Whether or not the pandemic persists beyond 2020, enrollment leaders stand to gain from a detailed understanding of how the first admissions cycle of the COVID era played out. If the pandemic does continue, related insights will help admissions teams prepare for a second round of recruitment complicated by social distancing, financial hardship for families, and an altered value proposition for students. If it does not, learning from this year will still prove valuable. Recent months have constituted a natural experiment on an unprecedented scale, revealing enrollment-marketing practices that work under even the harshest market conditions--practices that will help admissions teams adapt to whatever challenges the future may bring.

The bulk of our presentation will focus on three schools’ experience of enrollment management during the pandemic, with an emphasis on recruitment-marketing practices that proved able to deliver results in the worst market in living memory.

As will be seen, a common feature underlying their approaches was successful execution on two objectives: ensuring an appropriately maximal prospect pool and producing high levels of conversion among prospective students.

Schools often miss as many as half of strong candidates within their primary markets--a shortfall for which proven fixes exist. These include: using a truly comprehensive set of list sources; capturing all name releases from each source across any given year; and avoiding overly aggressive filtering of prospects. We will show how to ensure consistent execution on these objectives and the benefits of doing so.

While growing the prospect pipeline is essential in difficult markets, this approach does present its own challenges--especially that of how to create intensive engagement across an enlarged admit pool. The answer lies in better understanding the individuals in your pipeline. Students’ interactions with schools they are considering generate tremendous amounts of data--information that, properly interpreted, tells you a lot about their likelihood to enroll. Equipped with this insight, enrollment teams can distinguish between students for whom intensive follow up is likely to make a difference and those for whom a more opportunistic approach is appropriate. By freeing up admissions-team capacity, this form of triage enables counselors to pursue on-the-fence students with otherwise unfeasible levels of focus and intensity. It is precisely this form of highly individualized contact that answers the key challenges of recruitment in the COVID era, including student anxiety and increased competition between schools over a diminished pool of college-bound students. Furthermore, these very same capabilities will equip enrollment teams to address the defining features of higher-education markets of the near future: a reduction in the number of college-bound high school graduates and resulting hyper-competition.

Submission ID:

13414

Presenter(s):

Mary Lawyer Siena College

Blake Bedsole Arkansas Tech University

Emily Messer Jacksonville State University