Day 3, Noel-Levitz 2009 - The Future of Student Recruitment, Marketing and Retention (Panel Transcript)

 In a session entitled, The Future of Student Recruitment, Marketing, and Retention, an all-star panel addressed issues and emerging trends on enrollment management, marketing, and retention.

Panel members included: Kevin Crockett, Noel-Levitz; Doug Christiansen, Vanderbilt University; Carol Aslanian, Education Dynamics; Brenda Williams, University of New Haven, and Ken Steele, Academica Group.

Read my best effort to transcribe/paraphrase the panel discussion.

What recruitment advice do you have for a two-year community college facing declining high school populations in a rural setting and increasing competition?

Ken Steele: It's a common situation. In general terms, compete more aggressively in-state with mission differentiation and brand building. Identify pillar programs to draw students from a distance or invest in new programs. Finally, how do we roll-out our programs? Are we weak in inquiry generation? Conversion? Are we using the web effectively? These are questions to consider.

Carol Aslanian: Put programs online to open up new markets, region, state with high volume key topics. Or offer hybrid or weekend programs for adults to come less frequently and compress education.

Kevin Crockett: Online education is not a panacea. It’s largely a local enterprise. Extending the campus by sites will increase potential. We look nationally at completion rates at 2-year colleges is only about 25%. Look at retention strategies to keep more.

Carol Aslanian: 2/3 of students would like to study with institutions in their region. Look at setting-up partnerships with four-year institutions so students can finish those 3rd and 4th years.

Doug Christiansen: In a strategic enrollment planning view, you have to take a  hard look at yourself as an institution. You can’t be all things to all people. Maybe we can do 10 things, instead of the 15 on the table. Where does the institution want to be long term? It’s hard discussions with your board and your president.

What ideas do you have regarding retention for adult-learners?

Aslanian: We have to redefine what retention means for adult-learners. Many times they haven’t left they have stopped out. Family and life issues come about and the institutions forget they were there. Always follow-up and find out if it is a stop-out or did they just leave for another institution. Constant follow-up and tracking is very important.

Williams: One of the challenges will have to be to address how our faculty operates. We will have to examine a new role for faculty for advising adult students. Adults need a different type of advising and mentoring. New models are needed that are unique to your institution.

With student test results reflecting a lack of preparation what strategies should we employ to address this reality?

Schroeder: We need to think more systemically about this issue. Community colleges are in a unique position to get faculty to work with local high school departments. One of the best things you can do is to think about how to improve success with local summer boot camps, math support, and proactive intervention strategies. Start working with the high schools about what students are not able to do and how to adapt.

What is the impact of a testing-optional approach in college admissions?

Christiansen: As I think about testing, if it is the variable used to admit or deny, it’s not being used properly. If it’s used more holistically and as a norming mechanism, it provides value to the admissions process. We need to think about the dependencies in our decisions. If it can past the NY times test, you are okay. If you are transparent, and you end up on the NY Times, you are okay. If not, you need to look at your decision variables and processes.

Crockett: It’s interesting that K-12 is moving toward high-stakes testing, while some colleges and universities are considering moving away.  It’s going to require us to build more robust systems to analyze data to predict success.

How to bridge the gap between secondary and post-secondary education?

Williams: This question gets to the heart of the question. It’s not business as usual. We have changing student populations, faculty retirements, and younger faculty members. We must be prepared to bridge the gap between effective teaching and learning. We have to think about different ways to prepare our faculty to work with our students. What happens at the point of entry? How do we use information to better understand our incoming student traits? We are going to have to use more technology to reach our students. We have to look at where institutional resources are placed. A bunch of us are going to have to retire to get out of the way to let some of these younger faculty take over and use new ideas for technology usage, modes of delivery, and revenue generation.

Schroeder: Certainly the issue of pedagogy is a key to engagement. But there is something below the surface that is impacting engagement. We need to teach the students we have not the students you wished you had. Unless I’m missing something, we are not going to have better prepared students any time soon. Are you calibrating your courses to your students? Think about virtual learning communities with a cohort of students sharing courses. It’s a way to connect people with a central purpose.

As a small Canadian college, what are best practices we should be following for orientation?

Crockett: There are some cross border ideas that can work. Integrate some academic component, rather than simply social integration. I’m seeing other schools segmenting orientation around academic interests.

Schroeder: Does anyone in this room not have a job description? On your campus, your students don’t have job descriptions. What does it mean to be a successful student on your campus? In my experience, I’ve never run into a viewbook that talks about studying. You see recreation centers and nice pictures. How clear and consistent are the expectations you are setting? How do they make the most out of the experience to be successful? Does your orientation program provide a road map to do this?

Christiansen: I would say start by asking what you are looking to achieve. What happens in orientation and first-year experience based on attributes? How do you inculcate academics into orientation? If you are primarily doing ice-breakers you are not setting a long-term approach for academic success.

What kind of models where people are faced with online access deficiencies?

Crockett: I’ve had experience with institutions that have bandwidth issues. It’s not an easy issue. You can believe services until that issue is solved. You have to operate in more traditional means until that bandwidth is there.

Williams: Some examples where institutions have partnered with industry to work on the issue. The other piece is a global challenge. Keeping up with the IT budget is a challenge.

Higher education isn’t set up to graduate students in four-years. At the same time, students are accumulating massive amounts of debt. Do you see a time for the demand of accountability converges with the need to graduate in four-years?

Crockett: The broader issues is for institutions to determine the length of time to complete a program whether it’s 2 years, 4 years, then we need to keep that promise. We need to recognize student differences and career demands and adjust our education offerings. But more importantly, keep that promise.

Aslanian: The reason we have 50% of students over the age of 25 is because are set-up to help these circumstances. There’s a reality here that when I went to college it was understood that you go to college for four years. Now life realities have changed this expectation.

Crockett: If you are looking for new pools or markets, look to wandering around with some college credits as an opportunity.

Christiansen: I think Kevin is on target, it’s about defining credentials. It’s not just a 2-year vs. 4-year discussion. Are you articulating what you can do for that student, or are you forcing them through the ways you want to educate them?

Steele: We also have to consider the changing needs and wants of our students. Millennials want life balance straight out of high school -- work, personal, family, and school.  I think all the trends point to ever-extending completion times, ongoing lifelong learning, just-in-time learning, etc.

Schroeder: When I got to campuses and do focus groups, I hear students complain about parking. It’s really a symptom of a deeper problem … space utilization and capacity. We are creating our own bottlenecks with our scheduling of courses. As we finish up summer orientations this month, colleges and universities are running out of seats in English. We need curriculum management with enrollment management.

Aslanian: I’m predicting that online programming will be increasingly popular with high school graduates. They will have lots of experience online and more open to a hybrid approach. 

What do you see the impact of the current economic environment and what are the strategies we should look out?

Christiansen: As we think about the economy, don’t make short-term decisions that will create longer-term issues for you. Some of these short, quick-fix issues will come back to bite us. What are we good at? What can we sustain? These are the questions we should be considering.

Steele: The important thing is to not make non-strategic cuts. The conventional wisdom is to make 5% or 10% across the board cuts. What that is saying is that we are going to do everything that we were doing before; we are just going to do it less. Rather we should look at vertical cuts, investing in opportunities, and paring back non-essential activities.

Aslanian: This is a time to gain share. Don’t cut your budgets in marketing and recruitment. We can attract adult learners, not have to give discounts, and they will pay their own way. The demand is there.

Crockett: When you go about the business of making hard decisions, what are the programs and markets that are driving your economic engine? What can you be best at in your market? Where can you develop real market distinctiveness? Line up resources behind these answers.