Why is College Student Recruitment So Uncoordinated?
Part 3 of a series on reforming college admissions and strategies for a successful college search
I can’t remember how many times I heard about the importance of college visits when my sons were in their junior years of high school. “Only by visiting will a student get a feel for the vibe of the place, and if they fit in.”
Colleges sent multiple emails and postcards to my sons, encouraging them to see the campus. And, yes, we went on plenty of visits. I genuinely valued those trips as a chance to bond with my boys as much as learn about colleges. But, in retrospect, I am not entirely sure of their value — at least to the colleges that played up their importance.
Visits have become a big business. They have launched a nascent industry and spawned a pretty forgettable movie. Local lodgings are undoubtedly grateful. Some colleges and universities have built visitor centers just to handle the crush of newcomers. The colleges make it sound like if you are in the area, you should drop by. But in reality, at some colleges, tours are booked up weeks in advance.
Some colleges claim to track who visits as a measure of “demonstrated interest” in the institution. But campus tours have become too popular and now many colleges say that coming on one won’t really help you get accepted.
I Will Ignore Our Most Famous Graduate to Tell You a Boring Anecdote
Many of the tours are so scripted and hurried that they don’t feel insightful at all. Many visits seem like factory tours, with campus guides full of empty stories (looking at you, Boston University, where our tour guide nattered on about the importance of not stepping on the campus crest embedded in the cobblestones — but ignored the statue right next to it dedicated to the university’s most famous graduate, Martin Luther King Jr.).
Others were carefully-calibrated events. At Skidmore College, the tour guide talked enthusiastically about the quality of the food, then took us through the cafeteria just in time to get a warm cookie right out of the oven. Sold!
Some colleges offer large guided tours of 30–40 people, then offer smaller tours based on what major you might be interested in, or a special feature such as the Honors College. One tip: sign up for those if you can. At the University of Pittsburgh, my son ended up getting a one-on-one tour from an honors student because no one else showed up. He learned more from that guy in five minutes than we learned on the hour-long large tour.
Northeastern University also is smart about its tours and guides. They don’t wear college t-shirts or polos, at least not from what I saw. Our guide was informative about the school, but didn’t seem to be cheering for it (“The dining food is… fine,” she said, searching for the right word.) She was casually dressed and unrehearsed. That lack of insignia wear and pretense made the tour seem more authentic and authoritative.
Where is the Follow-Up?
Still, no matter what colleges we toured, they didn’t seem to be very good at following up or coordinating their lists. We had a number of colleges that continued to send us mail encouraging us to visit, even though we did just that months earlier (e.g., Miami University of Ohio and Bates College).
The lack of coordination is not just about college tours. My son, Reid, also had numerous colleges reminding him to apply after he had already, in fact, applied. Four days after the deadline, two colleges that Reid had just applied to, Oberlin and Occidental, invited him to a webinar to learn more about them. Duh.
And we barely heard from some of the other colleges we visited, including Skidmore, even though we could still taste that warm cookie.
Why does this happen? Why aren’t colleges more disciplined and organized when it comes to recruiting students, and following up with them?
Earlier in this series, I wrote about taking note of which colleges pursue you as much as you pursue them, and why applying Early Decision is not worth it. In this post, I want to speak more to colleges, and how they can be better about identifying potential students and nurture those relationships.
Invitations to tour a campus are just one segment of the veritable avalanche of inquiries and materials that high school students get, much of it undifferentiated and undisciplined. It is also bewilderingly wasteful. Colleges market themselves like coupons in a ValPak. And like that junk mail, most is unopened and thrown away.
The Same Thing, Over and Over Again
So many emails are obviously being churned out by the same company. The wording is almost exactly the same, and often so is the font. They just come from different colleges.
Here are some examples:
And
And
Reid got all of this and more, an endless cacophony of college correspondence. At the peak, Reid was getting more than 50 emails a day from colleges. I don’t have the impression that he was unique — I imagine tens of thousands of students were getting a similar volume of emails. There was no way to keep up with this many inquiries, even if he wasn’t a teenager who generally didn’t check his email anyway.
And some colleges (or the companies they are hiring) can’t even get the little things right, like personalizing an appeal. Check out the subject line on this email that Reid received.
The hit rate of these emails has got to be impossibly small. The strategy can’t be much more than dragging nets across the depths of the Internet and seeing what turns up. These endless attempts to capture Reid’s interest, and the 90+ percent failure rate in actually getting him to notice made me sad for these colleges. There has to be a better way of finding prospects with a genuine interest in your college.
Some Advice on Following Up and Maybe Standing Out
Here is my knowledgeable (if unsolicited) advice:
- Confirm that there is at least a baseline of interest between the college and the student. Has the student opted in to any sort of communication from a college? Has the student indicated that he or she is interested in pursuing the most highly thought-of major at the college? If not, the college should probably move on.
- Repetition is not a show of flattery. It’s spam. No, Kennesaw State University — you probably should realize that emailing a teenager 30 days in a row is not making a positive impression, nor is it likely to break the dam of indifference.
- Follow through appropriately when a measure of interest has been established. If a potential student has visited your campus, came to an information session at the child’s high school, or visited a college’s booth at a college fair, the tenor of the exchanges between college and potential applicant should change. Colleges should be sending different materials and reaching out in new more-personal ways to those students. But from what I witnessed with two children, three years apart, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
- If you are trying to form a relationship with a student for the first time, scour what you know about potential applicants to get their attention. Don’t send brochures about how many majors your college has — if the potential student is interested in one of your majors, emphasize that at the expense of almost anything else. Does the student have any interest in sports? If not, a photo with the student’s name on a football jersey probably isn’t much of a come-on. Don’t just talk about how “affordable” your college is — put it into dollar figures. Estimate the net cost for a typical student. Most colleges aren’t willing to do that, but that is the kind of information that can get potential applicants’ attention, and filter up to their parents.
- Colleges need to be realistic about the sea they are fishing in. A major state flagship university doesn’t need to send a brochure to every potential student to get them to apply. But a niche small college in an out-of-the way location will have to do a lot more to establish reasons for students to take interest. Reid received emails from such places as the University of Maine at Machias and Limestone University. He didn’t see any obvious connection — and neither did the colleges, from what they said. The inquiries seemed like Hail Mary passes rather than sincere efforts by colleges to identify and grow more likely pastures of potential students.
Few Colleges Can Tell You What Makes Them Different
I visited dozens of college campuses as a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. I learned that every college has a different culture, a different level of respect between faculty and students, a different level of openness, and a different way of responding to criticism, both internal and external. Also, colleges always had an aspect that made them special, whether it was a signature building, proximity to an appealing strip of restaurants or a neighborhood, unusual success in certain academic disciplines, or an inspiring leader or faculty member. Yet very little of that comes across in the way that colleges market themselves to potential applicants.
Only a few stood out. For example, my son found the information he got from High Point University to be pretty creepy because it assumed a familiarity that made him uncomfortable: he was promised that he would have a dedicated parking space if he made an appointment to visit, a designated golf cart to ride in, and he got an invitation to sign up for a weekly affirmation email from the college president. He got half a dozen thick, high-quality brochures from High Point, so voluminous and detailed that they read more like a prospectus for a retirement property than a college viewbook.
It’s not for everyone, but at least this college is trying to do something different. Others could learn from High Point. Its high-touch overwhelm-you-at-every-contact approach makes an impression. And making an impression makes all the difference in bringing in students.
Yes, college visits can tell you something, and so can any kind of college outreach. But it is what happens after the visit — or after any other kind of a connection has been made — that matters. Very few colleges are doing that part of student recruiting well.
In the next post, I will write about colleges marketing themselves in groups, a risky but rewarding ploy that some colleges use. More should try it.
