Muñoz Named New VP for Enrollment

Chris Muñoz, who became Rice’s new vice president for enrollment in July, increased the applicant pool at Case Western Reserve University by 50 percent in two years and oversaw a 30 percent increase in class size while serving as vice provost for enrollment there.

Chris Muñoz

Very precise market research helped him rack up such impressive numbers, and that strategy should also benefit Rice’s plans to expand its undergraduate enrollment by 30 percent over the next decade.

“We need to figure out where the best markets are to achieve that goal,” Muñoz says. “That includes finding out what is appealing about Rice to students who live in those areas and then creating the perfect knowledge to methodically make those appeals well-known to those students.”

“The perfect knowledge” is critical,” Muñoz says. “It’s one thing for Rice to have wonderful values,” he explains. “But if prospective students and their parents in other geographical locations don’t recognize them, those positive values will not be influential in increasing the size of the applicant pool and being able to manage the profile of the entering class.”

Direct marketing is the key to any successful marketing plan, Muñoz says, and he’s in favor of using everything from predictive modeling to geodemography to better understand how students view the college selection process in general and Rice University specifically. “It’s important to be on the bleeding edge of the use of technology, ecommunication, and websites and to use the intelligence that can be gathered by these approaches for our market segmentation strategies,” he says, acknowledging the value of surrounding himself with people who are “talented, dedicated, and have skills that are better than mine.”

At Rice, Muñoz will oversee the offices of admission, enrollment operations, and student financial services—all areas that relate to his professional background. In addition to his leadership position at Case, he has been vice president for enrollment management at both the University of Dayton and California Lutheran University. He also was director of admissions and school relations at Humboldt State University, assistant director of admissions and financial aid at the University of Oregon, and assistant director of financial aid at the University of California at Irvine.

A nationally known speaker on strategic enrollment planning, admissions, and financial aid, Muñoz serves on an advisory committee to U.S. News & World Report, sharing insight about challenges in higher education, admissions, and student recruitment that might be useful for the magazine’s annual ranking of colleges and universities. He has helped the College Board test its enrollment planning service and has chaired the Commission on Student Recruitment and Retention for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

Reflecting on significant changes in the college admissions process over the past three decades, what surprises Muñoz most is universities’ increased awareness of historically underrepresented students and their desire to track and enroll those students. “When I went to college, I was probably one of the few Mexican Americans going to the state university in Southern California,” says Muñoz, who has a bachelor’s degree in theater arts from California State University at Fullerton and a master of science in counseling from the University of Oregon. “Over the years, so many universities have noted the growing number of students who historically have not graduated from high school or gone on to college, and they have decided that trend is something that needs to be reversed, not just because it would be good for our community, society, country, and economy, but because it is the right thing to do.”

Rice is doing “pretty well” in this regard relative to other universities, Muñoz notes, saying, “That was one of the factors that was appealing to me about Rice.”

Muñoz succeeds Ann Wright, who left Rice last year.

—B. J. Almond