EdTek Services, Inc.

It comes around each year for admissions professionals, as reliable as the sunrise and sunset or death and taxes, depending on your perspective. New students arriving at our campuses to begin their studies each fall. This period of time represents the culmination of months of work that was preceded by planning and hopefully a training program to keep us finely tuned throughout the duration. No matter how many annual start terms your school has, the concept of the “big fall start” is alive and well in educational institutions across the nation.

Whether we have a pro-active or reactive admissions process, whether we are for-profit, non-profit, career related or liberal arts centered we all want the same thing: to achieve our start goals and ensure the continued financial viability of our institutions.

Check-in day can go awry for the best of us. As Vice President of Enrollment at a traditional college in New England I was once rescued by the athletic director after having spent 2 hours personally crisis-managing 200 students and families that overwhelmed the financial aid clearance station. As a person who suffers from bouts of low-blood sugar and stupidly having not eaten that morning the stress, heat and empty stomach began to get the best of me. However like any good enrollment person, I was too caught up with problem solving our start day to notice I was having problems. Re-enforcements were brought in and I was fine and the backup, resolved.

In consulting I leverage my own experience in guiding clients through the maze of enrollment issues they face. At this time of year I take a moment to reflect back on what I’ve learned and pass along some tips to help other enrollment leaders survive and thrive over the next few weeks.

In no particular order:

1. Stay hydrated

2. Eat regularly (protein, fruits and veggies)

3. Pick a goofy word to say when you are stressed out and about to “blow” your lid. Something that will make you and others laugh.

4. Be proactive across all departments that impact the start. This means taking steps in advance to avoid problems at check-in and during that critical pre-add/drop deadline.

5. Subtract 10% from the number you think will start and report that as your forecast, it is the best way to manage expectations.

6. Meet as many new students and families as possible. This is important for you and them.

7. Make it fun for everyone involved. How about a “show rate” contest with your staff? Divide the group up in two and decide whichever group has the best show rate at start will be served breakfast by the loosing team. This helps to boost morale and should be fun spirited!

8. Print out start lists, check-in lists and just about any list you may need. Computers and networks have a strange way of going down at this time of year.

9. Make an extra effort to show your appreciation to co-workers and staff around your school.

10. Once it’s all over, take a few days off before you come back to lead a full debriefing session.

In the end, remember we are facilitators of the education process.

Have fun out there!

Labels: admissions admissions consulting Admissions criteria admissions training college admissions director of admissions higher education vice president for enrollment management

4/7/2009
Dominick Miciotta
Comments (3)

Do Flashy Acceptance Letters Result in More, Quality Enrollments?

From text messages to videos, games, and confetti filled game tubes, America’s colleges and universities are increasingly creative when sending out acceptance letters. This trend of creativity with informing prospective students of their acceptance is apparently coming at the expense of denials.

Is this “creative renaissance” on the part of enrollment leaders, an expression of creative freedom, or the sign of true innovation meeting its ceiling? In order to attract college qualified students in a shrinking demographic and a troubled economy does spending money on flashy ways to inform a prospective student of their acceptance really secure the class the institution desires? Or is it a way that allows institutional leaders to feel like they are innovating enrollment when really they are just adding another expense line to their budget.

Here are some ways for non-profit institutions to improve their acceptance to start ratio without paying for games, prizes, videos and customized merchandise:

Focus on your target demographic and employ a communications strategy that speaks directly to them
Personalize communications by having professional admissions personnel interact with them throughout the enrollment process
Avoid delegating communications to your student volunteer “Admissions Ambassadors”
Develop an enrollment process flow and write scripts for your admissions staff on what conversation to have, with whom, and when (in the process)
1. Telling your staff to just make phone calls without providing a written guideline for what should be covered is asking for inefficiency
Establish conversion metrics for each member of your staff and if they cannot make calls in the fall and spring because they are on the college tour circuit… stop participating in the college tour circuit, you will find a tremendous improvement in your conversions by freeing up this valuable time (and it will save you A LOT of money)

For more ideas about how to improve enrollment conversions without adding to your expenses contact: dominick@edtekservices.com .

Labels: accreditation accreditation consulting Admissions criteria college board EdTek education consultants higher education Online learning marketing

3/27/2009
Dominick Miciotta
Comments (0)

A Word About Assessment & SAT Scores

Do students achieve the stated learning objectives? What is the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees? What is the acceptance rate? What College Board http://www.collegeboard.com/ tier groups comprise your new class? We see program assessment, classroom assessment and the noted "general" assessment categories. Each provides a set standard of practices and a schedule for reporting results. When navigating the minefield of assessment with an eye that is focused on what's important, how do we determine what counts?

The answer may be an easy, 'it depends on your perspective' but if we had to select one assessment of the higher education experience, what would (or should) it be?

Those of us who work in higher education are aware of the challenges of pleasing multiple constituencies: administrators, trustees, directors, regulators, accreditation commissions, faculty governance, unions and not to mention students and their parents. We debate assessment regularly. This article discussed the issue of making SAT scores optional during the admissions process http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/26/sat. In this case we are assessing the validity and impact on making SAT scores optional as an admissions requirement. This is an important issue to discuss and the early results of this study appear to reveal what we could have guessed: dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement increases diversity and average GPA's of the incoming class and in public institutions results in higher academic achievement. Great! All public institutions should drop the SAT as a requirement. Since public institutions are usually more affordable and dropping this requirement increases diversity and diverse populations tend to have a greater financial need, from an enrollment marketing perspective, this is a win-win-win situation.