By Lexi Chitwood
Edgewood College has hired a new Vice President for Enrollment Management, Amber Schultz, Ed.D., who has been in the position for just over a month. She assumes the role previously held by Christine Benedict.
Dr. Schultz came to Edgewood with an outside perspective and a fresh eye on its enrollment issues. “We’re not investing the same way that other schools do in recruitment and marketing tactics,” she said. “Our competitors start buying student names and start marketing to them a lot earlier than we do. There are people in Wisconsin who have never heard of Edgewood College.”
Dr. Schultz said that Edgewood’s metric basis for tracking enrollment goals has vastly improved and there is more data on conversion of campus visits to submitted applications than there has been in the past.
About tackling low enrollment, she said, “The faculty and staff really want to positively contribute. We need to make it a campus wide initiative.”
Dr. Schultz said low enrollment is “definitely a trend nationally, since 2008.” She attributed some of the loss to an age gap in demographics. “There are less people graduating high school because less people were having kids,” she said.
But Dr. Schultz acknowledged that not every institution is suffering from low enrollment. “There are some schools, Research I universities, that will reach their enrollment goals no matter what—but some colleges of our size have closed.”
Dr. Schultz said Edgewood doesn’t need to worry about closing “anytime in the near future.”
“No school is immune to that, but one of the things that drew me to Edgewood was the healthy endowment,” she said, referencing the anonymous $7 million donation the college was given the summer of 2018.
Edgewood is Dr. Schultz’s first venture into the private sector. She most recently worked as the Assistant Vice President for Admissions, Marketing and Recruitment at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota for five years.
SCSU has a student body of over 14,000, a far cry from Edgewood’s total enrollment of about 2,200. However, the small student body was part of the reason Dr. Schultz was attracted to the college. “I love to interact with students and a smaller campus allows for more of that,” she said.
One of Dr. Schultz’s areas of interest is providing access to higher education to low income and underrepresented communities.
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