Recruiting college students who are eligible for military aid through your net price calculator

Are you serving those who have served? Now that we are in an era where every campus “should” have a net price calculator (NPC), we find more and more campuses look at their NPCs as a recruiting tool. During the first couple of cycles after the mandate requiring all colleges and universities to have an NPC solution, it wasn’t uncommon to find (or not find) an institution’s calculator buried on its Web site. Today, we’re seeing campuses create solutions that showcase their institutional aid to their prospective students. Among the underserved groups our campus partners are targeting with their NPCs are those who may qualify for military benefits.

There are many post-9/11 benefits for students who have served in the military, including the Yellow Ribbon Program, Montgomery GI Bill, and several other programs your prospective students may qualify for. If your campus has a fairly large population of students enrolling who qualify for military benefits, should you modify your calculator to help answer questions from this important population? We know students are interested in learning what’s available to them (in the form of merit aid). When we look at the more than 2.37 million NPC starts across all the campuses that use our NPC (the Noel-Levitz TrueCost Calculator),  70.5 percent of those who start the survey will move through the scholarship page, while 50.77 percent of those students continue through the end of the survey (and our survey only takes about 3 minutes to complete).

More and more campuses are finding that secret shopper numbers are increasing in their applicant pool (secret shoppers are first-source applicants, students who show up as an applicant without previous contact with your campus). Because these students are, in most cases, finding all the information they need to apply from information on college Web sites, campuses are spending more time ensuring that the institutional Web site is a one-stop shop for prospective students. In our most current benchmark report—the 2013 Marketing and Student Recruitment Practices Benchmark Report for Four-Year and Two-Year Institutions—most responding campuses said they have a recruiting page on their Web site, and 74 to 86 percent indicated their Web site is either “very” or “somewhat” effective. With such a high percentage of campuses focusing energies on their Web sites, you have to look for every advantage against the competition—such as doing a better job targeting prospective students from key populations.

Circling back to the military benefits, there are some questions your campus should explore if you’re going to determine if you’re missing this population from your NPC solution. The first question is how many students enroll who may be bringing some type of military benefit with them to college? This should drive what type of questions you include on your NPC solution. Don’t try to be all things to every student. As I mentioned earlier, there are quite a number of military programs, and you will usually get the best results from your NPC if you keep it simple. For example, if you find that a number of students participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program, you may want to include questions to help those students understand how you’ll provide assistance to them.

Once you determine how many students eligible for military benefits you could potentially reach, the second question is whether your current NPC can include those benefits in the estimate. The federally-provided NPC does not include those benefits, and other calculators may not be able to include this level of customization—potentially leaving some of your prospective students without key information they need to make an informed enrollment decision.

Your NPC should reflect what your campus is able to provide to your students which should provide better information to your student population. You may not be able to reduce the number of secret shoppers in your pool, but the tools you provide on your Web sites can help provide stronger top-of-the-funnel information to your prospective students.

If you have any questions about customizing your net price calculator for active military members, veterans, or other specific groups of students, please e-mail me and I will share strategies that are working at other campuses right now.