CUT’s Student Recruitment Team held its annual planning session on 24 and 25 February 2022 to take stock of 2021 achievements and challenges experienced during the recruitment of prospective students. The team comprised officials from Communications and Marketing, Faculties, Registrar’s Division, and the Centre for Global Engagement.

The two-day Imbizo focused on bringing about brand and image alignment of CUT during the upcoming outreach programmes, developing and adopting a revised recruitment plan, strengthening CUT’s recruitment efforts for 2022, and improving student intake in STEM as well as CUT’s student demographics.

The session presented an opportunity for key stakeholders to critique intervention strategies that were employed to address the downward trends of STEM intake. Another focus was how to increase the recruitment of students outside of the Free State province and from a more significant number of schools within the Free State province.

In 2022, the university’s enrolment figure constituted 76 percent of students from the Free State Province. Currently, we are seeing a significant improvement of 10 percent of students from outside the province, showing an improved and diversified student profile of the university.

About 47.7% of CUT students are enroled in the priority area of Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics (STEM). As part of our Vision 2030, we aspire to increase our student intake in this priority area by 50 percent, which South Africa has placed on the critical skills shortage list for many years now.

“One of our strategic goals is to provide technological solutions to help bring about socio-economic differences, real differences in people’s lives, and it starts with the important work that the student recruitment teams do. Collaboration is essential. It brings together our efforts, not only operationally but strategically, and the way we’ve gone about doing it has resulted in synergy,” said Dr Gary Paul, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Resources and Operation.

In pursuit of achieving the Vision 2030 communications and marketing section has taken upon itself to embark on corroborative paths initiative that will see all four faculties and various support departments coming together to share their contribution on how they all can work together to advance the university brand awareness across the central region of South Africa and the country, with an international footprint in various SADC regions.

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The Imbizo aims to build brand awareness and generate leads for the opportunities CUT creates in terms of student and staff recruitment and business offerings.