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Increasing and retaining enrollment is an obvious goal of academic institutions. While enrollment numbers must be sufficient to stay profitable in the academic environment, retention and graduation rates are necessary to stay competitive. Academia manages these rates by monitoring and analyzing the factors that impact retention and graduation. In the 21st century, the use of technology caused a shift in the education paradigm. It is imperative that academic institutions utilize effective change management techniques to manage resources to embrace the new paradigm and subsequently manage enrollment, retention, and graduation rates.
The purpose of this study is to propose change management techniques and tools to successfully adjust to the shift in the education paradigm and continue to manage enrollment, retention, and graduation rates. More specifically, this study addresses: a) the problem of first-year student persistence, and b) utilizes the fishbone diagram as a tool to analyze causal factors that impact first-year student persistence.
The paper is divided into several sections. The first section highlights the concept of change management and its relevance to this study, the fishbone diagram and its applications, and first-year student persistence and its impact on the retention and graduation rates in academic institutions. The second section discusses the application of the fishbone diagram in analyzing the change management approach. The last section provides the concluding remarks.
Theoretical Discussion
This section provides basic definitions and discussion of the concepts used in the paper. The theoretical concepts included are change management strategy, enrollment and retention/ graduation rates, and the fishbone diagram.
Change management
Change management is the process, tools, and techniques used to manage people and ensure change is achieved to meet a required business outcome. Change is needed in response to solving specific problems caused by internal or external stimuli (Creasey, 2012) that could result in a shift in the organization's goal. In order to achieve the new goal, modifications of processes, systems, organization structures, and/or job functions are necessary. The magnitude of modification determines the change necessary to meet the new goal. A successful transition depends on how the organization's leadership manages the change. Shared governance plays a key role in managing and implementing change, and the faculty and the administrators must have a clear understanding of the shared governance in their...