Building paths for students to enroll and persist

On a campus in the Midwest, there is a popular new walking path that is guiding students in new directions in order to view the natural beauty of the campus’s tree-rich perimeter. By adding the new path, the institution changed its students’ habits, added an attraction, and overcame obstacles that were getting in the way of exploration.

Have you considered the power of path-building for student enrollment? Is your institution’s enrollment team intentionally building pathways that guide students in the directions you want? By building intentional, well-marked paths, prospective and current students are more likely to step past obstacles, respond to your requests, and become more engaged with your institution.

At Noel-Levitz, we’ve seen campuses build big paths that work for lots of students as well as smaller paths that work for priority subgroups and individual paths that serve particular student circumstances. The most important thing to remember is that good paths begin where students are at.

Trailheads and stepping stones
Placing strategic trailheads for students to enter an enrollment path is a critical first part of enrollment path-building. Are there new places or areas where you should be placing trailheads? For prospective students, do you offer innovative academic and extracurricular programs, online or on campus, that connect them to your institution or put them in contact with your current students? For incoming students, have you placed clear trailheads to career development, academic support, and venues for building relationships with others? For all students, are you in touch with the needs of key subgroups?

After the trailhead, the best paths provide students with appropriately-timed and placed “stepping stones” that gradually guide students into a deeper commitment to your institution and to their career goals. For example, to encourage students to visit campus—which for many prospective students is a big step forward—a path-builder must begin with smaller steps of little to no commitment and provide lots of options. For instance, the path toward visiting might begin with a face-to-face conversation with a current student, a social media experience, or seeing a campus video.

So how, exactly, can you identify the best paths, trailheads, and stepping stones? Examining past “foot traffic” on existing paths is effective, as is asking students directly. In reality, a single “path” might be a series of paths and obstacles upon looking closer. Effective path-building involves testing new approaches, minimizing obstacles, and gradually guiding students to make smaller choices that eventually build up to the bigger choices to enroll and re-enroll.

Without clear paths, students stumble—some specific examples
The following examples illustrate the potential impact of, and need for, well-marked paths in enrollment management:

• A new student begins classes without a written, course-by-course academic plan/path, and his or her motivation wanes.
• A prospective student leaves an admissions application path incomplete because a specific section on the application seemed confusing.
• A current student leaves a campus website because she can’t find the information she was looking for.
• A cluster of returning students decides to leave college at the same point in the semester for similar reasons, but the timing and reasons are unknown to the institution.
• A cluster of new students chooses a college as the result of a shared experience (a potential new trailhead for recruiters), but the experience is unknown to the institution.
• An incoming student receives a letter from an academic department that doesn’t match the tone of his letters from admissions, a disruption in the path.
• An undecided student doesn’t receive adequate career guidance during the first year of studies.
• A student with a learning disability has trouble getting connected to a person on campus who understands his situation.
• A cluster of prospective students begins using an influential new online tool to learn about colleges, yet the admissions team isn’t aware of the tool.
• A high-ability student doesn’t understand her preferred college’s process of admission and can’t figure out what to expect.
• While visiting campus, a group of prospective students follow a path that previously led other visitors to form a negative impression which could have been avoided with visitor feedback.

Pointing the way forward
As the above examples show, students stumble without clear and effective paths. And when students aren’t sure which direction to go, guess what? They often don’t go. Instead, they get hung up. Or they give up. Equally problematic is a path that suddenly places a big step in front of students without providing a smaller step first. Or a path that appears insurmountable (or actually is). Or a path with too many choices that feels overwhelming.

For enrollment teams, it is important to keep removing the bumps from existing paths, experimenting with new trailheads, and building progressive stepping stones. As mentioned, a good place to start is to study the successful paths of students who have already matriculated and persisted. Building effective pathways requires giving attention to small increments of progress, providing multiple options, and tracking data. In addition, most students want relationships along the way.

Questions? Want to discuss your students’ paths and obstacles for recruitment or retention? Or do you want to explore some places for new trailheads? Please email us or call us at 1-800-876-1117.