From the editorial board

Welcome to the first edition of Shoptalk Online: SEM Special Edition. This special edition of Shoptalk Online is devoted specifically to matters of Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM). Please share this with friends and colleagues who might be interested in our material. Also, feel free to share feedback with us.

This issue is devoted primarily to student retention, but with an eye to policy. Leading off this issue, and future issues, is an article based on current research. Today, we have Seven guiding questions for student retention, by Dr. Watson Scott Swail, president of the Educational Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Dr. Swail is a well-regarded researcher and policy analyst with whom we at TG have been pleased to partner on several occasions. We are especially pleased to have him to lead off our inaugural issue. Among his many contributions to SEM, Dr. Swail recently published a book, Retaining Minority Students in Higher Education, with Kenneth Redd and Laura Perna.

Next in this SEM Special Edition is a practical and enlightening piece by Dr. Brad Johnson, former director of enrollment management at Amarillo College. He has shared a model of practice that was helpful to the college. If resources are limited, and whose aren't, how can we serve our nontraditional students, who may never set foot on campus, as well as our traditional, on-campus population? Dr. Johnson has an answer that enabled a college to improve its services for both student groups, using the same mechanism.

Two review essays will round out the features for the issue. The first is a review of a recently published study on the important policy questions raised by the dwindling public support for colleges and universities. Correcting course: How we can restore the ideal of public higher education in a market-driven era was written by Lara Couturier and Jamie Scurry of The Futures Project, and reviewed by Maria Luna-Torres, TG director for educational finance initiatives. The second is a review essay of six journal articles on credit card use and abuse by college students. There has been a lot of publicity over the last few years about students getting into trouble with credit cards, and these studies provide important, insightful information on how help retain students in spite of rampant credit card marketing. The reviewer is Matt Short, TG's director of institutional enrollment services.

The issue is rounded out by our Events Calendar provided by the editors.

We hope you enjoy this inaugural issue of Shoptalk Online: SEM Special Edition, and we look forward to your feedback. Please forward comments and questions to communications@tgslc.org.

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