major provides an additional level of specificity to the diploma. And we’re adding a customizable transcript cover sheet that allows students to choose what portions of their college career they want to highlight for potential employers. Students will be able to emphasize elements of their career by selecting key aspects of their academic history to highlight and share.

Our work is not done. As always, we will continue during the 2016–17 academic year to make great strides in recruiting, supporting, and serving IU Bloomington students.

For more information on the Office of Enrollment Management and regular updates on our work, please visit our website.