Enrollment Funnel Failure 13 Sep 2007
- Posted by:
- Categories:
Part 2 of 5
Serious Problems
According to the enrollment funnel, students progress through five distinct stages of increasing interest in an institution: prospect, inquiry, applicant, accept, and enrolled. Some variations on the theme exist, but these five stages are a fairly common component to all of them. For years, institutions have known a few of the very serious problems this model engenders.
Because the enrollment funnel focuses on recruitment and “pushing” students through stages, it demands a continuous short-term approach that leads to problematic trade-offs. Specifically, our desire to push students through specific stages of the funnel (our focus on high response and conversion rates) can lead to an incoming class that does not reflect the institution’s original enrollment goals.
Even worse, our attempts to push students through stages leads to over-inflation; we end up with inquiries who will not apply, applicants who will not finish, and admitted students who will not deposit. Last year at my university, fewer than 18% of search responders began an application; in other words, more than 82% of our applications came from non-responders. Our focus on increasing response rates improved one area, but it hurt us down the road.
This short-term focus on stage transitions also stifles strategic innovation. If new initiatives do not show immediate (i.e., stage-transitional) payoff, they are often discouraged. We are left clinging to modestly-successful historical approaches that will not disrupt any of our tenuous predictive models. In short, the enrollment funnel limits strategic thinking more than it supports it.
For example, our institution sends senior inquiries the first part of our application paired with a viewbook. These two items could not be more diametrically opposite to prospective applicants. The viewbook is used by students to help remove schools from consideration, a tool for the start of the college search process; as such, it belongs in the early prospect stage. The application, on the other hand, is seen by students as a major milestone of the search process; high-quality students only apply to schools after careful consideration, not on a whim. But because we have achieved modest success with this combined approach in the past, we feel safer continuing the mailing (and spending an incredible amount of money on print and postage) rather than pursuing alternatives which may or may not be more successful.
A third problem with the enrollment funnel is that, over time, it has become less and less useful as a predictive model. Students jump straight from prospect to applicant without ever demonstrating the characteristics of an inquiry. Added to that, an increase in applications no longer guarantees an increase in deposits. And students we might traditionally expect to deposit opt instead to attend schools we may not consider competitors. Searching for answers, we try to mold the model to fit reality, are told to mine our data and to perform multi-variable regression analyses. In the end, we are left with a greater understanding of the past, but without any real predictive abilities or suggestions on how to recruit future classes.
But the biggest problem by far with the enrollment funnel is that it encourages us to focus more attention on students in later stages than earlier stages. If students do not flow through the funnel, they are discarded. Case in point: despite being a very well-known and popular higher education consultancy firm, we were the first university to request all prospects from our search vendor, not just inquiries who responded to the initial offer. The idea was so contrary to their prescribed approach, it took two full search cycles before they would consent to give us our data.
Prior to that watershed moment, we never communicated with 80% of the students whose names we initially purchased, choosing instead to focus on the 20% who responded to our search campaign. But when any contact initiated by a student is enough to elevate him from prospect to inquiry, you not only lose out on discriminating prospects, you also end up with an inflated pool of inquiries. Setting the hurdle so low makes the distinction between prospect and inquiry almost worthless for recruitment.
Besides leading to a weakened inquiry pool, in an age of cheap communication, there is no longer any reason why an institution should so eagerly embrace first interest during a search campaign but not after. Anytime a prospect wants to demonstrate first interest, to reach out to your institution, you should jump at the opportunity. Limited space and resources are never an excuse to turn away a student who wishes to take a step forward and interact with your institution. Creating a false distinction between diluted inquiries and unknown prospects is a quick and easy way to lose many potentially great students.
The fact is, until they apply, everyone is a prospect.