Gaining Acceptance

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Recruiting & Retention Technology

Gaining Acceptance

9/1/2007

By Matt Villano

Every year, he adds, roughly 40,000 high school seniors apply, and the school admits about 13,500 with the intent of enrolling around 6,200. Though admittance has remained fairly constant in the past 10 years, enrollment has grown from 5,136 in 1988 to just over 6,000 in 2007, and qualification and selectivity have increased markedly. Among those who enroll, FSU has improved its six-year graduation rate considerably, says Burnette: For the class of 2002 (pre-BI), the graduation rate was 63.4 percent, but that figure rose a full 4.5 points for the class of 2006. Clearly, the BI tools help the school not only increase enrollment numbers, but also enroll candidates who are better qualified, and so more likely to end up graduating.

“It might seem like a small increase, but anything that makes our process more efficient and more successful is a step in the right direction,” he says. “As we collect a larger amount of data, the process will only improve over time.”

Rethinking Marketing

Marketing is a key part of recruiting, admitting, enrolling, and retaining students, and a number of schools have turned to new technologies to capitalize on improvements in these areas. At Texas A&M University-Kingsville, officials are using certain aspects of customer relationship management software from Talisma to handle recruitment. Manuel Lujan, the school’s associate vice president for enrollment management, refers to the school’s funnel-model approach as the best way to direct pertinent information to interested applicants and so push viable candidates to the top. The model is constructed around mailings. Students log on to the school’s website, answer some basic questions about their interest level, and request additional information. Behind the scenes, based upon the way students have answered these questions, the Talisma system automatically determines which mailings to send out. If students appear to be marginally interested, they receive general information. If students are curious enough to express specific interest in a particular major, they receive targeted material, and are moved to the top of the queue.

“The idea is to get the most detailed information into the hands of the students who need it most,” Lujan explains. “Obviously, if one student is considering our school more seriously than another, both candidates are important, but we want to make sure the most serious candidate gets the most specific marketing material he or she needs, in order to choose.” The Johnson School, the management school of Cornell University (NY), employs a similar approach, using technology from Media Logic. Before the new technology was put into place, the school recruited professionals for its executive MBA programs by printing up general-interest catalogs in batches of 40,000. Then, a few years ago, Director Tom Hambury opted instead to burn CD-ROMs with the information, in batches of 5,000. Hambury says the decision saved money and made the marketing process more “nimble.” Still, the school wanted to target its efforts even more effectively.