Crimson and Gold Connection; Dr. Howard Smith

Welcome to the Crimson and Gold Connection. My name is Dustin Treiber and today our guest is He's doing double duty right now. It's Dr. Howard W. Smith the Dean of PSU College of Education And he has now been appointed the interim associate vice president for enrollment management and student success Dr. Smith welcome today You're doing like I said we're doing double duty right now. It's as we're recording It's it's the end of July and you're doing basically coming out of one position going into another. How's that working for you? Well, it's actually keeping me very busy right now as you might anticipate there's a you know a lot a lot of folks in both areas So it's given me an opportunity to to serve in a lot of different capacities and you've served several capacities throughout the years Starting off basically through elementary different positions through middle school high school all the way to college You've been here at Pittsburgh State University for several years and several different positions and you've had an illustrious career actually Well, I've had an opportunity education has been my life and Of course, I started out wanting to be a teacher and it served as a teacher and a lot of different roles and an administrator

Spent some time in K-12 public education and then came to higher education because that was an ultimate goal And I've been fortunate to be here at Pitt and get to serve in Really and a lot of really really neat types of positions and I'm going to enjoy this new one as well I college of education is a great place great staff I have this opportunity to move across the street here for a little while and help with enrollment. So that's going to be nice Now this is a one-year Position, I guess and then you'll go back is that correct? Well, that that's what that's what we've talked about at this point and As that's the interim is that's so that's why it's the interim position And we'll see what happens from there yet, you know, I never say never to anything anymore I used to but you never know what will happen. That always makes life interesting. Well, tell me You're kind of learning a new position. What are some of your plans for the future? Honestly right now really the the biggest goal that we have for Let I'm coming into it with and that is to increase enrollment

There's there's really more to enrollment management and student success than just admission and enrollment But to do that is you have to serve and we have a lot of services in that particular division financial aids there The student success programs that we have to help students academically and also to Get familiar with campus and learn how to live in campus International programs honors college The registrar. So we are a division that serves We make a difference with students and right now what we're going to do is make a difference and get and grow enrollment Well, Dr. Smith tell us more about the enrollment process and about your plans for the enrollment process for the future Well, in the enrollment process itself is really a lot more complex than many people think it it involves lots of lots of different groups Now we look at our data in many different ways that brought the probably the broadest approaches to say how many undergraduate students are my graduate students Dehan, but it's bigger than that it's yeah, we look at the different kinds of Students that come to us whether they come to us from in-state whether they come to us what we might call regionally

Through our grill advantage or our gorilla edge programs. We look at our international student Enrollments and populations because this particular mix makes pit state what it is it makes it the environment that it is it creates the culture So when when we look at those numbers If any one of those numbers happens to be not as good as it was the year before then we want to get that number back up So when people talk to you about enrollment pit states been very fortunate. We've had an enrollment growth trend Not to say that there weren't dips in that You know, there were years probably we were a little less in an area or a couple areas in another year this year is not any different But the real goal for us is to to get all those areas up every year if we can and so we're really analyzing the data And we're probably going to look at Drilling deeper you might say in the data world To see what kinds of things we can do to keep students here that once they enroll as well as attract new students because If they've enrolled here they they've had goals and we want to make sure they meet those and if for some reason they don't stay

We want to know why Are there is there a certain area that you're trying to push more than the other? I mean we have a lot of local area students that come around and obviously we have a lot of Students that come from from other countries Are these are one of these groups that you're looking at maybe trying to push more towards enrolling Not not really I wouldn't say we're trying to push one area more But we certainly want them all to grow and in one of the things that pit state over the years We've prided ourselves in in serving our region and in our community There has been a change though when you start looking at high school graduation rates in some of the areas there's been some population decline and high school Decline and in graduates and in southeast Kansas in particular which was traditionally a high enrollment area It's still an excellent and great students coming out of those areas coming to pit But we have to look outside of that area too and in recent years We've been some of the metropolitan areas in Kansas City have been producing more Freshman coming to us

Then we've had another areas The markets are a lot more competitive. All you do is watch TV or watch YouTube or watch something There's or click on Facebook and there'll be an institution come come up on there So, you know, we've got to be out in front of people too and we want them to continue to to know the value of pit state It's such a great place to go to school. Yeah, well talking about the internet We offer online courses as well. How how has that changed the demographics over the years? The online courses actually have replaced some of the outreach courses One of the positions I had at pit state was actually director of the Kansas City Metro Center for a while And in and it's a perfect example of what online has done There was a time when students would go to an outreach center and take classes Well, then as we brought online classes on or hybrid classes, which is kind of a combination of online and face-to-face we began to See our students enroll in those rather than want to sit in let's say the traditional classroom. So They it has impacted us in some cases in some cases. It's just substituted one delivery method for another But at the same time there are some programs particularly in education

That online has taken hold and if you're not if you do not have online programs and you're probably not going to be in the market Yeah, you know, one of the things that I think that that at pit state, you know, we're talking about students here This is a tremendous living environment. You have a community that that just Is outstanding and it's support of the institution you start looking at the the city and the university Cooperation you start looking at the community groups and the and the university cooperation You know for students to come to school to a place with a community that supports its institution There's no there's no one better You know, we we talk about a lot of the experiences that students have at pit But the reality is that that experience is a combination of everybody in this area working together to make that a great living environment As well as an academic environment and you're going to have those two pieces together Without them, you're not you're not really a high quality institution We're fortunate because we have those pieces here at pit plus we have so many opportunities for students It's the whole picture and so you know, it's it's a great value as I said and indicated earlier

We're known not only locally, but also nationwide and worldwide So we've done some great things here and Dr. Smith I know you're going to do an awesome job at bringing some more of those those future students to Pittsburgh State University I wish you good luck in the future in the position and we hope you come back and talk to us later on you bad anytime Thanks for having Dustin. Thank you