Recruiting Intelligence

"How Millennials Are Changing the Face of Marketing Forever -- The Reciprocity Principle" is a research piece published by BCG (Boston Consulting Group), a management consulting firm. While the report reviews how millennials interact with a range of consumer brands and products, there are valuable lessons for those of us in academia. After all, this age group is pretty heavily represented in our classrooms, hallways, and registrars. Let's see what we can learn from BCG.

Video is a powerful force. In our marketing work we encounter the force of video every day. FACT: The second largest search engine in the world after Google: YouTube.

A personal experience, much to my chagrin: my son wants to learn how to tie a necktie. Does he ask me? No! He simply consults YouTube.  

One more example, my son's high school teacher has a meeting outside of school and he will miss a lesson. This teacher does not believe in the quality of the substitute for his high level math class. He selects a set of videos on YouTube with lectures on high level math and provides questions to answer. Online video content supplants human teaching in this case.

That gets us to our Intead Insight review of: "Research on the Use of Khan Academy in Schools." The research was conducted by SRI and the Gates Foundation to understand the outcomes of using Khan Academy videos as teaching tools. 

The vast majority of companies still treat social media as a fad and social phenomena. Their use of social media tools for marketing is rudimentary and the equivalent of marketing by billboard. Not to say that billboards are ineffective. It's just that digital marketing and social media offer a different marketing opportunity and by and large, folks simply don't know how to use it effectively.

And so, because social media marketing is free, more and more companies are putting up their billboards (first it was websites back in the 1990s and now it is social media accounts). So here's the thing: digital marketing is a waste of time given the number of billboards now posted, UNLESS you have the infrastructure to create and disseminate compelling content and track the online activity.

And so, the answer is "yes" that will require more investment in digital tools, staff or vendors. Effective marketing is not free afterall. Even when using social media. Sorry to be the ones breaking the news.

Today we want to highlight data from a report from Sprout, a company providing social media management tools.  

How do you successfully market education? Is today's youth so disaffected by bleak job prospects that they just don't care? Are parents turned off by inflated and growing tuition costs?

Higher ed is increasingly challenged to demonstrate that education matters. More than ever before, higher ed must demonstrate that there is a positive return on the investment of time and money. What's a university to do?

Objective research to the rescue: the Pew Research Center recently provided a useful study, called “The Rising Cost of NOT Going to College.”

Chart 1 (below) shows the growing divergence of earnings between groups with different levels of education.  As you can see the gap has risen from generation to generation. Today’s millennials, with at least a Bachelor degree, earn significantly more than less educated full-time worker in the same age bracket of 25-32. 

China is the second market in our series on niche or micro-markets in student recruiting. Last week, we covered the Indian market as presented by Lakshmi Iyer, today we are sharing with you the insights from Kim Morrison from GrokGlobal on the Chinese market. Kim gave a great presentation at the annual AIEA conference in Washington, D.C., in February 2014.

We recommend that you download the presentation which contains many more fascinating slides than we can present here (registration required - Please note that the actual presentation starts on slide 5).  

• What motivates and interests this generation?
• How can universities communicate and how does this student group communicate with each other?
• What can we tell about how this generation consumes content?

The millennial index highlights five different segments and personas (See Chart 1). Depending on your focus (undergraduate vs. graduate studies), you will find a different share of these segments among your target audience. 

In this Intead Insight, we take a deeper look at the long term trends in international student enrollment. Universities need a long-term commitment to build internationalization programs. Successful international enrollment requires dedicated staff resources and expertise as well as campus-wide support. 

We are using the open door data, collected annually by the Institute of International Education (IIE). This year to year view of international student enrollment trends is extremely helpful. The most recent report showed a 7.2% overall increase in the total number of international students studying in the U.S. which represents 3.9% of all college level enrollment in the U.S.