Posts Tagged ‘college costs’

The Unexpected Partnership That Can Lead to Increased Enrollment

July 29th, 2015

You already know that a student’s excitement about your college leads to a far greater likelihood of enrollment. And, you probably know that college tours and campus visits can influence a student’s level of excitement about a particular institution. But, you might be surprised to learn exactly what does and does not create excitement during a campus visit.

Recently, we asked 12,000 college-bound students to give us the scoop on campus tours and, frankly, we were shocked by what they told us. For instance, approximately 60% of students say that college campus tours are about the same in terms of generating excitement. Most don’t generate any more or less excitement than all of the others they experienced. In part, the reason for not generating excitement, students say, is the focus that the college places on itself rather than the student. This is especially so in group tours. In contrast, students who receive one-on-one tours where the focus is on them and what they want, tend to see the campus visit experience as a demonstration of the college’s personal interest in them.

When asked to rank the order which factors are most influential in generating their excitement about a college, students rank “seeing the campus” as most influential. The importance of interacting with current students places second. This is a continuing refrain, as evidenced in other data uncovered in The Excitement Factor! (our latest national higher education study) about the power of current students as a draw for prospective students.

Can you guess what ranked third? More influential than talking with counselors, meeting faculty, or even spending a night on campus or attending a sporting event? Seeing and experiencing the city and community in which they will live!

That’s right, gaining a sense of the community and what it has to offer has a big impact on prospective students. It’s an important component in the total set of factors that will make up this new chapter of their lives.

Lower number represents greater influence.

The relative influence of the city/community suggests that colleges will be well served in their recruiting efforts by taking a hands-on approach to enabling students and parents to see and experience all that the city and community has to offer them, in much the same way as a campus tour is planned, organized and executed.

How can you tap into this resource most effectively? We have compiled a few effective strategies for you to consider.

Personalize It

Some universities actually have an online interactive tool that allows students to select the various types of restaurants, activities, shopping and sights they are most interested in experiencing. Once the selections are made, recommendations are made and directions, reservations and special offers are made available.

Make Handouts Meaningful

If your college, like most, includes a community brochure in your welcome packet, it is time to take it up a notch. Ask retailers to include special offers for visiting students and their parents or to provide some local swag such as t-shirts, hats, cups, mugs, posters, etc.

Involve Community Leaders

Your institution is an enormous player in the local economy and adds great status to your city. If you don’t already have a presence in the local chamber of commerce and downtown association perhaps now is the time to do so. Progressive chambers of commerce will welcome the opportunity to expose their membership to your influx of potential new “residents” and may be willing to host events, present city tours and provide key community players to interact with the students. Downtown associations and chambers have been known to organize street parties and welcome events during campus tour periods and to ensure that every establishment is decked out in welcome signage.

Offer a Taste of the City

Invite restaurants, retailers, attractions, and key businesses to be a part of the campus tour experience. Whether you make this a stand-alone event or integrate it into your standard tour, it can have big impact. Entertainment from local theme parks and attractions; demonstrations of anything from skateboarding to the rock climbing club; food samples from area restaurants, all designed to expose students to a selection of activities that represent your unique community is sure to generate excitement.

These community partnerships needn’t be budget breakers either since the majority of cost will be borne by the businesses you work with. You’ll be offering priceless exposure to local businesses and creating excitement for the community AND your college or university.

Measure It!

Most colleges survey students and parents after a visit. Were we friendly? Did we provide the information you needed? Was the tour guide engaging? Did you like our campus and community? What did you like most and least about your visit? What improvements can we make?

These may seem like good questions but they don’t tell you much. Instead, ask questions that tell you whether your campus/community visit “moved the student’s needle” in your favor. Examples: Did your campus tour guide make you more or less excited about attending? If so, by how much? Why? Did you find the city/community more or less exciting and inviting than other colleges you visited? If so, what made it more or less exciting? To what degree do you feel we took a personal interest in you? Did that make a difference in your desire to enroll here? Did your view of our college change as a result of your visit? If so, how? For better or worse? How can we better show you what your life will be like as a student here?

This just scratches the surface of the range and depth of questions you can ask. Don’t be afraid to ask penetrating questions of students and parents after a visit. Let students and parents know that your purpose is to better serve them, and future students, by gaining a greater understanding.

The best part: You will be differentiating your campus visits/tours from all others!

Summer is the ideal time to train and motivate your staff. Email or call me if you are interested in how we can help you develop a powerhouse team of admission counselors, tour guides, student callers, and others on campus who impact your ability to recruit students.

Because it’s connected with the topic of this post, you should know that we are launching a new higher education study (the latest is a very popular series) in which we will explore, in detail, how students form a relationship (or not) with the colleges they consider. It’s called, The Relationship Dynamic: How prospective students form a relationship with your college, and why it matters in your ability to grow and control enrollment. You can get insight into how effectively you are building (or not building) relationships that will lead to enrollment.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

Rick Montgomery is as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company. With over 20 years in higher education marketing, he brings an innovative approach to helping colleges and universities meet their enrollment goals. Rick can be reached at 913/492.1265 x.708 or via email at rmontgomery@longmire-co.com.

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Posted in Campus Tours, Campus Visits, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training, Customer service, Organizational development, Parents, Your Value Proposition

Enrollment Planners: Creating Excitement Will Drive Enrollment!

July 15th, 2015

I will be in Chicago this week to make an appearance at the ACT 30th Annual Enrollment Planners Conference. With a full day of pre-conference workshops followed by more than 60 practitioner-focused sessions and nationally known speakers addressing the latest topics in student recruitment and retention, the ACT Enrollment Planners conference is always a very rewarding professional development experience.

Rick Montgomery, from the Longmire and Company team, and I will be joining Cathy Heinz, Purdue University, Director- Enrollment Management Communications, and Rachel Balows, University of Denver, Associate Director of Admission and Communication, to present: ”The Excitement Factor: Drive Enrollment by Creating Student Excitement.”

This is sure to be an enlightening and thought-provoking session where we’ll present the findings and implications from a groundbreaking study, The Excitement Factor! The research revealed that a prospective student’s excitement about attending a college is more highly correlated to enrollment than either cost or the perceived quality of the institution. Purdue and University of Denver are two of the more than 40 colleges across the United States who cosponsored the study, which generated more than 13,000 respondents.

We are looking forward to taking a deeper dive into the data that was uncovered in this study. This is actionable information that will help enrollment professionals better understand the environments in which student excitement is created, the people on campus who create it, points in the recruiting cycle where it is most frequently created, and specific methods and messages that are most and least effective in creating a student’s excitement about your college.

Most importantly, Cathy from Purdue and Rachel of the University of Denver, will be sharing specific strategies that any college or university can use today to increase the excitement factor and grow enrollment.

Attending the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference? Join us Thursday, 9:45 – 10:45 a.m. in the Armitage Room on the 4^th floor. If not, you can follow the conference on Twitter @ACTepc and #ACTEPC. If you are interested in learning more about The Excitement Factor, you can DOWNLOAD the full report now. Or, better yet, call or email us and we will provide a comprehensive presentation of the data for you and your staff.

We recently announced the launch of our new co-sponsored study, “The Relationship Dynamic: How prospective students form a relationship with your college, and why it matters in your ability to grow and control enrollment.” This study is a partnership of private and public colleges and universities from across the country seeking powerful data about building the types of relationships with prospective students that will lead to enrollment. CLICK HERE to learn more about getting involved in this new study.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. For more information about Longmire and Company’s Interactive Counselor Training Program, click here. Be sure to Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.

Bob Longmire is President of Longmire and Company, Inc. He is a recognized expert on the topic of how prospective students and parents form their college selection decisions – and how colleges can use that knowledge to grow and control their enrollment. He can be reached at (913) 492-1265, ext 709 or at blongmire@longmire-co.com. Connect with Bob at Linkedin/in/boblongmire.

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Posted in Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training, Organizational development, Research, Your Value Proposition

Tags: ACT ACT Enrollment Planners Conference ACTepc admission counselor training admissions counselors admissions customer service admissions success college college admissions college branding college costs college enrollment college presidents college recruiting college recruitment EMChat enrollment management higher education branding higher education marketing higher education strategies longmire and company Longmire and Company study Purdue University of Denver

Yield Enhancement Series: The Final Push – Act Now to Impact Enrollment and Minimize Melt

March 23rd, 2015

[This is Part 6 of the Yield Enhancement Series: The Final Push, offering actionable and effective strategies for the closing weeks of the yield season.]

You are in the final weeks of your yield season and fully engrossed in your efforts to bring in your 2015 class. I know the last thing you want to think about right now is the dreaded “summer melt,” but there are actions you can take today to ensure that your admitted students matriculate later.

Melt (for the benefit of readers new to, our outside, higher ed) refers to those admitted students who give every indication of enrolling and then “melt” away – never to step foot on campus. Some are students who commit to one college and later find they are accepted at a school where they were previously wait-listed. There are students who will complete the admittance process at two (or more) schools to keep their options open until the last possible moment. Sadly, there are college-bound students who will be admitted yet never enroll or start their college education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates the melt rate between 10% and 20%. In certain points of the country (particularly in lower income areas) it can be higher than 40%.

A Harvard study titled The Forgotten Summer, authored by researchers Benjamin L Castleman, Lindsay C. Page and Korynn Schooley, delves into the “high rate of summer attrition from the college pipeline among college-intending high school graduates.” They also explore the effectiveness of various outreach efforts during the summer. You can also read about the Summer Melt Program created by uAspire, a non-profit organization whose mission is to help students find an affordable way to – and through – a post-secondary education.

Obviously, when a student fails to matriculate it is a lose-lose situation: A college-bound student gets derailed in his or her pursuit of higher education and your enrollment goals are impacted at the point of no return. But there is another reason you should be thinking about this now: The research shows that the factors that contribute to the phenomenon of melt are the same issues that are impacting the students in your admit pool today; coping with the reality of college costs, anxiety about finding the “right fit” and an overwhelming amount of often confusing paperwork, among them.

We will take a deeper dive into the subject of melt in the coming months. What is of importance today is to follow the lead of the most successful admissions counselors. They know they must build relationships with their students and gain valuable personal insight about each and every one of them. They know whether or not cost is the most critical factor and what attributes of their college will excite the student.

With that knowledge in hand, they nurture a relationship with the student that best serves the needs of the individual. They stay in touch, ask questions and have meaningful conversations throughout the entire admissions process. They make the student feel wanted, important, and engaged with the college. And, they don’t get unpleasantly surprised in July when the student tells them he or she has opted for another college or gone completely silent.

We help colleges and universities with their recruiting efforts every day, especially now during yield season. If we can help you, please let me know.

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Posted in Behavior, Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Research, Your Value Proposition

Tags: admission counselor training admissions admissions counselors admissions success college college admissions college costs college enrollment college recruiting college recruitment enrollment management finding the right college fit higher ed higher education branding higher education marketing higher education strategies higher education value longmire and company Longmire and Company study recruiting staff training value proposition yield enhancement

The Counselor Training Series: Tap into the Excitement Factor

December 16th, 2014

[In part 10 of the Counselor Training Blog Series we look at how a prospective student’s excitement about attending your college influences their final decision.]

Research shows that when a student is in the process of selecting a college, three factors generally come into play:

Cost, perceived quality of the institution, and his or her excitement about attending.

Most students consider each of these factors important but the key question is, which factor is the most important?

CounselorTrainingSeries270x150 So I ask you, which one of these factors do you think is most predictive of enrollment?

If you said excitement, you’re right. The single factor that is most strongly correlated to likelihood of enrollment is the student’s excitement about attending. It’s more strongly correlated to enrollment – by a factor of two – than either cost or perceived quality of the college.

It makes perfect sense.

How many of us have bought something that our rational brain was telling us we shouldn’t buy because it’s too expensive? But we bought it anyway because we just had to have it. The excitement of owning it, using it, or wearing it was the most powerful force that drove our action to buy.

The same holds true for students in selecting a college.

Research shows that when students are faced with a choice of colleges that they perceive to be generally alike (believe me this happens more frequently than we’d like to admit), they will choose the one they are most excited about. They will naturally find ways to rationalize away a higher cost or lower perceived quality.

Colleges and counselors that are most successful at recruiting are masters of understanding each prospective student and generating their excitement.

They uncover what the student wants and how they will feel if they get it. They put prospective students in the environments and with the people who are most likely to create that spark of excitement, that “aha” moment when the student not only knows but FEELS that they have found their college.

So, when you’re recruiting students, don’t just find out what they want. Find out what will make them feel that your college is the right choice for them. Find out what will excite them.

Recently, over 40 colleges participated in a comprehensive national co-sponsored study on this very topic conducted by Longmire and Company. The results of the study have yielded clear findings on how student excitement develops about a particular college and the role that the college plays in its development.

If you would like a copy of the full report as soon as it is released you can CLICK HERE to send us an e-mail to put you on the distribution list. I promise you will find it enlightening and extremely valuable.

Continue the conversation on Twitter @LongmireCo. For more information about Longmire and Company’s Interactive Counselor Training Program, click here.

[Subscribe to Versions of Conversion today so you don’t miss any of this highly-valuable information.]

Karen Full is a highly-respected higher education professional who has held positions in admissions and enrollment management at several institutions in the Midwest and Florida. With her vast experience working with large and small, public and private colleges, Karen brings a valuable perspective to her role as an Enrollment Strategist at Longmire and Company. Call Karen at 913/492.1265 x.711 or email her at kfull@longmire-co.com. Follow Karen on Twitter @KarenAFull.