The Game Is the Game: Graduate Recruitment in a Competitive Era

I was listening to a podcast recently, and the host said repeated the phrase “the game is the game” a few times. I began to think that while he was talking about football, he was also talking about graduate recruitment in a competitive era.

The analogy to success in the graduate and online space came into even greater clarity as I watched the 2021 Super Bowl. While others were thinking of Patrick Mahomes and Kansas City or Tom Brady and Tampa Bay, I was getting revved up for what we need to do to prosper in these competitive times.

To be successful in the graduate and online space, you have to invest in the basics first. To put it in football terms, you have to take care of your blocking and tackling first. Where is your next best dollar spent? It is exciting, and even understandable, to want to focus on the bright shiny object—in our world that is sometimes a new program idea, or a slick new platform—but without that investment in the basics, it’s all for naught. Like football, it really is all about blocking and tackling—the fundamentals of the game.

Blocking: How much effort, energy, and ultimately dollars are you putting into understanding the market position for your programs as well as the possibilities for new programs? How much are you utilizing surveys to better understand your market and your audience? This is mission critical. I truly think this is the most important, yet underutilized tool in the toolkit—knowing who you are and how you stack up. Take Kansas City and Tampa Bay this season. Both franchises looked at their teams in the off-season and evaluated their strengths and weaknesses, and it led them to the pinnacle of football. Are you doing the same with your programs?

Tackling: Recruit your own alumni and current students! You have qualified leads who are highly motivated by your brand—nurture them early and often! How is your outreach to your own “raving fans?” These students are building blocks to success, can create demand for your programs, and are often good sources of referrals as well. This can help create lift in your program and develop some revenue wins as you start to put resources into the next two buckets.

Blocking: When you do a Google search on your program plus the city you are in (program title + city), are you listed in the first few items? Are you even on page one? In 2020, over 70 percent of searches for graduate programs did not include a school’s name. This is because graduate and online students are far less concerned about the institution at which they enroll than finding just the right program. Will you show up? Go do it. Try a search of “program level + program name + city” and see where you come up. If you aren’t at the top of the search page, you have a problem, if you aren’t on page one, you are in trouble. One school we recently partnered with to increase SEO saw a 97 percent increase in completed RFI’s through optimizing their search results and ensuring that their program was at the top of the page.

Tackling: Are you generating leads for enrollment and not just for leads sake? Many institutions that I have talked with recently seem to think that the number of leads they are producing are—in and of themselves—a mark of success of their marketing efforts. But if leads don’t convert to enrollments, they are just “numbers signifying nothing” (to borrow a Shakespearean reference). A former CFO of mine used to say, “I can’t pay the bills with leads” because it is all about enrollments.

Do you know the conversion rates for each of your programs? If not, you need to. Only by knowing what you are doing today, can you make a plan to increase conversion tomorrow. One school we recently partnered with lowered their cost per lead by 59 percent while tripling their enrollment.

If you are an avid football fan like me, you know that teams get to the top in a lot of different ways; however, they rarely if ever get and stay to the top without some fundamental investments into blocking and tackling. For a graduate and online program to really stand out and flourish—be at the top of their game if you will—they must take care of the blocking and tackling first. The game is the game—and those who invest in the right areas will win.