Do not blunder around like the constables in The Pirates of Penzance . First, make sure your house is in order. I will be asking the Graduate Sub-Meet and Confer to expect this sort of information from every graduate program in the College. Second, make a concerted effort to attract, keep, and graduate every student who comes to your program. One is to attract qualified students, and the other is to see to it that they achieve their goals once they arrive here.
Recruitment is a joint responsibility.
But, unlike undergraduate students, most graduate students come not for the institution but for the program. The College can entice them to take a look, but the program has to hook them. Retention and graduation is usually focused at the program level after all, you know your students better than anyone else. This Fall, the College of Graduate Studies will be using a special allocation from MnSCU to conduct a market survey to provide all of us with more specific information about our prospective and admitted students. We will also replace the graduate catalogue with a recruitment brochure which is more marketing oriented.