Old Bay & New Bonds: Building Strong Relationships with Program Directors

Please provide a one-paragraph overview of the session.‎ (200 words or less): This presentation provides a comprehensive roadmap for strengthening collaboration between graduate admission teams and program directors by focusing on the importance of their relationship in recruitment, communication, and student yield; clarifying roles and responsibilities; addressing the challenges of centralized versus decentralized approaches; and ensuring sustainability despite leadership changes. Attendees will learn actionable strategies to immediately improve partnership effectiveness, including proactively engaging program directors around shared goals, hosting monthly workshops to share updates and best practices, developing structured communication plans, creating written processes to ensure continuity, and recognizing when to adjust efforts if engagement is limited. Together, these insights and tactics offer both a strategic framework and practical tools to build trust, streamline operations, and sustain long-term collaboration.

Session Agenda/Outline (200 words or less): This session provides an inside look at Towson University’s graduate admissions journey, highlighting the evolution from a relatively new admissions office within university admissions to becoming its own college, Graduate Studies. We will review the challenges of operating with centralized admissions alongside decentralized committees. We’ll explore common pain points such as rotating program directors, decision turnaround times, recruitment involvement, and communication gaps between admissions and programs.

A key focus is on building and sustaining collaborative relationships with program directors through general outreach (sharing dates, events, initiatives, and enrollment updates), targeted individual outreach (program updates, research highlights, and student successes), workshops, and one-on-one meetings. We’ll also discuss how admissions staff can support programs by bringing the prospective student perspective, providing market insights, coaching program directors on adapting to evolving student expectations, and operationalizing continuity with written plans.