By Elizabeth Held
Bryn Mawr has recently taken steps to consolidate eight offices across the Undergraduate and Graduate schools into five offices. These five offices—the registrar, graduate and undergraduate admissions, career development, student employment and student financial services—will report to Jenny Rickard.
While Rickard formerly served as dean of admissions and financial aid, she is now the chief enrollment and communications officer, a position created as part of the reorganization. Chuck Rickard (no relation to Jenny) has been hired as the interim dean of admissions.
Previously, five different offices oversaw student services. The Chief Financial Officer was in charge of the Bursar’s office and, in turn, student loans. The Chief Administrative Officer supervised student employment. The Undergraduate Dean oversaw the Career Development Office. The Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid administered Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid, while the Provost managed the Registrar’s office, Admissions at both Graduate Schools and Career Services at the School of Social Work.
The new structure puts Jenny Rickard in charge of all of those offices.
“It’s combining talent for the benefit of better student services operations," said President Jane McAuliffe. "The goal of all this is, number one, to do a better job of student services across the board.”
The restructuring is very much in a beginning phase. Five working groups have been formed in order to determine what the final structure will look like. The five working groups are: admissions, student financial services, student employment, unified student experiences and survey response.
The admissions group is figuring out how to best utilize and share resources across the admissions offices of the undergraduate, graduate and post-bac programs.
The student financial services group “is charged with understanding the current business processes of the financial aid and controller’s offices as they relate to financing undergraduate, graduate and post‐bacc student educations and recommending changes to those processes,” according to the groups website.
The student employment group’s job is two fold. It’s attempting to simplify the administration of student employment, but also wants to make student employment a more meaningful experience by combining it with career development.
“Student employment and career development could be better tied together,” said Chief Financial Officer John Griffith.
He offered the example of having students interested in finance work in the comptroller’s office, and said the goal was to make student employment “not just a pay check,” but “a real asset to them in the future.”
The unified student experience working group is trying to improve student self-service capabilities, particularly with Virtual Bryn Mawr.
The final working group, the survey response group, is analyzing a student survey given last spring,
The original idea to restructure student services arose in 2007-2008, when the Board of Trustees Task Force on Balancing Mission and Resources required “the exploration of greater integration between graduate and undergraduate student services in the 2008-2009 academic year.”
Griffith described the Task Force on Balancing Mission and Resources as a “big picture look at the college” and the “ability to sustain out programs.”
As part of the exploration, a survey was given in the spring to five hundred randomly selected students, which asked about services ranging from the tri-co course guide to emergency loan services. Confidential interviews were held with 39 selected staff and faculty members, and 31 students from the three schools participated in focus groups. Additionally, the college hired a consulting group to study student services.
“We spent about a year working with a firm of professional consultants who interviewed lots of people on campus, looked at all the operations and helped us think about this before beginning the process now of starting this integration,” McAuliffe said.
The study found Bryn Mawr was dong a “satisfactory” job of student services.
“The conclusion [of the study] was we could do much better than what we were doing,” stated Griffith.
The consulting groups made a number of suggestions for organizational options.
A committee that included Griffith, Dean Karen Tidmarsh, then Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jenny Rickard and Provost Kim Cassidy chose one of their suggestions and then modified it for Bryn Mawr’s needs.
On their website, the group said they want to “ensure that students can get issues resolved promptly without having to work with multiple offices or websites to do so,” “create a comprehensive, user-friendly, service structure that will empower students to resolve their issues quickly and efficiently” and “continually improve systems for capturing, analyzing, and acting on information critical to our student recruitment, retention and career development efforts.”
By the start of next semester, the group plans to have created an implementation plan.
This article is © 2008 The Bi-College News. The material on this page is free for personal or educational use, but may not be reproduced, reprinted, republished, redistributed, or otherwise transmitted to a third party without the express written permission of The Bi-College News, 370 Lancaster Ave, Haverford, PA 19041.
Editor's note: Articles that appear in the Last Word section are works of satire.
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