Recruiting the e-Generation: smart admissions administrators are now using the Web to increase yield - Online

University Business, Sept, 2002 by Nicole Rivard

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project 2000 (www.pewinternet.org/reports), nearly three-quarters of young Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 go online regularly, and about half of all American high school students go online every day. More than half of these teens (55 percent) have visited a chat room, and nearly 24 percent of them have created a Web page.

It's no wonder then--with the Internet such a large part of a teen-ager's daily routine--that colleges and universities are catching on to the potential of the Web. They're now using it not only to attract students, but as a means to increase the number of admitted students who actually enroll

The Internet as an Admission Tool 2001, the third annual survey conducted by the consulting firm Education Now (www.ednow.org), revealed that admission and enrollment managers are awakening to the larger communications potential of their Web sites. Sixty-two percent of the respondents said they see the conversion of accepted students to matriculants as a relevant future issue.

For some pioneers in college admissions, the future is now. They are the campuses already using the Internet as a means to achieve their primary goal of attracting, admitting, and yielding high-quality students. Admissions officers at these schools have discovered the Internet offers a level of customer service that the traditional paper world lacks, making it easier to attract those better students.

"As students' SAT scores go up, yield goes down because those students are more competitive," says Jip Inglis, Senior VP of Connexxia (www.connexxia.com), manufacturer of the Web-based AdmissionsGenie, designed to help schools in all phases of the admissions cycle. "The battle to get those high-quality kids is super intense, so anything you can do to show them more personal attention and to make them see how well they would fit into your school, helps." The Internet can also help to distinguish a school from its competition, say e-recruiting pros--something that has become more and more difficult to do with the standard recruiting materials.

"There's a lot of noise out there," says Dennis Matthews, VP/Enrollment at Georgia's Oglethorpe University. "It's harder than ever to distinguish your institution in traditional ways. Even accurate descriptions become confusing when all sorts of schools use the same words to describe themselves. That makes it increasingly challenging to rely solely on print materials." What's more, he continues, "With Caller ID, part-time jobs, and tons of competing activities, it becomes harder and harder to wage effective telephone campaigns to prospective students. Electronic communication is an important supplement. We did not think we could ignore this direction."

BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE

Companies such as Connexxia and ApplyYourself (www.applyyourself.com) are positioning themselves to help colleges and universities like Oglethorpe leverage the power of the Internet to increase yield. Proponents say the Web-based programs and services (starting at $5,000 for ApplyYourself's i-Class, and $30,000 for AdmissionsGenie--and priced according to desired features) can enhance the recruitment process by boosting the level of customer service in the following ways:

Offering personalization through customized e-mails is more effective than generic one-way paper communications, say the experts. HTML e-mail with lively graphics catch the eye, while content can be defined for various target audiences (regional, national, international, gender, minority). Yon simply need to determine what the goal of each message is, advises Anne Made Pascoe, ApplyYourself marketing/communications manager. By targeting messages based on recruitment objective, stage of the admission process, and audience, she says, a school can create an effective communications calendar from which to work. Types of e-mail messages can include:

* invitations to recruiting events and receptions

* newsletters

* Links to the online application

* application deadline reminders

* detailed program information (based on the applicant's specific interests)

"In our research, we discovered that students have a tremendous desire for personalized two-way communication," says Connexia's Inglis. "Most schools tend to send out generic, one-way communications that lead the student to interpret the whole admissions process as, `That's a big school out there, and there's just little me down here: Such communications can be intimidating-even confusing and frustrating--to them."

Enabling communication in minutes, rather than weeks, via highly interactive Web sites, e-mails, chat rooms, and message boards. "Once a school gives a student an admissions decision, there is a four- to eight-week period when the student is trying to decide where to go," says Len Methany, President and CEO of ApplyYourself. "That's a critical time when the school needs to be in touch and show that it really wants that student. In the traditional paper world, the school is probably achieving only one con tact with the accepted student during that yield campaign. With the Internet, a school can achieve three or four different touches in that critical period." Scholarship/financial aid information; alumni, student, and faculty profiles; and invitations to receptions being held in the student's area are all messages that the technology can expediently deliver to students, to help them make enlightened decisions.