Edu-leaders

The seismic shifts in the ways that students consume information, share ideas, and communicate with the world around them put traditional recruiting and admissions approaches at risk. To meet institutional goals by effectively targeting, recruiting, and admitting students, particularly amid the clutter of proliferating media, colleges and universities must engage in a far more strategic and calculated approach to enrolment.

While new technologies, for example, automating mass email communications, make some things easier, new challenges have arisen. Today, the response rates are falling as students resist efforts to be ‘poured’ into an enrolment funnel. Increasingly, familiar approaches are less effective and often do not take into account long-term, and possibly negative, effects. Evidence is increasingly clear that the influence of enrolment marketing initiatives is diminishing and mistrust of marketing is on the rise. At the same time, the internet helps students develop their ideas about your institution well before their first formal contact with it. Consequently, awareness building through mass communication provides little value to students who have already advanced further down the decision path, worse it misses them entirely.

To be successful today, recruiting and admissions teams must consider new factors. Connecting with the 21st century student requires an approach informed by a deep understanding of each student as well as alignment of relevant recruitment and admission activities with a student’s decision cycle. More often than not, today’s enrolment process is a path with alternate entry and exit points, a complex network of information, influencers, and decisions.

What does this mean for enrolment managers? It means there is great opportunity. Enrollment managers can thrive in this challenging environment. How? By treating relationship building as an institutional value and area of competence that must be developed, by engaging in evidence-based recruiting and admissions planning and strategy, and by employing technology that is capable of powering and supporting key activities.

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