Blaming more than a decade of sagging enrollment on administrative complacency, Central Michigan University is aggressively ratcheting up marketing efforts to woo more students for the fall.
In an email to faculty and staff last week that comes after CMU announced plans to temporarily close three dormitories in mid-March, Jennifer DeHaemers, CMU’s vice president of student recruitment and retention, gave a blunt assessment of the school’s 43-percent decline since 2012 — while outlining strategies to change course.
“When enrollments reached a peak around 2010, a general sense of complacency overtook some areas of the university, creating a sense of satisfaction with outdated technology and leading to a failure to employ new and updated best practices of recruiting,” DeHaemers wrote in the email, obtained by Bridge Michigan.
