Recruiting Intelligence

Your campus may feel a little cozier this fall as housing units start to fill up again. Welcome news, right?

The enrollment dip we’ve been living through could rebound to pre-pandemic levels, meaning we may see nearly 1 million more enrolled students aged 18-24 in 2022 than in 2021. This is according to analytics giant Gallup.

Likely your team is seeing a positive shift in inquiry and applications. (No? Then be in touch).

The big question still is whether all that activity results in actual enrollments. There is reason to be skeptical at many institutions.

In Gallup’s recently issued The State of Higher Education 2022 Report, done in partnership with Lumina Foundation, we see some interesting results. The central goal of their work: to help inform institutions how to better support current and prospective students. The survey included adults aged 18+ who have completed high school and are living in the US.

Many survey participants are currently pursuing a degree, others unenrolled from their certificate or degree program since Covid. Many others are prospective students who never enrolled in a certificate or degree program after high school.

We are thrilled to have these insights in advance of #NAFSA22 to inform our discussions with all of you. If you’ve not yet scheduled a meeting with us at the conference, please be in touch quickly. Our schedule is nearly filled up. You’ll be receiving a summary of our 4 NAFSA don’t-wanna-miss-em presentations by email.

From Gallup, we took special note of the finding that despite the many (many) disruptions caused by the pandemic, US adults (aged 18-29) remain interested in pursuing higher education. There have been many stories of the growing anit-higher ed sentiment. So how do we lock in on those with high intent?

If you haven’t read the report, it’s one you won’t want to miss. Read on for a link to the report and the top 5 takeaways we think will be the most valuable to your team…

Every CFO’s dilemma: how much discounting do we have to do to fill our classes?

But before you get there, it is the Enrollment Management team’s job to answer a few other questions:

1. To whom do we market? (this takes us from suspect to application)
2. Whom do we accept? (this takes us from applicant to accepted pool)
3. And now we turn to the CFO and financial aid team to answer, “How much do we award them?” (this takes us from accepted to tuition-paying)

The Intead team is hyper-focused on question number 1 in ways that others in the student marketing world seem to miss or oversimplify. Zip code and IPEDS analyses will tell you that there are roughly 250K families in the US able to afford tuition bills of $30K or more. And that pool is shrinking as the Chronicle of Higher Ed and industry analysts consistently remind us. The fear of 2025 is growing!

Private institutions have faced, and will continue to face, a world of trouble in the years ahead. If you are not clear about what makes your institution highly valuable to your target audience (and no, the answer is not, “we provide a personalized level of attention to our students”), then your classrooms and dorms are going to look sparser. Those doubles you converted to triples will be double again.

And for other institutions, those with lower price points, there are significant headwinds in terms of how students and parents are evaluating your value as well. Competition will continue to grow.

We'll be talking about all of this at #NAFSA2022 in Denver in just 5 weeks. Please be in touch to set up a meeting or join us for one of our four interactive NAFSA presentations where we are honored to share the dais with our colleagues from Benedict College, San Diego State University, Clark University, Northeastern University, CIEE, ICEF, and GNET.  

With this post we share our concern, and it should be yours as well, that the marketing agencies offering enrollment/recruitment services for so many institutions are taking their marketing plans from their most recent client and applying them to the next one that comes in the door.

Literally, some of them are simply slapping your logo on the marketing plan they delivered to the client that came before you and selling it to you as something unique and fresh. They are that cynical about their own work and what you are doing on your campus.🙄

Read on for tips on how to frame the pertinent questions and approach the answers for your institution. While the framework has common elements for all, the resulting marketing plan must be different based on your specific institution type, location, ranking and academic strengths, tuition, culture, etc.

Your student enrollment marketing must focus on what makes you, you.

We’re here to say very loudly: rinse and repeat is not the answer.

This week we wrap up our three-part series on #FinTech, where we’re exploring how money for college can be found and moved faster, safer, and smarter, alleviating some of the headache for students, their families, and this time around, for university administrators. This is part of our focus on #EdTech and all the changes our industry is experiencing.

In our first piece, we talked about new student loan options, especially for students from underserved demographics, those looking for social equality, those who want unique repayment terms, and international students. Then last week, we jumped to alternative funding sources, such as micro funding, income share agreements, and new developments in scholarship FinTech.

Those areas of FinTech were all helpful to the students seeking ways to finance their educations and helpful for university administrators to understand as the financing tools and options you students can access change.

Today we are looking at what is new in the world of financial data and payment processing. Let's consider how your job might get a little easier.

And speaking of making your job a bit easier, we have 3 new Intead student recruiting research reports headed your way. Now is a great time to consider an Intead Plus Bookshelf subscription. Don’t miss these valuable reports to help you improve your institution’s recruitment game:

• Student Interactions on Peer-to-Peer Recruiting Platforms
• Student Interactions with Chatbots and other Artificial Intelligence Tools
• Student Recruiting in Emerging Markets: Africa and Latin America

Or you can learn from us with a personal meeting: we will be discussing our latest research and presenting our student recruitment insights at the upcoming TABS, ICEF and AIRC conferences. Email us to set up a meeting.

Read on for important insights into a set of really valuable questions you need to ask before embracing the latest FinTech tools…

This week we continue our three-part series on #FinTech, where we’re exploring how money for college can be found and moved faster, safer, and smarter, alleviating some of the headache for students, their families, and even for administrators. This is part of our focus on all things #EdTech.

Last week, we dove into new student loan options, especially for students from underserved demographics, those looking for socially conscious financing, those who want unique repayment terms, and international students seeking financing. If you didn’t get a chance to read it, you can check it out here.

A quick shoutout to NAFSA's latest issue of International Educator. It was in our mailbox this week and it should be available online soon. Great articles on priority topics: student services, student employment opportunities and Intead's and iSchoolConnect's article about artificial intelligence and chatbots. Great stuff well worth the read.

With 3 new Intead student recruiting research reports headed your way, now is a great time to consider an Intead Plus Bookshelf subscription. Don’t miss these valuable reports to help you improve your institution’s recruitment game:

• Student Interactions on Peer-to-Peer Recruiting Platforms
• Student Interactions with Chatbots and other Artificial Intelligence Tools
• Student Recruiting in Emerging Markets: Africa and Latin America

Or you can learn from us with a personal meeting: we will be discussing our latest research and presenting our student recruitment insights at the upcoming TABS, ICEF and AIRC conferences. Email us to set up a meeting.

Now a look at alternative funding sources. Read on to find out what exists outside of student loans.

When you think of student loans, your first thought might not be of the Space Race between the US and the Soviet Union, but that’s exactly where they started. Following the launch of the Soviet Sputnik, the first federal loan program began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) to serve students studying engineering, science, or education degrees.

Since then, technology has rapidly advanced—both in outer space and right here in the earthly realm of higher education. Interestingly, tech has also advanced in how to finance education.

Continuing our exploration of #EdTech, today we are turning to FinTech in what will be a three-part series. Most of us have probably checked our bank balance online and many are cashing checks with a click of our cellphone cameras. The younger ones among us are transferring funds to each other using Venmo. (You had to pay your babysitter that way just the other week, didn't you?). These same digital advances in FinTech are starting to overlap with EdTech.

The rising cost of higher education is a huge concern for most students and families. Today we explore some of the new financial technologies that allow money to be moved faster, safer, and smarter for the students and families that are eager to attend your institution.

Why is this important?

Knowing what your target audience is into is always important from a recruitment and retention point of view. Is your institution making it easy for students to use the modern financial tools available?

In our FinTech series, we are going to look at new student loan offerings and alternative funding sources for scholarships and crowdsourcing. And while those are helpful on the student end, we will also discuss FinTech solutions for verifying financial details and aid approvals as well as payment management systems.

Quick reminder: This December, the Intead team will be attending the TABS conference in Boston, the ICEF conference in Miami Beach and the AIRC conference in Miami. Drop us an email if you’d like to meet and hear about our latest research. We are releasing 3 new market research reports in the coming months. So much insight!