THE BOX MODEL

Exit Opportunities

Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Before going into detail on how to use the model to develop recruitment initiatives, I want to re-emphasize an important earlier point: we must always guard against our desire to inflate cohorts by setting easy or inaccurate transition criteria.  Under no circumstances do you want students in your model who do not want to be there.  Medium-cohort prospects who only demonstrate the qualities of early inquiries leads to wasted resources, and you do not want students identified as high-cohort if they never intend to apply to your institution.

Recall that the funnel encourages us to make short-term trade-offs that increase response or conversion rates at the expense of an incoming class that does not match our enrollment goals.  Use this model to do the opposite, to discard students as soon as possible who will never complete their application or deposit. This advice runs counter to institutional efforts to improve national list rankings, which typically factor in application counts.  But discarding students who will never complete will improve your completion rates, increase your selectivity, improve school relations, and help to ensure long-term retention.  This model is meant to provide a long-term benefit to institutions.

You may even want to consider giving prospects an easy way to notify you when they are no longer interested in your institution, something more explicit than a “communication preferences” or “opt out” link in your e-mails.  Perhaps a link that says simply, “I am no longer interested in your university.”  For low- or medium-cohort prospects, you could respond with a “we’re sorry to hear that” message.  But for high-cohort prospects, this would be a clear indication that something has gone wrong, something the model did not predict.  For a high-cohort prospect, clicking that link should generate a notice to the student’s admission counselor to follow up with a phone call to find out what happened.

After all, like any prospect, even high-cohort students can change their commitment to your institution.  Perhaps, after submitting his test scores junior year (one of our sample criteria for T2), a student decides he no longer wants to pursue biology but is instead interested in nursing.  He re-evaluates his shortlist and discovers that you do not have a nursing program, so he as discarded your institution.

It is up to you to either acknowledge the poor fit and to wish him well or to convince him there really are options worth pursuing at your school.  Maybe you do not have a nursing program because your pre-med curriculum is so strong that 90% of your graduates interested in nursing go on to their first-choice schools.  This is something you can only communicate in a personal conversation, and only if you provided your prospects with a way to notify you when their commitment changes.

By keeping your cohorts clean, you will be able to focus your limited resources on relationships with students who have genuine interest in and value to your institution.  As we will see, having accurate cohorts opens up many more recruitment possibilities not otherwise available.

Next: Using the New Model

Moving Beyond Prospect

Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

So, once he applies, a student is no longer a prospect.  He moves to the next stage of the funnel and becomes an incomplete applicant.  Just as we removed the distraction of inquiries present in the enrollment funnel, we now clarify our new model by showing that the only applicants we need to target are those who have not yet completed.

Although the transition from prospect to incomplete applicant is straight-forward, institutions that have different internal and external definitions of “applicant” should be cautious with their criteria.  For example, most colleges consider test scores a part of their application, and may therefore think to move a student from prospect to incomplete applicant when a score report is received.  But, if their prospects are told they are only considered applicants when they pay the application fee, then moving them into the applicant stage when they have not yet paid the fee could lead to confusion or even anger.  Remember that the stages exist from the student perspective, not the other way around, so you must always be confident that your students exist in the stages that match their understanding and expectations.

Completed applicants who meet your admission criteria move into the admitted stage.  And admitted students who deposit move completely out of our model.  Again, to eliminate distractions, we removed the “enrolled” stage from the enrollment funnel.  In admissions, the enrollment deposit is the last thing we need to focus on.  Coincidentally, this leaves us with a nice representation of the college search process from the student’s perspective, which was our goal all along.  Notice that the three triangles along the bottom each represent college search milestones from the student’s perspective.  They are the core concerns and questions the student faces at each stage of the college search process: whether or not to apply, to complete, or, in the end, to deposit.

Next: Exit Opportunities

Prospect Transitions

Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Luckily, in this model, transition criteria are completely defined by institutions.  In fact, the transition criteria can be unique for each school.

For easy reference, I have labeled the transition from low- to medium-cohort T1 and labeled the transition from medium- to high-cohort as T2.

T1 and T2 will likely consist of multiple institution-defined criteria.  To move into a higher cohort, students can match either a single criterion, a subset of criteria, or all of them; it is up to you to find the set of measurements that best models student characteristics and behaviors.  This is an area that will likely require tweaking at least once each year through solid research and analysis.

Be careful not to set the criteria too low.  An institution stuck recruiting in the enrollment funnel mindset would likely set a response to search as one of the criteria for T1.  And, of course, that could be a valuable measurement when combined with some other demonstration of positive interest.  But, by itself, responding to search only means the student is willing to hear more about your institution (and sometimes not even that much); she has not yet made the emotional transition that is required to cross into the medium cohort.

We face the constant desire to increase the number of students in later stages of our model, but this temptation must be avoided.  The goal for low-cohort prospects is to build a relationship that leads to a subset of them placing your institution on their short list.  It is not in your long-term interest to try to move every low-cohort prospect into the medium cohort.  In fact, it is preferable that students who will never end up applying are weeded out as early as possible.  That may sound like an obvious piece of advice, but many institutions try to position themselves as all things to all people.  Not only does that lower your credibility, it also overextends your resources trying to recruit students who will eventually (because they are intelligent) realize that attending your institution is not in their best interest and either never apply, never complete their application, never deposit, renege on their decision to enroll, or (in the worst case) never matriculate.

Always keep in mind that this model is not about pushing students from one stage to the next; instead, its goal is to more accurately identify when students have made those transitions themselves so you can better recruit the kids who believe they are a good match for your school.

To avoid inflation, the basic idea behind each criterion for a transition point is that it must accurately reflect behavior for at least 75% of the students who fall into that category.  For example, if you believe a campus visit should be a criterion for transition from low to medium cohort, then at least 3 out of every 4 people who visit your campus should demonstrate the behavior of medium prospects.  That is, at least 75% of your campus visitors should immediately show an increased commitment to your institution.

If you examine your data, however, you would likely find that percentage a little lower.  If so, it could be because families who take the college search process very seriously more frequently use campus visits to eliminate a school from a longer list of possible schools.  Or it could be because demonstrating an increase in commitment requires at least a small passage of time.

If you find yourself in this situation, then you can combine your “campus visit” criterion with some further measurable action occurring after the visit, such as a request for department-specific information, an e-mail to a faculty member, or attendance at an off-campus event in the student’s area.  Recall that contact by itself is not an indicator of interest; however, if it occurs after some opportunity to remove your school from consideration (such as a campus visit), then it could be worthy of a transition point.  In this case, it would depend on whether or not 75% of your prospects who match these two criteria demonstrate the characteristics of the medium cohort.

To become a high-cohort prospect, the student must meet one, some, or all the criteria you define as part of T2.  These criteria should indicate (again, for at least 3 out of every 4 prospects), that the student is ready to apply to your institution.  One example might be receiving an official test score from a student prior to her senior year in high school.  After all, if she is willing to pay to send your institution her test scores, she is probably fairly committed to applying.  You will end up with a leaner medium cohort if you come up with accurate T2 criteria that prospective students can demonstrate in any year of high school.

Another example of a good T2 criterion might be a request for an application or fee waiver.  For that reason, fee waivers should always be provided if requested, but never given out automatically.  If students receive automatic fee waivers, then you have lost the ability to use them as an accurate transition criteria into the high-cohort.  You have also potentially diminished the quality of your high-cohort prospect pool.

Unlike the stages in the model, these example criteria are all clearly institution-defined.  What is nice about this approach is that students cannot “game” the system because they do not know the transition points.  And because the criteria are based on hard data and apply to at least 75% of your prospects, you can be confident that students settle into the correct cohort, without inflation.  If you are fighting the reputation of being a “safety school” for other institutions, this model can help you weed out or deny those students who do not have a genuinely strong interest in your institution.

Just as the point of the model is not to push students from one stage to the next, the point of segmenting prospects using transition criteria is not so you can discard lower cohorts for higher.  An institution that targets a single cohort to the exclusion of the others does so at its own peril because it ignores the fact that not all prospects enter the search process at the same time.  As helpful as transitions are to institutions, never forget that everyone is a prospect until they apply.

Next: Moving Beyond Prospect