Students late to register

by Sylvia Koss

The time for spring semester enrollment has passed; however, approximately 80 students have yet to sign up for classes. This number is lower than the one previously released by the Student Government Association, but not substantially.

“I think it was 100 a few weeks ago,” Simpson College Registrar Jody Ragan said. “We’re down, I believe, under 80 right now.”

Those 80 students have various reasons for not completing the registration process on time. Some have Business Office holds, others have yet to meet with their advisers and some are planning on transferring at the end of the fall semester.

“Students register late for a variety of reasons,” Ragan said. “Sometimes they have a financial hold that they have to take care of before they can register. They may be thinking about taking an internship, and until they find out how that’s going to work out, they don’t register for their other classes. They may be uncertain about returning. There’s always some students that leave at the end of the semester, and some of them know that earlier than others and don’t register.”

If students are looking to transfer from Simpson, they must complete the checkout process, which includes filling out the necessary paperwork and scheduling a meeting with Jim Thorius, vice president and dean for student development.

“The first step would be contacting me,” said Kristie Elbert, office manager for student development. “Then we go through and we fill out a withdraw form. Then I’ll wait until the end of the semester and schedule an exit interview with the Dean or with one of the Associate Deans.”

In addition, students must obtain signatures from different offices around campus in order to ensure all of their fees have been paid.

“There’s a withdraw appointment,” Thorius said. “There’s a couple of forms that they complete; and then there’s some places around campus, the Financial Aid office, the Business Office and the Registrar’s Office that they need to get signatures from to make sure that their accounts are in order.”

Students will also fill out a satisfaction survey to help the college make any necessary changes in order to better help students in the future.

Another reason students may have not registered for classes yet is because they simply missed the correct time due to account holds or because of procrastinating and forgetting the date all together.

“Every term, there are a group of students who don’t get everything done on time,” Thorius said. “If you put it into the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively small percentage; I mean it’s a single digit percentage, but we follow-up with them.”

Thorius, along with others from Student Development, created an email address ([email protected]) for staff and faculty to use as a way to bring up any concerns involving students and registration, retention or possible concerns for a student’s personal affairs.

“It’s an email address that if a faculty or staff member is working with a student that they have a concern about, whether or not it’s difficulty in a class or there’s some personal issues that the student is dealing with,” Thorius said. “That email goes to a select group of staff who are a part of what is called the TLC (Traditions of Learning and Caring) committee, and they do follow-up and outreach with students to try and provide assistance so they can be successful.”

This system is meant to help students through the difficulties they may encounter while in college.

“The premise that I think all of us operate from here is that students come to Simpson, one because they want to be here and two because they think they’re going to be successful and we think they can be successful,” Thorius said. “Sometimes there are bumps in the road that occur and students have some challenges that make it a little more difficult, so this is a way for us to be able to provide some outreach, be a little more proactive, to try and work with students, to follow-up on that premise.”

Even though 80 or so students have yet to fully register for their spring semester classes, a large majority of the campus has. The few that have not still have time before second semester begins.

“That also doesn’t mean that those 80 won’t register; it just means that they haven’t yet,” Ragan said.