With increases in applications and admissions this semester, UMass Boston officials are forecasting strong student enrollment in fall 2004.Undergraduate applications are up nearly 13 percent from this time last year and acceptances are up 23 percent, according to a recent enrollment management admissions report. Officials, heartened by the turnaround after a recent enrollment decline of five percent, estimate the arrival of 1,100 new students, based on last year’s yield rates.Applications and acceptances to the College of Nursing and College of Management show substantial surges. The week of May 3, the College of Management saw a 26 percent increase from this week last year, and Nursing had a 20 percent jump.Nursing is a field that has “so much interest,” says Dr. Lisa Johnson, associate vice chancellor of enrollment. “There’s a huge need for nurses. Students are very savvy to know where the jobs are.”The College of Public and Community Service (CPCS) took a tumble of nearly 28 percent, which is attributed to the closing of their criminal justice major. “The university didn’t lose them, but the college lost them,” Johnson says. “Enrollments were shifted from CPCS to other places at the university because…we were no longer able to place students into that major.”As many students are looking to break for summer, the Admissions Office is left with the job of recruiting more students.”The biggest job now, and this is a message we have to get out to the community, that good students apply to multiple places, and they’re accepted to multiple places,” says Johnson. “Once you get to the point where you’ve accepted a student, your next job is to try to yield them, and that means the work is not over. We have to show them that UMass Boston is the best choice, and all of our competitors are showing them the same thing.”Main competitors, depending on whether prospective students are looking at public higher education or something within the city, include: Boston University, Bridgewater State College, Northeastern University, and UMass Amherst. “Everything you do from the time a student is accepted is either reinforcing to them, ‘You made a great choice,’ or having them sit back to question, ‘Did I make the right choice?'” Johnson explains.Johnson told of how she and Vice Chancellor of Enrollment Kathleen Teehan recently went over to the Boston National College Fair, held at the Bayside Expo Center down the street from the university. Teehan and Johnson came with a digital camera to take pictures of the best tables for some reconnaissance.”We got there, we walked the entire Bayside Expo, looked at every single table there, and guess what? UMass Boston already had the best table. So we didn’t even take a picture,” she said. “We left there saying, ‘Wow.’ We were going there to see what models we could look at and what models we could implement, and we already had the best.”Admissions is also training new counselors before they go in September to raise the university’s profile in high schools. “They’re going to learn the campus inside and out, they’re going to be visiting with every college, seeing where they’re located, hearing from the faculty in the colleges about their colleges, learning from the professionals in those areas how to talk about those colleges to prospective students,” Johnson says.Along with that, Admissions is reaching past the traditional gatekeepers of college applications, harried high school counselors, and going straight to the teachers.A letter is being sent out to all Advanced Placement teachers in Massachusetts, telling them what a “hidden jewel” the campus is with its honors program, faculty involvement, scholarship money, and the “tremendous success the campus has had with students just excelling to all kinds of great lengths,” according to Johnson.The teachers will be invited back in September for a breakfast and a “professional development event” through the Graduate College of Education, “so that they would not only get to see this beautiful campus, but be able to also get some professional development points for coming,” she says.On May 27, the university will be hosting a high school for “Leadership Day,” a pilot program of leadership workshops. “The idea behind this is that if we can get student leaders to come here and see what we have, we think we can recruit more of them,” she said.At the workshops, student leaders, from student body presidents to captains of the football team, will work with faculty and staff, including Associate Vice Chancellor Kenneth Lemanski, Chancellor Jo Ann Gora’s chief of staff and a former state representative, Director of Athletics Charlie Titus, and Professor David Matz, a director of dispute resolution. “They come for leadership, they win because they gain the skills from a tremendous program, and at the same time, we’re able for them to see what we have, and also to interact with faculty and staff who are presenters at the workshops,” Johnson says.Admissions officials hope to use the high school as a model. “We want to be able to take it to other high schools and say, ‘We can train your student leaders right at UMass Boston, let us host them,'” Johnson says. “Hopefully, we’ll get high schools right in this community to bring their student leaders here, some of whom have never seen the campus.”For transfer students, who can often be heard complaining in the classroom about credits not transferring, Admissions is working on a matriculation agreement with Bunker Hill Community College and its deans to outline a curriculum students should take, so when they transfer, they would know that their credits would be accepted.”Bunker Hill is just the first of many community colleges that we are going to keep working with to make the entire transfer experience more student-oriented, more student-friendly, and just to build on the relationships with faculty and staff here and faculty and staff there,” she says.So far it has been a busy year for Admissions, the office having been through an “enormous transition,” and a move into the new Campus Center. Many see the move as an opportunity to become more efficient and organized.”There’s [a] lot of pieces of information that come together in the Admissions Office that have to be put together, and how fast you do that, how efficiently you do that, is how well you service students,” Johnson says.Lilliana Mickle, director of Admissions, agrees. “So we’re looking at our service from beginning to end. We really want everything to work for the students. We want it to be a seamless process, we want the process to work for the university staff and the university community.”