Hixson-Lied College enrollment grows through more strategic recruiting

calendar icon22 Oct 2024    

Lincoln, Neb.--According to the fall census taken Sept. 2, the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts grew by 3.1 percent to 838 undergraduate students, up from 813 last fall. Graduate students also increased 5.1 percent to 124 students, up from 118 last fall.

The growth was, in large part, due to an historic, first-time freshmen headcount of 180, which was a 19.2 percent increase from 151 last fall. This was the largest freshmen headcount for the Hixson-Lied College in its history, and no other college at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln increased their freshman headcount by a higher percentage this year.

Overall University of Nebraska–Lincoln enrollment was up 1.7 percent to 23,992 students. The Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts was one of six colleges that saw enrollment growth for undergraduates this year. The student census is taken annually on the sixth day of classes.

“The Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts has a lot of energy and momentum right now with the anticipation for the new music building opening soon, increasing interdisciplinarity among our units, and the start of the Global Art Academy. Students want to come and study the arts at Nebraska, and we are eager to welcome them,” said Dean Andy Belser. “I want to thank the faculty and staff in our college who work so hard to recruit and retain our students every day and made this growth possible.”

Director of Recruitment Chris Watson said the college has focused recently on better coordination of its recruiting efforts.

“We’ve been much more strategic in our recruiting and better coordinating that through my office and through the university’s systems,” he said. “Our faculty do really amazing things to meet and cultivate prospective students, such as doing workshops in high schools and at conferences, giving private lessons and performing in the schools, among other things. We have huge events like the Men’s Choir Festival that brings 300 high school students to campus. My job has been to see how we can better help coordinate all that with Admissions, and we continue to improve on that each year.”

Emily Griffin Overocker, the college’s senior director of student success, noted that Watson has elevated the college’s campus visit experience for prospective students.

“Chris is doing a really good job of having hands-on experiences for prospective students and really personalizing the tours,” she said. “Our tours are not just students and parents walking around with him and saying, ‘Here’s this building.’ It’s much more interactive and engaging. They are stepping in to classes and talking one-on-one with faculty. It’s very much like a small-school tour experience instead of an impersonal big-university tour. That’s made a huge difference.”

Recently, the college has bolstered its student success team, adding Griffin Overocker as the senior director of student success, overseeing both recruiting and advising, as well as supporting student success. This year, the college completed its move from faculty advising to professional advising with the hiring of three professional advisors—one each for each of the college’s three schools.

“That has helped us more seamlessly transition students from prospective students to admitted and enrolled students in ways that students feel connected and supported,” Griffin Overocker said. “Faculty have always been involved in our recruiting, but having this additional support at the college has been important to bolster those recruiting and admissions processes.”

Student retention efforts also support enrollment growth. And this year, the Hixson-Lied College had a record high first-to-second year retention rate. The number retained to the university was 90.5 percent (up from 85.1 percent last year). The number retained to the Hixson-Lied College was 79.1 percent (up from 73.6 percent).

Charlotte Kramer, a theatre and psychology major from Holyoke, Colorado, chose to study at Nebraska because she could get the majors she wanted at a school that felt like home.

“A lot of the colleges I was looking into made me feel like a double majoring would not be very possible. I was expected to either drop a major or spend another year in college,” she said. “But here, it felt not only possible, but exciting. Another big reason I came to Nebraska is because it felt like home. It felt like the transition from rural Colorado to Lincoln would be easier than most changes would be, and that has really proven to be true in ways I didn’t expect. There are so many more resources available to me here, especially when it comes to artistic opportunities, but UNL still has a lot of the small-town atmosphere I’m used to.”

Griffin Overocker said this year’s incoming class has been “phenomenal.”

“There’s a lot of talent in all of our areas,” she said. “And there’s a lot of enthusiasm from students to be a part of what’s going on in the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts. Our students are passionate, and there’s a lot of energy in the college right now.”

Among the college’s new freshmen are seven students in the first cohort of the college’s new Global Arts Academy. The first cohort includes three international students from India, Nepal and Vietnam, and four U.S. students from Colorado, Nevada and Nebraska.

The Global Arts Academy recruits world-class students through a curated four-year program that immerses a cohort of students in a transformative academic and co-curricular experiences.

“The Global Arts Academy, first and foremost, helps globalize our college so that we can have expansive perspectives embedded throughout our college so that we can be thinking globally and can prepare our students to be global artists,” Griffin Overocker said. “It’s also important for us to tap into untapped recruiting markets and expand our recruiting reach.”

In September, Belser, along with Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film Director Hank Stratton and faculty members Jen Landis, Tom Larson and Ann Marie Pollard traveled to India and Nepal to continue recruiting for the Global Arts Academy. In October, Belser and a delegation from the Glenn Korff School of Music, including Director Felix Olschofka, traveled to Vietnam to make additional connections.

Nyssa Fernandez, an emerging media arts major from Mumbai, India, is among the initial cohort for the Global Arts Academy.

“I’ve always been interested in learning about new cultures, and the Global Arts Academy felt like the right place to be,” she said. “Getting to interact with people from different places and having conversations about culture, life, food, traditions and drawing comparisons and similarities is a very fun experience. UNL offered a great program and opportunity for this very reason and also because Lincoln, Nebraska, especially is such a diverse city.”

Chayton Howell, a dance major from Las Vegas, Nevada, was also eager to join the first cohort for the Global Arts Academy.

“The purpose of being a part of a global academy is to learn from people from a different state or country as you, all from different cultures,” she said. “From growing up on the West Coast to traveling to Midwest Nebraska and observing cultural differences between the states, I have had a different experience of what I want to see in the world to find myself and who I am. The value that the Global Arts Academy program helps me with is that it allows me to explore my ability and knowledge beyond just the country, to explore dance in other places, and to learn from other communities, which gives me the right state of finding myself.”

Another area the college has focused on is improving the processes for awarding scholarships.

“We know that this year, 70 percent of our students are receiving a scholarship from the college or the schools,” Watson said. “And 100 percent of our students are receiving a scholarship, at some level, from the university or from the college or from the schools.”

The college also changed its scholarship strategy to award four-year scholarships instead of two-year scholarships across the college.

“We are leveraging our scholarship funds to be more strategic and to help as many students as possible,” Griffin Overocker said. “And that’s been huge. For example, at Red Letter Day, I tell students that if they are talking to other schools, they need to ask if their scholarships are renewable for four years because ours are. We are also working with the Office of Scholarships and Financial Aid to better understand our students’ need and more effectively leverage our scholarship funds to recognize artistic merit.”

Watson said prospective students appreciate hearing about the success of the college’s alumni and seeing the career paths available in the arts.

“We have a lot of amazing alumni who are doing exciting work in a wide variety of fields, and it really shows the value of our arts degree,” he said. “We have a lot of successful alumni that we can point at and say, ‘This could be you.’ But also, the skills like creative thinking, flexibility, adaptability, entrepreneurship that come with all of our degrees are transferrable and make our alumni strong in any field they choose to pursue.”

The Hixson-Lied College has put a focus on increasing interdisciplinarity among its areas and degrees, which is also what prospective students want—to study more than one area within the arts or outside of the arts.

“Chris has been hearing it a lot from students. They don’t use that word—interdisciplinarity—but the idea of how do I get a little of this and a little of that?” Griffin Overocker said. “And this past year, we’ve started talking about how it might be possible to help students build their own path, in a way. I think we are only going to see that increase in the coming years.”

Belser said the integration of interdisciplinarity throughout the college’s curriculum is a top priority.

“The importance of interdisciplinarity is a constant message that we hear from professionals across arts industries,” he said. “We believe it’s ethically imperative to prepare students to have careers in a world that will continue to change, and increasingly, this means preparing them to think, create and collaborate across disciplines.”

The Hixson-Lied College’s faculty and staff are already back on the recruiting trail for next year.

“It really is a phenomenal college with amazing opportunities and resources, just waiting for students to use it,” Watson said. “That’s the Nebraska difference.”