Don MacMillan has acted as Registrar across a handful of institutions throughout the years, with the bulk of his career being spent at the University of Toronto - first as Registrar at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE) before undertaking a stint as Director of Student Services at the School of Graduate Studies, and finally as Registrar of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering from which he has just retired.
What’s the biggest issue facing registrars right now?
I think that registrars right now are struggling with the post-COVID students that they’re receiving and some reluctance on the part of staff to actually resume full-time face-to-face services.
Over the last couple of years, we all pivoted into an online environment and I think everybody agrees we did an outstandingly fine job in doing that. It amounted to really doing the impossible. For example, U of T has almost 100,000 students. The decision to move everything online was made on a Wednesday afternoon and by Monday morning, the vast majority of people were teaching classes over the internet.
And if you had asked me if that was remotely possible the previous Tuesday, I would have said never - because we are not an at-a-distance educational institution, and yet we pulled it off. I think we did an outstanding job at delivering services to students.
But I would also argue that the experience we delivered was still second-best. It wasn't as robust as the normal face-to-face services that we deliver in person. And what I'm finding now is that there's reluctance in some quarters to come back into the office full-time, while students are really craving human face-to-face interaction.
From the interpersonal staff point of view, I don't think it's as efficient or rewarding to catch up via Zoom call, but for students, it’s a serious issue. It’s been a couple of years where they’ve been cut off and I think they deserve to be seeing academic advisors and seeing frontline services, and it's taken longer than I thought to get there.
“We know that if we can support that first-year group, and get them through the difficult transition from first year, they're probably going to graduate.”
Can you tell me a bit more about what the fallout on the student side is?
Sure, first off - attendance is pretty poor.
For most of our classes, we maintained an online component in our courses because we knew that we were probably going to get heightened illness rates during the fall. So our faculty is teaching in front of students, but they're recording their lectures and making them available through the learning management platform so that students who are absent because of illness would be able to keep up. And because that's available and because they're first year, some students say, “Hey, why go to class when the lectures are online?”
So we're hearing about 40% empty seats in a room. And that's a lot. Especially during the formative first year, which is a very tough transition.
We need to start giving students a good reason to be on campus.
Things have to be open and available for them - office hours, on-site faculty, in-person advisors. Support and activities that are robust enough for them to want to be there. And it's a challenge.
And what do you think is the biggest opportunity that registrars have today, that not everybody is taking advantage of?
Well, it’s an opportunity/challenge. University budgets are now predicated on a pretty robust international tuition. And I think that we have to be careful with our international enrollment targets so that we don't overly rely on a single source of students.
We have just experienced COVID restrictions coming from parts of the world where many of our international students come from and then in the past cycle, Visa delays which were unpredictable. And in that case, targeting one country more than others, where a lot of us do receive a lot of international students.
Institutions need to diversify enrollments in order to minimize the risk of putting all of our eggs in very few baskets.
In my wildest dreams - and I've been around long enough to know that there have been various iterations on this - I’d love to see a ‘Team Canada’ approach led by the Canadian government to really professionally push for international student recruitment in key international markets, it's difficult for individual schools to have the kind of that oomph.
“by creating this first-year one stop shop, it really has improved retention, we're now up to 94% retention for year one into year two and that’s really good for an engineering program.”
What can registrars do to help make something like that happen?
Well, registrars work through the hierarchy of their universities where often there are people who deal with intergovernmental relations and stuff like that. I think that the advocacy for that team approach, registrars themselves don't have direct access to the lobbying and advocacy pathways - but what they can do is make sure that decision makers know that this would really help.
At the highest level, can you tell me about some reflections that you've had about the role of the registrar as it relates to student success?
When I started at Marianopolis College - it seems like an eon ago - registrars didn't talk a whole lot about student success and retention. In fact, I would say it was generally sort of accepted that there would be loss in, not just the first year, but there would be attrition across all years. And the sentiment was “Ah, you’ll just get more new students next year.”
And so that’s obviously evolved over a period of time. The reputational cost of losing students and the human cost of losing students means that retention is a very real priority. So that’s been the biggest change I’ve seen.
And what we’ve done here is we've split off the first-year cohort from the registrar's office and created the First Year Office: the one stop for all of our first-year students for complete support. If they have questions on anything - financial aid or housing stuff or their account, it’s just one door they have to walk through.
In the old days, they're used to be many, many doors that a student could walk into and learn that it was the wrong door and they had to go see this person down the hall and tell their story all over again. And so, by creating this first-year one stop shop, it really has improved retention, we're now up to 94% retention for year one into year two and that’s really good for an engineering program.
We know that if we can support that first-year group, and get them through the difficult transition from first year, they're probably going to graduate.
Last question, how do you think registrars need to adapt as the higher education landscape continues to shift?
Yeah - everything is changing and so there's a million facets, but I think the most impactful is that the registrar has to advocate to be at the decision-making table.
Registrars have a unique voice - they bring to academic policy decisions a perspective that isn't always well understood by academic administrators. There's a different perspective when you're dealing with it from an advising and counseling role.
It used to be that the registrars were kind of technocrats, bean counters. Over time, I think we've evolved into being much more student service providers and really caring and advocating for students. From the earliest contact points with students, we're involved in the recruitment and admissions phase, as well as advising and supporting them during their time with us all the way through to convocation.
All this to say there's a continuum of connections to students that we bring to the table. It’s more holistic. We're able to identify, through our conversations with our staff and the students, where the bottlenecks are, where there are deficiencies or issues that can impede student success and advocate for change.
And I know in some places, the registrar isn't part of the decision-making table and I think that's not a good thing. It’s important to get out and make sure that we talk about those student issues from our perspective because that advocacy leads to more resources for things that will make the student experience better. I think we are in a rather unique position to do that.