Recruiting Intelligence

How important is response time and turn-around time for your success in international student enrollment?   Let me tell you why I am thinking of response time in marketing. I had two recent experiences that made me focus on the topic.  During a side conversation at a conference with the owner of a for-profit college, he mentioned that they follow up with a phone call within seven minutes of a registration on their web site (almost 24-7). Wow.  Then I needed a garage door repair, signed up on a website for recommendations for repair companies and received three recommendations to fix our garage door problem.  While I picked up the phone, the first repair person from that recommendation list called me.  The follow up happened within 30 seconds.  AMAZING. 

Why your international student applicants won't brag. Susan Cain's book  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking reminded me of my own experience as a German student applying to U.S. graduate schools 25 years ago. I wrote my draft essays and shared them with a Canadian friend at my German university. She gave me a lot of advice and edit suggestions on how to present myself in the essay and how to talk about my accomplishments. I was rather taken aback to change the more modest style to describing overtly how great I was.  From a German cultural perspective, this was inappropriate.  Well, my friend's editing suggestions seem to have been helpful and I was admitted to three U.S. graduate schools.  

This blog focuses on the alignment of your marketing resources in light of your current recruitment channels and the desired mix of student enrollment channels in the future.  We will focus on the alignment of the geographic, as well as, the marketing channel mix for this analysis. For the purpose of this article and analysis, we are going to exclude other important enrollment criteria such as the ability to pay, English capabilities and academic level and preparedness. 

• Audit your external brand perception, visibility and content

Social media is becoming a must-do activity to generate prospects, nurture them through the admissions process and convert them into enrolled students.

Prediction # 3: The range of programs and teaching channels for universities will increase to include more offline and professional programs as well as auxiliary services.

 We hear a great deal about endangered programs. Philosophy, history and language programs are shutting down due to the lack of students and financial resources. In contrast, I believe that universities will actually offer more, not fewer, services and programs, in more teaching formats, length and channels in the future. Universities will strive to find additional revenue sources. Executive training programs will be just one of many examples. Colleges will want to build a continued relationship with alumni exceeding current alumni fundraising focused activities.

Prediction #2: Universities are expanding their marketing to broader geographic areas.

We notice a tendency among our clients to broaden their geographic recruiting area. This broadening is driven by three distinct factors:

Prediction 1: Marketing channels and interactions are dramatically shifting to digital channels.

 It's a platitude that our rising high schools students are digital natives and their information gathering behavior is centered on digital activities and channels. College education is by far the biggest investment and purchase decision high school students will have made so far in their lives. Online research, social media interactions and information gathering will be at the center of their research.  The Google Research chart below shows the current resources used by prospective students.  Five of the eight most frequently used resources are digital.

“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” as the quote goes by Yogi Barra & Niels Bohr.  I was reminded of this quote as I read an article on trends in liberal arts colleges. "Since 1990, the number of liberal arts schools in the U.S. has dropped from 212 to 130, a 39 percent decrease". This information came from a study by Roger Baldwin from Michigan State University "Are liberal arts colleges disappearing"  The author states that only a handful of colleges have gone out of business, but many have added vocational programs in nursing and business and have changed their focus so dramatically that they no longer retain a liberal arts identity. It's a shift of great magnitude without any major headlines for the outside world to notice. I strongly feel that education will continue to change without dramatic public headlines.

 I want to discuss five predictions and analyze how these changes will affect student recruitment and marketing activities.