UNM will soon have a permanent vice president for enrollment management.
President David Schmidly created the position in July, and Terry Babbitt has been serving as interim since then.
The vice president of student enrollment oversees the offices of admissions and recruitment, scholarship, financial aid and the registrar.
Schmidly said the biggest challenge UNM faces in terms of enrollment is student success.
"We've got to improve that 43 percent graduation rate," he said. "It's costing the state, and it costs students, and students pay a lot of money to go to school here. We need to make them more successful."
Three candidates, including Babbitt, participated in forums each attended by about 30 people.
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One of the candidates, Carmen Alvarez Brown, is assistant vice president for enrollment management at Florida International University.
"At the institution I come from, 58 percent of students are Hispanic and 18 percent are African-Americans," Alvarez Brown said.
She said that while UNM needs to encourage minority enrollment, "there's this broader picture of promoting the University that needs to occur."
Alvarez Brown said she spent the weekend touring Albuquerque and asking people what they know about the University.
"(UNM) is an incredible institution. I'm so impressed with everything that it has, but it's very understated and people have a misperception," Alvarez Brown said. "The great stuff that's happening at this institution needs to be told."
Candidate Betty Huff, vice chancellor for enrollment services at UCLA Santa Barbara, said that in order to attract more minority students, UNM has to make them feel that the University is an outstanding academic institution and the right choice for them.
"You have to have an organized approach to how you work with students," Huff said. "You have to make the student feel it's a comfortable, warm, welcoming place where they'll grow and develop."
Huff said she believes UNM will face a great challenge in recruitment as high school graduation levels are projected to level and even decline in the coming years.
Babbitt said the decreasing number of high school students will magnify UNM's enrollment challenges.
"We've got to increase enrollment and make sure the students do better and are more successful with a little bit of a decreasing market," Babbitt said. "That means we have to recruit in new areas. We have to retain more students. We have to have a comprehensive plan to meet all those goals."
Babbitt said the University needs to improve at the graduate level.
"The place where we really have the biggest gap in our diverse student population is graduate students," he said. "We need to recruit and enroll more graduate students of color, and we have to put resources in it and focus on it."
Babbitt said enrollment numbers for UNM are critical because the institution is funded by a state formula - the more students enrolled, the more state money.
Schmidly said he wants whoever fills the position to work to increase enrollment.
"Also, we hope to see graduation rates go up and see dramatic improvements when we measure student satisfaction," he said.
He said this will happen when the University focuses on the success of students.
"We need to make UNM the most student-centered institution it can be."
