LinkedIn dominates online professional relationship building. LinkedIn creates and retains connections, provides transparency into professional backgrounds and accomplishments.  Professional recruiting is heavily influenced by LinkedIn.  An now LinkedIn is starting to build a direct connection to universities, alumni and even university rankings.  What does that mean for your activities as university administrators, admission officers and alumni offices?

The transformation of higher education is a hot topic for authors.  Two new books will be released this spring by Kevin Carey from the New America Institute and Ryan Craig from University Ventures. While the authors have very different professional backgrounds - a policy analyst versus a professional venture capital manager -- they derive at similar conclusions and insights about the future of higher education.  Higher education as we know it will not be sustainable according to the authors and a great deal of disruption and change will be upon future student generations.  

Both books have a remarkable optimism that sees the future of education with greater access, more innovation, better outcomes and lower costs.   Yet change will not happen without pain for many existing institutions. 

Energizing, educating and motivating your recruiting network around the world is an important function for admissions offices. But what are the best ways to encourage your recruiting network? How can you motivate your network to be productive?

The season of new ranking releases will be upon us again soon. Admission departments worry that their school's U.S. News & World Report ranking will be lowered and student, faculty, and alumni will let their displeasure be known. 

International travel and attending fairs is an important recruitment channel and is a major investment for many universities.  Last week, we shared data with you on how lead generation for prospective students is affected by the quality of the services provided by fair providers in our blog post: Will Your Student Fair Provider Deliver Value This Recruiting Season?

Recruiting tours, fairs and the associated travel expenses are some of the biggest line items in an institution's recruiting budget. Given the investment of time and money to achieve student recruiting goals through travel, we hear the same great questions every year related to this topic. How do you know if you're getting the most bang for your buck in terms of recruitment travel? This is article is part one of two on this subject.

As admissions officers and higher education marketers, we are out there "selling," "marketing," and "explaining" our institutions and services. We are all committed to the value of education. Most of us appreciate the environment and respect the act of learning. University academic staff liked college so much that they never left school!  But what is happening around us?   We are selling into an environment that does not necessarily prioritize education for the sake of education, but is rightly looking for a preparation for life with a focus on professionalism. 

Do you watch your frequent flyer status? To be honest I do, too.  I like free flights. And it helps to have status for early boarding and luggage perks as airlines have gotten so stingy and charge for bathroom visits (no, they haven't come up with that one...yet).  For this blog, I have selected a few services that can make your travel easier.

Seth Godin coined the phrase "interruption marketing" many years ago to describe the way traditional marketers interrupt the consumer to draw attention for their products and services. His message was that consumers will find more and more ways to avoid interruptions. He was right.   At the 2014 INTEAD Global Marketing Workshop for Academic Leaders in New York City, Hubspot's Matt Fradette showed the process and the successes of moving from interruption marketing to contextually relevant inbound marketing for universities.

The discussion about using commission-based student recruiting agents has been an arduous and drawn out debate in the United States. With the NACAC acceptance, or let's say toleration, allowing NACAC members to use commission-based agents as long as they are managed appropriately, we have moved into the implemenation phase of agent-university relations.  One question that we hear frequently asked or at least mentioned with lots of grumbling is the "double-dipping" done by agents.