How can you grow and shape enrollment at the same time?

At nearly every campus I visit, I hear a desire to grow enrollment while also shaping the incoming class. Shaping once meant attracting stronger academic students and was usually synonymous with increasing academic profile. Today, this term often means recruiting student populations that campuses have difficulty attracting and enrolling. While it can certainly still refer to those students with stronger grades and better test scores, more and more it refers to characteristics defined by institutional mission, geography, talent, ethnicity, and many others. Knowing this, campuses are becoming (or should become) much more proactive in the way they build, develop, and cultivate their admissions funnels. In other words, shaping enrollments primarily after students are admitted is too late in the process. An institution should look at the characteristics it desires and incorporate those goals into the funnel-building process.

In some instances, shaping is not difficult. For example, many colleges and universities (particularly small ones) have very little difficulty enrolling student athletes. This can be for reasons such as athletic scholarships (for NAIA or NCAA Division II schools), a highly competitive program that attracts students willing to “walk-on” (all levels), or simply the mere desire of playing for the sake of playing (at NCAA Division III schools). This is also usually true for academic programs where there is high demand but also limited seats due to factors such as institutional gift aid expense, cost to educate, and/or strong competition due to academic profile (Physical Therapy, Nursing, or Aviation are three examples of these types of academic programs). The struggle with shaping tends to be identifying institutional connections, or points of distinction, for students that institutions seek outside of these high demand programs and that may be simply seeking to attend an institution for the general goal of getting a college education.

So there is the $64,000 question: How does a campus best identify those students in the marketplace who can fill those seats in under-prescribed areas/programs that a campus wishes to fill?

First, it appropriately starts at the top of the funnel. One of the general strategies that I recommend to campuses is to look at their graduates. These are the students who started as freshmen or transferred in and ultimately graduated from the institution. Who are these students? What characteristics do they share? Are there common or clear academic, programmatic, geographic, or other characteristics that stand out about these students? Of these students, are there subsets that possess the characteristics you seek? If these are the students who stayed long enough to earn a degree, then can you find more like them as you build for the long term?

Next, of the students currently enrolled in the areas that you wish to grow or shape, what characteristics do these students have? Let’s say you want to increase majors from non-health professions, or increase the number of out-of-state students. Start by analyzing the characteristics of those students who are currently enrolled and possess those characteristics you desire. Do they come from certain states, backgrounds, household income levels, or academic groupings? If you want to change the composition of your student enrollment, then you need to attract different students through funnel construction, marketing, and academic offerings. While the latter two are bigger issues, predictive modeling tools do exist in the marketplace that can assist you with identifying students who fit the characteristics you want and qualifying their likelihood of enrolling at your campus. This can even be done before you make list purchases through specific databases such as NRCCUA. For example, you may find that the characteristics or variables of the students you wish to attract and enroll are present in places that you may have rarely searched in the past. By using predictive modeling, you can find students with high predictive model scores in these markets, making it more cost-effective and worthwhile to search for opportunities in new markets. Of course, there must be sample sizes large enough to model, and this certainly doesn’t take away from the overall recruitment process. It just helps you qualify more strategically and use your resources more efficiently. After all, wouldn’t you rather send one of those expensive viewbooks to a student who has a greater propensity to enroll rather to one who doesn’t?

Finally, it’s critical to have a competitive and data-driven scholarship and financial aid strategy. As one of my former colleagues used to always say, “Students seek scholarships. Do your scholarships seek students?” One of the best ways to have your scholarships “seek students” is to have a net price calculator on your Web site that will provide scholarship estimates. And, as with using predictive modeling to build and shape your funnel, you can use statistical modeling for financial aid awarding to not only attract students, but find the most strategic balance between meeting student need and supporting your enrollment goals.

These strategies will help you align your marketing, admissions, and financial aid policies with your enrollment goals. By being more data informed and using your recruitment and financial resources more efficiently, you can attract more students who have the characteristics you desire most.

I hope that this has been helpful, and feel free to contact me with questions.