Enrollment Funnel Failure 16 Sep 2007
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Part 3 of 5
Why the Enrollment Funnel Fails
The reason the enrollment funnel fails is because it is predicated on two erroneous beliefs: that we control the information students use to make their decisions, and that contact is a good measure of interest.
The enrollment funnel assumes that colleges and universities control the information students use to make decisions, but this is no longer true. Having grown up surrounded by advertising, students no longer make decisions by relying on a single source of information. Instead, they rely on networks, real and virtual, to help make their decisions. Students give more credence to the guidance of family members, teachers, and even their doctors, than they give to institutions. Online college-bound communities and “independent” publications take a lesser, but still contributive, role when gathering information on potential schools. As tough as it is to hear, what your institution says about itself has less credibility than it used to.
But even today, many admissions websites still push students to “join the mailing list,” either out of habit or from a genuine belief that placing prospective students within their communication plans affords them more control over the college search process.
Letters, e-mails, and publications will always have a place in recruitment. The trick is providing real value to students at their current stage in the process, not trying to push them to another stage. Put another way: you cannot manage people; you can only manage their motivations. Because we do not control student behavior, a communication plan or recruitment strategy focused on moving students through the funnel can only ever have tangential, happenstance success.
The second incorrect belief underlying the enrollment funnel is that contact is a good measure of interest in an institution. Although it is true that contact can demonstrate interest and help a counselor determine whether or not a student would be a good fit, if measured incorrectly, it can also potentially harm your institution.
Take phone calls, for example. Most schools probably measure this point of contact and take it as a positive indicator of interest when reviewing applications or pushing students through the funnel. Let us pretend a phone call adds a point to a student’s “enrollment potential” score. There are 3 reasons why relying on this type of contact to indicate interest is misleading at best and harmful at worst.
First, a student who does not call is not necessarily less interested in the school. It could simply be the case that he already has the information he needs to make his selection (perhaps from relatives or teachers). Adding a point to the students who call is like subtracting a point from students who do not. You are left with interest scores that do not match up to reality.
Second, even if a student calls 50 times, every conversation was positive, and the counselor believes strongly that her institution is the student’s first choice, that could all change the next day. Maybe the student is moderately religious and suddenly discovers that your college does not have a chapel. It could be enough of a deal-breaker to devalue completely those fifty points she had accrued.
Finally, if a student calls your institution 50 times, chances are good she is also calling every other institution on her list 50 times. This is the cardinal rule of spam: the more contact you get, the more indiscriminate it is likely to be. Even many first generation families know that contact counts in their favor and make their best efforts to respond accordingly.
That becomes a serious issue. After we moved our admissions website toward a personalized and student-driven account system, we began to receive calls from nervous parents who no longer knew how to “join the mailing list.” Without a way to “prove” their interest in our institution by requesting publications, they felt their son or daughter could be at a disadvantage when it came time to be reviewed for admission.
Even in the early stages of the college search process, savvy families know our expectations and very much do not want to disappoint us. So, when students do follow the enrollment funnel, it is more likely to humor us than because we have control. The irony is tremendous: since all schools measure interest the same way, savvy families know how to show it to us; but, because they are simply gaming the system, admissions offices are left without a fair, accurate, and institution-specific way to gauge student interest.
And institutions are not the only losers. Families who are not so savvy–such as first generation or underrepresented minorities–seem to lag behind. Because they do not know the rules of the game, they appear to have less interest and to move through the funnel more slowly than their counterparts. They do not necessarily have less interest, of course. Many of these students want very much to attend college; they simply do not demonstrate their interest in ways we recognize and measure. We can try to compensate when reviewing applications, but a good model would not put us in this situation to begin with.
Basically, when contact is used as a measure of interest, you end up with an inflated pool of inquiries receiving undue attention and a devalued pool of prospects who have as much (if not more) real interest in your institution. I will suggest some solutions to this problem throughout this paper.
These two beliefs–that contact shows interest and that we can control student decisions–are the central tenets of the enrollment funnel. If they are not true, then the funnel no longer has any value for us. And yet, rather than discard the failed model, we look for ways to fix its many problems.