Question: What percentage of your incoming first-year students receive 75 percent of your institutional aid resources?
This blog is the second of a three part series. In the first installment I looked at price sensitivity in relation to the wealth of private colleges. While there may be concepts here that help inform the awarding of aid at public institutions, the simple fact that public institutions usually have a much smaller pool of institutional aid makes this topic less relevant to them. (One quick take-away for all institutions should be that full- or near-full-ride scholarships are perhaps much less effective than having those funds spread out more broadly.)
Calculating your distribution of aid number
To calculate your distribution of aid number (which I’ll refer to as the “number”) for your campus, simply create a list of your students with the amount of institutional aid awarded to each, ordered from high to low (and including students getting no institutional aid). Determine how much aid makes up 75 percent of your total aid, and then calculate what percentage of students it takes to use up that much aid.
Continue reading “Calculating the most efficient and effective use of financial aid” »
What are the driving factors that influence why students enroll at your institution? The reasons may vary from student to student, but I am sure if you conducted a poll on your campus, you would find some general themes that ring true. Once you understand the motivating factors for your current students, you can focus your messaging for prospective students to address the factors that may be top-of-mind as they are considering their higher education options.
Every year, hundreds of campuses administer the Student Satisfaction Inventory™ (SSI) to their students. In addition to more than 70 items rated for importance and satisfaction on the general student experience, the SSI includes nine items that address factors in a student’s decision to enroll. The 2012 national research report Why Did They Enroll?: The Factors Influencing College Choice focuses on data from more than 55,000 students who completed the SSI in fall 2011 at more than 100 public and private four-year and two-year institutions, with a special emphasis on the responses of nearly 22,000 first-year students.
Enrollment factors for first-year students by institution type (click on image to enlarge).
Continue reading “Understanding the enrollment motivations of college students” »
2012
May 8
Three critical junctures for collaboration between financial aid and admissions offices
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In my work with campuses, I am often surprised that many financial aid offices understate their impact on the enrollment outcomes at their institutions. Financial aid officers often don’t realize how the knowledge and the data they hold can empower admissions officers. For this reason, it is critical that enrollment managers recognize the role that financial aid officers play in recruitment, as well as help foster a positive relationship between admissions and financial aid throughout the recruitment cycle.
To help enrollment managers, I suggest that there are three critical points in the recruitment cycle when the financial aid office and the admissions office need to collaborate.
Continue reading “Three critical junctures for collaboration between financial aid and admissions offices” »
As I visit campuses all over the country, one of the questions I often hear is: Do you have suggestions on how I can advance my career? Having worked in higher education for more than 35 years, I have seen first hand a wide variety of ways that higher education professionals can advance their careers. I think these five recommendations are the most helpful.
1) Make your work more than a job
Those who advance their careers often view their work as more than a job. They have a passion to improve the lives of the students they serve. Whether they work in recruitment or retention, or with traditional-age students or nontraditional adult learners, they believe that their work contributes to their students’ lives. So my first suggestion is to be passionate about the work you do and the contributions you make. Passion drives us to do more, learn more, and impact the lives of those around us more.
Continue reading “Five steps to advance your career in enrollment management” »
2012
Apr 25
Three basics for monitoring, tracking, and responding to meet your fall class objectives as May 1 approaches
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The talk on every campus in the coming weeks centers around upcoming exams, graduation, and the May 1 response date for recruitment. Anxiety and anticipation abound as campuses plan to seat classes for the fall. Even though everyone knows that June 1 is “the new” May 1, the universal response date remains a key time for most of those in the world of enrollment management. As you move toward that date and continue to push for optimized enrollment for fall 2012 (the number of students you want, the types you want, and at the revenue line you need), there are many essential factors to monitor and measure on a point-in-time comparison dashboard. I’ve included three for your consideration:
1) Application, admit, and deposit numbers for targeted market segments
As different types of students apply, deposit, and even melt back out of the counts on differing timelines, it’s important to track and monitor the populations that are important to your campus on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, identify enrollment trends, and craft timely responses to those trends. Most schools will track in-state and out-of-state students separately. Some schools keep an eye on student athletes, while others are more interested in trends by major. But all agree that the most successful recruitment tracking involves segmenting the market into groups of like students.
On most campuses, we feel as if we’re sprinting down the home stretch to the lazy days of summer. However, in terms of year to year retention, we’re still mid-way through the race.
Noel-Levitz research shows that, for both first- and second-year cohorts, more students make the decision not to return during the spring and summer months than between the fall and spring terms. Thus there is a compelling reason for extra focus and emphasis this time of year and over the summer months.
Click on image to enlarge.
Lew Sanborne, one of our Noel-Levitz retention consultants, works with his clients now, while the students are still enrolled, to make sure that continuing students are well positioned and confident for a smooth transition back to campus in the fall. Lew and his clients typically focus on the following areas.
Student Retention by .
Noel-Levitz just released its 2012 Discounting Report, a summary of fall 2011 discount and net revenue outcomes based on aggregate freshman data from institutions partnering with us to strategically manage their financial aid. (Our participants are 139 private four-year colleges and universities.) The good news from this report is that the average overall freshman discount rate increased less than one percent in 2011, the smallest increase since the peak of the recession in fall 2008. The recent growth trend appears to be slowing as the economy improves.
Discount rates in 2011 increased by less than one percent for the private colleges in this study, the slowest growth since 2008 (click to enlarge)
Continue reading “Eight factors that can affect your discount rate” »
Financial Aid by .
Check out recent Noel-Levitz blog entries and you’ll see my colleagues Jim Hundrieser and Tim Culver both making strong cases for data-informed practices to boost retention and graduation rates by targeting diverse student populations. Tim applauded the University of Texas for its plan to boost graduation rates by 20 percent. For argument’s sake, I want to step off the bandwagon for a moment and make a case for encouraging campuses to stop focusing so much on retention and graduation and to look for the positive side of student attrition. Bear with me for a few more sentences.
One reason community colleges in particular struggle with graduation rates is because so many students in associate’s degree programs transfer to a four-year school before completing the associate’s degree; they then become attrition statistics. This is no doubt why the U.S. Education Department announced plans to broaden its definition of “student success.” It reflects a more accurate, more realistic view of student “attrition.” Students at all institution types identify new major or career paths that are not supported by their first college, and off they go. Some students arrive at college unprepared, or at the wrong time in their lives. The first group is often better served by stepping back and working on skill development, sometimes at their first school, but sometimes at another. The second group may better spend their time focusing on work or family and giving school a try at a later life stage. All of these students leave for good reasons, but their departures count against a school’s retention rate, and if they don’t come back, their leaving will count against graduation rates, too. When students leave for reasons that make sense in their own lives, it should be good for the school too.
Continue reading “Can attrition be a positive outcome for college students?” »
Student Retention by .
Click on image to enlarge.
A new study by Noel-Levitz, OmniUpdate, CollegeWeekLive, and NRCCUA® (National Research Center for College & University Admissions) finds that 94 percent of college-bound high school students said it was important to communicate with colleges during the search process. Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) said they wanted to communicate with campuses before and after applying.
These students (and their parents, according to responses from that group) said that they place high value on those conversations. When asked which recruitment-activities were the most influential, conversation-related activities occupied three of the four top responses—campus tours, talking with students, and talking with admissions representatives, with the campus Website being in the top four as well.
In fact, when asked who they would want to hear from during a live, online video presentation, 80 percent of high school students said they wanted to hear from admissions representatives. Seventy percent said they also would like to hear from current students and financial aid representatives.
Finally, students expressed significant interest in communicating with campuses via live, online chats. This format was their second most-preferred communication option, after e-mail and slightly ahead of social media.
The report is available at the Noel-Levitz Website.
How can you maximize the productivity and satisfaction of your student workers?
Have you taken time to examine how many of your students are working while taking classes? Research confirms that the majority of incoming students anticipate working. According to the latest Noel-Levitz data, 77 percent of first-year entering undergraduates planned to work. Watch for our forthcoming 2012 National Freshman Attitudes Report for a breakdown of the data.
A successful on-campus job assignment can be an effective way to engage students in campus life and increase students’ sense of identity with the institution. Further, having a job while going to school forces students to be more aware of the value of their time and induces them to strive for greater efficiency.
But between classes, homework, extracurricular activities, friends, family, and work, how do students fit it all in? Like most of us, they could use a few more hours in every day. And, most students admit that they would benefit from help with time management skills in the form of employment training workshops or coaching in student success skills.
Time management is an important life skill that begins with time monitoring—deciding how to spend (and invest) time. Below are some questions from our Connections NOW online training program to help student workers get focused. We present these in honor of National Student Employment Week, April 9-13.
Continue reading “Time management tips for student workers” »
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