Six Ways to Increase Enrollments at an Extended Campus.

This is a "best practices" article focused on sharing six new academic scheduling strategies recently employed by the BYU Salt Lake Center to optimize course offerings and increase enrollments. These strategies are generalizable to other academic programs that help extend academic programs at a distance, including online courses. The Center is an extended campus in Salt Lake City, Utah situated 46 miles to the north of the main campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The distance between the flagship university and its Center pose unique challenges in relation to course and enrollment optimization. Some of these strategies are made possible with the help of new software tools recently licensed by the university to help mine "big course and enrollment data" (current and historical) of a large university with 30,000 students. Introduction This is a “best practices” article focused on sharing new academic scheduling strategies recently employed by the BYU Salt Lake Center—an extended campus associated with Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah—to better optimize course offerings, facility space, and undergraduate enrollments. Over the past five years the Center’s director (and one of the authors of this article), Scott L. Howell and colleagues, sought to attract and serve (or impact) more matriculated students from the main campus, and non-matriculated students admitted to the Center only. When he first joined the Center the primary strategy for scheduling courses from semester to semester was to replicate or “rollover” course offerings from the semester one year previous. For example, fall semester of the previous year was the schedule template for the fall semester in the next year, subject to a few tweaks. While this rollover of course offerings from year to year served the Center well for many years the senior administration recommended the Center seek ways to better utilize the facility, and also reverse a gradual decline in enrollments at the Center in the years following its relocation in 2007 to its current site. The authors will share six guiding questions, any of which, if considered at other institutions, will help optimize their academic schedule, increase enrollments, and better serve students. The six questions, or strategies, also referred to as predictive variables, are 1) how can we best use main campus enrollments to predict which courses to offer at the extended campus? 2) How can we best use the waitlist for courses offered on the main campus to inform course offerings at the extended campus? 3) How can we apply the Amazon principle of “customers who bought this item also bought...” to predict which courses to offer in tandem? 4) When is the best time to cancel a low-enrolling course? 5) What is the best day, and time of day, to offer courses? and 6) Which courses do the students really want to take, and when? Background and Context The BYU Salt Lake Center was established in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1959, as an extension of the main Brigham Young University campus located 40 miles south in Provo, Utah. The Center has occupied five different facilities within the city over the years and is presently situated in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City near the headquarters of its sponsoring institution, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The BYU Salt Lake Center occupies three floors of a five-story building which includes 1 auditorium (110 seats), 27 classrooms (35 to 70 seats), along with a small library, student service area, testing center, and some administrative offices. In all, the Center utilizes approximately 67,500 square feet. It also hosts the university's executive masters programs in business and public administration.