Obtaining approaches to attract and retain new students is 1 of the core focuses of Enrollment Management divisions of colleges and universities, and Enrollment Management Consultants alike. Increasingly, college admissions officers are turning to technologies in order to accomplish the task of attracting and retaining prospective students.

In the news, we’ve seen recent headlines that focus on Enrollment Management topics such as: the recent trend in State funding of higher education the promotion of distance studying initiatives performance based funding policies and how colleges and universities seek to bolster socio-economic diversity among students, by promoting various admissions procedures.

We’ve also seen how the right use of direct response marketing (a form of advertising that allows advertisers to quantify advertising ROI by soliciting a direct response from the consumer)—combined with sophisticated tracking technologies, and academic advising centers—provides more applications and enrollments. Far more colleges and Universities are turning to the internet, and other mediums that offer the chance for the increased efficiency of direct response marketing.

In an article entitled “Admissions deans grapple with the promises and pitfalls of electronic recruiting” Elizabeth Farrell discusses the new approaches that universities are employing to reach out to prospective students. A quote that appears in the write-up from the director of admissions of Colby, is a excellent summary:

“We’re genuinely attempting to keep up with what’s going on in the commercial globe, due to the fact that’s what the kids are exposed to,” says Steve Thomas, director of admissions at Colby. “It is what they’ve come to anticipate in dealing with us.”

As colleges and universities delve into advertising and marketing and advertising, they could not realize the enormous amount of time and money that can be saved by outsourcing Enrollment Marketing initiatives to Direct Response Marketing organizations that are more equipped to reach target students, on a performance basis. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as marketing and advertising agencies have been utilizing the world wide web and other channels in order to initiate direct quantifiable contact with buyers for some time now.

Promoting Diversity

An intriguing article appeared in the New York Times these days that focuses on promoting ethnic diversity in student bodies through scholarships and admissions procedures. Michael F. Summers is runs a biochemistry laboratory at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The post highlights the actions that Summers has taken in order to improve the number of African Americans that have access to an educational structure that will give them with the chance to pursue doctoral degrees.

Summers has taken actions like developing the Meyerhoff Scholarship program, a full scholarship that is awarded to African Americans. This program has provided the chance to enter a competitive scientific program to about 800 undergraduates.

In addition to highlighting the aggressive position that Summers has taken, the post also highlights numerous statistics that show just how couple of African Americans are awarded PH.D’s in science, math, and engineering: less than 3%. TO address this, Summers designed the Meyerhoff Scholarship, a program that starts with an aggressive admission criteria:

We take minority students — those with quite high SATs and high school grades — and we offer them full scholarships. We compete for them with the Ivy Leagues and we focus on retaining them as science majors. We give the identical kind of nurturance they may possibly get at the traditionally black colleges, but we do some additional items, too. In the summer between high school and college , we have a “bridge program” showing the students what it will take to excel in science. We say, “we anticipate you to get A’s,” and we show them how to study so they’ll get them.”

By securing a scholarship program that funds high-achieving economically underprivileged African Americans, Summers has evened-out the diversity of his lab: 15 of 32 researchers are African American, a proportion that is unheard of in a biochemistry lab.

The different approaches that colleges and universities are taking to generating student enrollments is really intriguing, and we will continue to monitor the new ways that academic institutions seek to increase diversity, and enhance applications and enrollments.

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Sources-

1 Farrell, Elizabeth “Admissions deans grapple with the promises and pitfalls of electronic recruiting” The Chronicle of Greater Education March 16-2007

2 Dreifus, Claudia “Goal No. 1: Excellent Science. Objective No.1 Diversity The New York Times March 13, 2007

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