The President and CEO of SEM WORKS, Dr. Jim Black, is the founder of the National Conference on Student Retention in Small Colleges and co-founder of the National Small College Admissions Conference and the National Small College Enrollment Conference. He formerly served as the director of AACRAO’s Strategic Enrollment Management Conference. Dr. Black has published numerous articles and book chapters including a feature article in College & University, Creating Customer Delight; a chapter, Creating a Student-Centered Culture, for a book on best practices in student services published by SCUP and sponsored by IBM; a chapter on enrollment management in a Jossey-Bass book on student academic services; as well as a bimonthly feature in The Greentree Gazette. Among his other published works is a monograph titled, Navigating Change in the New Millennium: Strategies for Enrollment Leaders and a book he recently edited, The Strategic Enrollment Management Revolution – considered to be a groundbreaking publication for the enrollment management profession, Gen Xers Return to College, and Essentials of Enrollment Management: Cases in the Field.

Black was honored as the recipient of the 2005 AACRAO Distinguished Service Award. He has been interviewed by publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Converge Magazine, The Enrollment Management Report, The Lawlor Review, and was interviewed for AACRAO’s Data Dispenser. Black also was featured in an international teleconference on enrollment management sponsored by The Center for the Freshman Year Experience at the University of South Carolina, and a PBS broadcast on “Blending High Tech and High Touch Student Services.” Since 1999, Jim Black has been an IBM Best Practices Partner, one of only twenty-three in the world. He was invited by The College Board to Heidelberg, Germany, to evaluate the APIEL Exam and most recently was invited to lead conferences on enrollment management and student services in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Dr. Black has served on the boards of several technology companies and has consulted with companies such as Microsoft and the SAS Institute. Higher education clients have included two-year, four-year, public, and private institutions.

SEM WORKS was founded by Dr. Jim Black and is grounded in a long history of serving higher education clients through consulting and professional development. The combined experience of the SEM WORKS team includes nearly 150 college and university clients from five countries. SEM WORKS staff have experience with community colleges, four-year public and private institutions, graduate and professional schools, proprietary schools, non-profit as well as for-profit organizations, and college and university systems. Its services include consulting, conferences, training, research, and other activities.