Rakin “Rock” Hall, vice president for Enrollment Management and Student Success, met with the Ithaca College Student Governance Council at its March 3 meeting to discuss the college’s plans to increase future enrollment.

Senior Kathi Hodel, vice president of business and finance and head of SGC’s Appropriations Committee, also announced that at their Feb. 26 meeting, the committee allocated an additional $16,199 to student organization and club events for Spring 2025. Hodel said this brought the total allocations for the semester to $103,582, with $40,000 left to allocate. She said the committee will start to allocate money to student organizations for Fall 2025 beginning after spring break.

SGC also heard from Cliff-Simon Vital, interim director of the BIPOC Unity Center, who urged senators to get the word out about the center’s upcoming Building Better Brotherhoods retreat March 29. Vital said the one-day retreat will focus on demystifying the concept of masculinity and how intersecting identities impact its conception.

Hall’s discussion with SGC focused heavily on his new strategies to increase marketing and outreach to prospective students. Class of 2028 enrollment was about 200 students below the college’s target of 1,380-1,420, according to President La Jerne Cornish at the All-College Welcome held Aug. 27, 2024. Hall said applications for the 2025-26 academic year are up by 37%, but he said a more robust marketing strategy is needed to preserve enrollment and increase retention.

“Luckily, [the college] has a very strong brand and a great name that still attracts people from a 50-mile radius,” Hall said. “I believe, with a little intentionality and a little marketing, we could probably attract people [within] a 170-mile radius and get more transfers here, which will hopefully lead to more graduate students.”

Hall said part of the college’s new marketing model is a more deliberate communication strategy for prospective students and their parents. He said that despite applications opening in August, the college does not send reminders to prospective students to apply until December, after the early decision deadline Nov. 1 and the early action deadline Dec. 1 have passed. Beginning in Spring 2025, Hall said the college will start sending emails to prospective students in June and to parents in April.

“We’re going to have a parent engagement strategy that doesn’t exist right now,” Hall said. “I think if mom and dad saw a few more communications, chances are we can increase yield a little bit more.”

In addition to increasing outreach, Hall said the college plans to increase incentivization for early applications by offering prospective students more scholarship money when applying early action and early decision.

Sophomore Giulia Gennari, the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance senator, told Hall she is from Vermont and asked what plans the college has to connect with prospective students also living outside New York and its bordering states. Hall said his budget request for the 2025-26 academic year includes a request for funding to hire regional territory managers in states like Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine. He said these staff would engage in regional community events to market the college.

“Everything’s relational,” Hall said. “I think the relationships we build in certain regions helps students better understand who we are as people, not what we are as an institution.”

Junior transfer senator Login Abdulla said that when she transferred to Ithaca from her previous college, she spent much of her time filing petitions with the college to ensure her course credits transferred over. She asked Hall what he is doing to make this process easier for future transfer students. 

“Is there a resolution to make sure that [transfer] students have the opportunity to be students and not have to focus on, a lot of the time, maybe grades or worry that they’re not gonna graduate on time?” Abdulla said.

Hall said the solution he is working on is to strengthen the college’s articulation agreements with other colleges and universities. The college has agreements with seven colleges and one BOCES program, which define a clear pathway for credit transfers between institutions and programs. Hall said he is looking to create more agreements with schools in a 100- or 200-mile radius in coming years.

Junior senate chair Nikki Sutera asked Hall how President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash the Department of Education’s funding will impact current and future students who rely on federal student aid to attend college. 

Hall said that while he does not think the closing of the DOE is inevitable, the college is discussing the possibility of hiring one or two full-time grant writers. These individuals would connect individuals with necessary funding by writing and submitting grant applications.

Juno Brooks, Class of 2027 senator, asked Hall how the Supreme Court’s 2023 overruling of affirmative action will affect the college’s ability to ensure a diverse student population. The decision prohibits colleges and universities from considering race in admissions, which had helped combat racial inequalities in higher education for nearly 60 years.

Hall said that while the college has to respect the Supreme Court’s decision, he and the college are working to come out on the other side of what he described as a natural pushback against progress.

“I think the overriding win is the human spirit,” Hall said. “We’ve been here before, and we’ll just keep thinking our way through it.”