Courtney McAnuff arrived at Rutgers in September 2006 as vice president for enrollment management, a post conceptualized by the Task Force on Undergraduate Education. His arrival marked the first time that admissions, financial aid, and the registrar’s office were unified under one umbrella. McAnuff came to New Jersey from Eastern Michigan University, where he rose from director of financial aid to vice president for enrollment services over a period of 26 years. McAnuff’s return to the East Coast is a return home – he was born and raised in New York City and has degrees from the City College of New York, Hofstra University, and Wayne State University. Among McAnuff’s top priorities are making Rutgers attractive to out-of-state and international students, recruiting top performing high schoolers, providing financial aid for low-income and middle-class students, and erecting a high-tech welcome center with ample parking available for prospective students and their parents. “It was a good time to come to Rutgers. I can take credit for all those football victories,” McAnuff jokes. “But it’s been a fun time to be here, certainly both caught up in the change of the academic experience and athletics. We have some unique challenges, but we can work through them."
FOCUS: Tell me a little about your career and history.
McANUFF: I am back home, almost. I’m a graduate of the City University of New York, Hofstra, and Wayne State University. I was director of financial aid at SUNY–Farmingdale. I became financial aid director at Farmingdale at 23 or 24, through a number of circumstances. I moved to Eastern Michigan in 1980, planned to stay in the Ann Arbor area for three years, and ended up staying 26. The school was a great place to be and the community a great place to live and raise a family. If you could get rid of January and February, it would be the nicest place in the country. With two universities and 86,000 students, it was never boring.
FOCUS: What’s
your impression of the students at Rutgers so
far?
McANUFF: If you are going to promote the university and talk about it, you really have to know it. I toured all 144 residence halls. The students are very bright. I went to a number of debates and discussions with the student leaders and was fascinated by how they conducted themselves in such a thoroughly focused way. They were adults and had cogent arguments.
The diversity of the student body is, I think, an amazing asset for this university. What a great place to go to school, to learn how to work with people so different than yourself. I hope students take advantage of it. Whether it is religious, ethnic, rural, suburban, straight, or gay, there is such a variety of people here that you must be prepared for the world of work when you leave this university.
FOCUS: You speak
a lot about the international diversity of Rutgers
as well.
McANUFF: That is very important for a great research university. Not only do we mirror our area, but we should mirror the world. This should be a university that has broad appeal not only nationally but internationally – and it does. Unfortunately, I think there are some negatives with state policy that preclude some of that growth. This is the only state that assesses a fine for out-of-state students. The university is billed $6,000 from appropriations for every out-of-state student. I am hoping that will be rescinded, that people realize what a treasure the state university is, and that a great university is not parochial but really encompasses the country and the world.
FOCUS: How has
the recruitment and admission process changed since undergraduate education was
transformed in New Brunswick?
McANUFF: The biggest change is the interest. So far for fall, there is a 73 percent increase in visits over the previous year, which is staggering and has stretched us beyond our limits. Summer visits were up 65 percent. Now that fall has come it puts a great strain on the staff. With the size of the campus, it is very difficult to do the tours.
There is an unprecedented level of interest in Rutgers right now. We project 45,000 undergraduate applications this year. Applications have been going up about seven percent a year. Right now they are running about 15 percent ahead of last year.
We just started a national campaign for the first time to increase enrollment in Douglass Residential College and to see what level of interest there is outside the state. We have been amazed at the reaction. We purchased names of women who took the SAT who said they were interested in the women’s educational experience. So we are calling all of them, and the reactions have been very, very strong.
FOCUS: There was
speculation that the creation of one arts and sciences college would decrease
standards or make it harder for some students to get into Rutgers.
McANUFF: We didn’t know what to expect last year – I certainly did not as we came in and determined what the scholarship program was. The staff and the School of Arts and Sciences faculty ran numerous projections, and what we see is certainly a better profile class than when you averaged the five schools together before that. And I think you will see the profile increasing every year because we’re becoming so much more selective.
The applications for the new SAS are up 11.5 percent. What that means is that you become more selective because there isn’t anymore space. That will add a lot to students' Rutgers degrees in the future.
Already for SAS, 20,254 students have applied versus 17,557 last year at the same date. There is a better sense of clarity now in the outside community about what happened. Literally everything we did had to change. The nice thing about it was that I had no particular ownership or ties. That allowed some of the changes to be easier. No one saw me having allegiances to any school.
Our big challenge is maintaining the diversity. Our diversity enrollment for new students remained exactly the same percentage as it was before. You can have a very diverse institution and grow quality. They are not mutually exclusive.
FOCUS: What’s one
of the most critical issues Rutgers is
tackling now?
McANUFF: We really want to examine graduation rates. We want to examine the entire student body as well as students of color. There is a difference in the graduation rates of students of color, and we aim to close that gap. The first thing to understand is where they are falling off. Do we have a first year issue, second year issue, a particular academic discipline issue? I suspect we have more of a male issue than a female issue. If you look at the national data, the graduation rate for black and Hispanic females is five times greater than for those males. We are national trendsetters, and we should come up with some national trendsetting solutions that deal with the issues.
FOCUS: What are
some of the major financial aid challenges facing students and the university?
McANUFF: Financial aid helps with student retention. It’s not necessarily the attraction of the students that keeps an institution’s profile raised; it is keeping the students graduating. Rutgers’ graduation rate is very good. We are probably in the top 10 percent. Our six-year graduation rate is about 72 percent. So it’s very good, but it’s not good enough. And based on the students we admit, they should all graduate. They have the academic credentials to do so. I know there are personal factors, social factors, and financial factors. Our students are now borrowing $250 million a year through the university – and growing. The private loan volume, I believe, has escalated almost 600 percent in five years, just for students at Rutgers. What we don’t know is what the families borrow through financing mortgages, refinancing debt. I suspect they borrow a whole lot more. As we start our new campaign, a significant focus is need-based scholarship and need-based student aid.
FOCUS: Are there
any admissions issues that are specific to Newark
and Camden?
McANUFF: We are going to have to approach Newark and Camden with a great deal of independent thinking. We are in the midst of meeting with folks from both campuses to look at the application of the scholarship processes, and probably separate some of those functions so that we can market them independently because they are all appealing to different audiences. Certainly Newark is in a very vibrant and growing community. They have a specific need to deal with not only traditional students but a large proportion of nontraditional and adult students. That is somewhat the case in Camden. We have a study going on in Camden now from a private company looking at changing the marketing direction of the campus.
FOCUS: I
understand a new high-tech welcome center is in the works. Can you talk a bit
about that?
McANUFF: We hope to announce the building of a new visitors’ center in a few months. It will be on Busch near the traffic circle. The Gateway building would have been the initial site, but it was vetoed because of the logistics. It would be impossible to park, and there is a lot of traffic in downtown New Brunswick. We want to give visitors and parents a real “wow” experience. We want to get them excited when they come in their first building. I think people will be pleased when we break ground. It will be unique in the United States. We are talking virtual campus maps where you can take a dorm tour by walking right on the table and actually opening the doors – all with virtual technology. When you see what they can do now, technically, it is pretty amazing.
FOCUS: How do you
integrate the university’s history and tradition into such a high-tech
building?
McANUFF: The history of Rutgers will be right around the whole inside of the building, and you will be able to touch portions of the building and have it explain how the university formed through the different time periods. There will be information about the faculty and the kind of research they do. It will be the academic version of the Hale Center. Instead of Ray Rice scoring a touchdown, we might show Wise Young in his lab. This is all providing we can raise enough funds to build it the right way.
Drs. McCormick and Furmanski have been extremely supportive during my first year at Rutgers.