THE BOX MODEL

What Comes Next

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

It can be very hard to stop thinking in terms of prospects, inquiries, applicants, admits, and accepts.  But freeing yourself from that mindset is essential to moving your institution to the next level of engagement and selectivity.

As you develop your transition criteria and brainstorm new initiatives, always try to keep in mind the beliefs this new model was based on:

• We no longer control the information students use to make their decisions.
• Using contact to measure interest is hazardous at worse and worthless at best.
• Institutions exist from the student perspective, not the other way around.
• There is no such thing as an inquiry; until they apply, everyone is a prospect.
• Forcing students through stages leads to inflated and diluted cohorts.
• Students should never be discarded from the model, but…
• Students should be able to leave the model at any point.
• Measure transition criteria; no other criteria are important.

The description and approach you should use for each prospect cohort are as follows:

• Low-cohort prospects have not yet placed your institution on their shortlist.  Start a value dialogue and allow students with no interest in your institution to exit as quickly as possible.
• Medium-cohort prospects display some interest in your school but have not yet decided to apply.  Discover and address their concerns.
• High-cohort students will apply to your institution when given the opportunity.  Provide one-to-one guidance and begin building a network with alumni, faculty, staff, and students.

I wish you all the best.

Using the New Model

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

Now that we have a model that represents the college search process from the student perspective, with transition criteria our institution can use to accurately identify interest and commitment, we can begin identifying approaches for each stage that will help us to develop recruitment initiatives that provide real value to our students.

Here, then, is the completed model, now with suggested approaches layered on top of the different stages.  As you may have guessed from the nursing example above, there is a significant difference in strategy required for high-cohort prospects as opposed to low- and medium-cohort prospects.  This also goes back to our earlier warning about treating high-cohort prospects the same way you treat your other prospects.  Students who submit their test scores prior to their senior year, for example, should no longer be recruited; you have already succeeded in recruiting them, now you should move on to guidance and retention.

The criteria you defined for T1 and T2 may help you to identify which specific initiatives you should pursue.  For example, if you now believe that a search response must be paired with some other positive indicator of interest to qualify the student for a transition from the low- to medium-cohort, then that might change how you construct your search campaign.  Your push would no longer be to generate a response but to begin a value dialogue.

A value dialogue means finding out what the prospect wants and where your institution fits in.  Many schools would begin this process by asking their prospects what their interests are.  But most students are savvy enough to know the game is rigged–no matter which interests they choose, your institution is probably the “perfect” match for them.  Rankings work the same way; throwing numbers at a student does nothing to convince them you would really be a good match.

Instead, a better approach would be to highlight successful students and alumni in a variety of fields (even if those fields might not match the student’s current interests).  Success stories will not give you the market penetration you would get by professing to be “all things,” but the projection of success and its association with your curriculum, faculty, campus life, or other quality unique to your school, could help move interested low-cohort students into the medium cohort.

The viewbook also acts as a simple value dialogue.  Students use the viewbook to discard institutions that do not have their major, are the wrong size, or just do not match with their self-perception.  Since applying is the milestone in prospects’ minds, your goal with the low-cohort prospects is to present your school accurately and let those students for whom the message does not resonate exit as soon as possible.

Those students for whom the message resonates will eventually move into the medium cohort.  Students here should demonstrate many of the characteristics associated with inquiries under the traditional enrollment funnel.  However, unlike in the enrollment funnel, the goal of the medium cohort is not to get students to apply but to show enough value to them that they will apply when the opportunity becomes available.  This expands our recruitment market beyond current high school seniors to students in all years in high school.  It also helps address one of the more bizarre results of current search campaigns: the long gap between becoming an inquiry as a responder sophomore or junior year and applying as a senior.

Initiatives targeting medium-cohort prospects should aim to identify those concerns or problems that could keep the student from applying.  Although each student can be worried about different things at different stages in the process, common concerns include financial aid, academic reputation, advising, housing, dining, campus safety, athletic and extracurricular opportunities, and overall quality of student life.

These concerns all fall under the general umbrella of “security,” both economic and personal. Economic security includes financial aid and whether or not the school’s academic reputation will lead to job opportunities.  Personal security includes academic support, physical comfort, safety, recreation, and friendships.

For that reason, your initiatives targeting medium-cohort prospects should aim to identify and address their particular concerns.  Your goal is not to push them (or worse, bribe them using fee waivers) to apply.  Instead, address their concerns and they will move into the high-cohort stage of their own accord, ready to apply when the time comes.

Assume your initiatives for the low- and medium-cohorts have succeeded and your high-cohort population contains students who are very likely to apply when your application becomes available their senior year.  Accordingly, at this point, you should switch from a recruitment to a retention approach, providing one-to-one guidance your prospects will value.

It may seem odd to try to retain students who have not yet been admitted.  But since application rates directly affect selectivity and you know these students are committed to your school, the students in the high cohort will always be worth your time and attention.  For that reason, if your counselors do not give out their direct phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or instant messenger screen names, they should make an exception for this group.

Retaining these students will require you to build a network beyond your office.  Encourage your alumni, faculty, and student service departments to reach out to these students and their families.  Connect them with the leaders of campus clubs matching their interests.  More relationships at this stage will lead to higher application completion rates and an easier job getting admits to deposit.  In other words, when your relationships increase, your institution’s selectivity will follow.

Students who begin the application process and move to the “incomplete applicant” stage should still no longer be recruited.  Our goal for the remaining students is to encourage them to complete by continuing to provide counsel and guidance.  If possible, expand the scope of your relationships to their parents and high school counselors, since they have a large impact on student completion rates.

As one example, consider inviting high school counselors to fill out an online form to help identify scholarship opportunities for applicants from their schools.  While there, let them know which students still need to submit transcripts or teacher recommendations (perhaps required in order to be considered for award consideration).  Or, invite parents to fill out a “brag sheet” that will be read by the admission counselor and used when determining scholarships.  While filling out the brag sheet, identify for the parents the remaining application items their children still need to submit.  Be considerate of which items you show to parents; keep in mind that school teachers and counselors would not appreciate parents calling them to complain about late items.

Once a student is admitted, you should continue to use a retention approach.  Do not slip back into the recruitment mentality of the enrollment funnel; more than at any other stage, admitted students should be treated as if they had already decided to enroll.  Expand or build upon the network of relationships you created when they were in the high-cohort stage.  For example, ask your residential life office to combine residential advisor training with a mentorship program for incoming students.

Send admitted students your university’s logo on a window decal for their car (and their parent’s).  Create a website where they can meet other admitted students and cement their commitment to your institution.  Perhaps build online communities themed around each of your freshmen dormitories, and let students join the one they find most interesting.  Embed chat rooms into the website and set up “dorm parties” where students can mingle on nights and weekends.

Next: What Comes Next

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

Removing Distractions

Note: For context, you should read the posts in the "Enrollment Funnel Failure" series before reading this article.

A better model would acknowledge that institutions fit into the student decision-making process, not the other way around.  The stages, therefore, would exist from the student’s viewpoint.  But in order to be useful to institutions, the transitions between stages must be identifiable using criteria we can measure.  That would allow us to identify where in the process the student exists so we can craft messages and recruitment initiatives that provide real value.

Let us build this better model step by step.

We already identified the boundary between prospect and inquiry as a false distinction that provides no real value to recruiters.  Everyone is a prospect until they apply.  This matches how a student views the college search process: he does not start the search by deciding which schools he will attend; he is focused instead on determining which schools he will (or will not) apply to.  He would never label himself an inquiry and would be the first to tell you that his list of schools could change at any time.  Our model should remove the inquiry stage entirely, even as it acknowledges that not all prospects are equally committed to an institution.

The new model discards the inquiry stage entirely and instead segments prospects into three cohorts based on their relationship with an institution. As with all our stages, the three prospect stages exist from the student perspective.

The lowest cohort encompasses the traditional definition of prospects, responders, and early inquiries.  Basically, it is the set of students who have not yet made a firm commitment to your institution.  This includes students not traditionally considered prospects, such as search responders.  These students may have met with a representative of your institution in their hometown or even interviewed.  But, since contact does not indicate interest, you have not yet seen any clear indication that your institution has been placed on the students’ so-called “shortlist” of schools to which they may apply.  Think of it as purgatory–your school faces the very real possibility of being either kept for further consideration or discarded entirely.  Understanding your position this way will drastically change how you communicate with this cohort.

The medium cohort contains students who have not yet decided to apply to your school but like what they have seen so far.  They have demonstrated some measurable indication that your school ranks favorably on their list.  This stage is the rough equivalent of the traditional definition of inquiry.  Most institutions like to pretend that all their prospects exist in this stage.

The highest cohort contains prospects who have decided to apply to your institution as soon as the chance is offered.  They may be seniors, juniors, or sophomores; their age is completely irrelevant as long as the decision has been made.  Still, until they apply, they will continue to require your occasional focus and attention.  These students have made a not-inconsequential emotional commitment to your institution that requires a different communication approach than you would use for either the low or medium cohorts.

We must not fall back into the erroneous belief that we can push students through stages that only have meaning for us; these three cohorts exist from the student perspective.  But, in order to make our message and recruitment activities meaningful, we do need to be able to identify when students have made the transitions between the three cohorts themselves.

Next: Prospect Transitions

Part 5 of 5
The Enrollment Funnel, Summarized

Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

The problems with the enrollment funnel, again, are:

• Students who do not progress to the next stage of the funnel are often ignored or discarded as institutions concentrate their resources on those who demonstrate the greatest perceived interest.
• A desire to push students through specific stages of the funnel (the focus on high response and conversion rates between stages) can lead to an incoming class that does not reflect the institution’s original enrollment goals.
• The focus on well-understood funnel stages and historical response and conversion rates limits an institution’s willingness to look beyond its previous approaches–deviation from the funnel is seen as costly and dangerous.
• Over time, the funnel has become less and less accurate; it is no longer useful as a model.

These problems exist because the funnel is predicated on two incorrect beliefs: that institutions control student decision making because they control communications, and the best way to measure interest is through contact.

Next Time: A New Recruitment Model

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Part 4 of 5
Finger in the Dam

 Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

In an attempt to salvage the familiar and to squeeze reality into the enrollment funnel, many experts have promoted remedies that address the problems listed above.  Unfortunately, these fixes rarely work.

For example, attempts to push students through the stages often leads to short-term trade-offs that seriously imperil enrollment objectives.  When faced with this situation, common sense would tell us to re-examine our desire to push students through stages.  But experts instead tell us to use predictive modeling to better align our initial purchases.

In other words, if we originally purchased 10,000 students with the characteristics we want but only 100 exited the funnel, and we want 200 students next year, then we should increase next year’s purchase to 20,000 students.  That way, even if we make the same bad decisions, we are still left with the class we want.

Or, if prospects no longer appear interested in your institution, rather than find out what they want and what you can offer them, maybe you just need a new image, a new name or logo, or a mission statement.  In other words, there is no need to change what you say, just how you say it.  Branding initiatives fall into this category.  Basically, their suggestion is to exert a lot of time and energy focusing on things that are only tangentially related to recruitment.

Another expert suggestion for when students ignore your message is to change its frequency.  For example, our search vendor sent out 15 e-mails to each name we purchased, until they either responded or told us to never speak to them again.  When we raised some concerns about the frequency, we were told politely that we were not the experts, that as long as a single student responded to the 15th e-mail, the frequency was justified.  They said students who responded to the last few e-mails were just as likely to enroll as the earlier responders.

Of course, when we performed our own analysis, we found that was not at all true.  This vendor spammed our prospective students and used response rates as a justification.  It was not malicious; they simply never stopped believing that we judged their value to us in terms of quantity, as opposed to the quality of the inquiry and how the student felt about us.  They operated as if the conversion from prospect to inquiry were the finish line, not the start of a very important conversation.  So we fired them.

Ultimately, there is no reason to laud a record-breaking search campaign if a large portion of the responders do not match your institution’s enrollment objectives.

The moral of the story is that no one else can recruit on your behalf because no one else understands your institution or can make the personal connection required to attract quality students.  Luckily, when you stop using the enrollment funnel, you get rid of the very same problems that made you look for outside help in the first place.

Continued…

Part 3 of 5
Why the Enrollment Funnel Fails

 Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

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.

Continued…

Part 2 of 5
Serious Problems

Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

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.

Continued…