Setting Enrollment Strategies and Expectations in a Post-COVID Environment

Joseph Miller, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing, Winthrop University

In higher education, the practice of teaching and learning is the missional core of our educational enterprise. What’s more, as learning organizations, we become scholars, practitioners, and students of our own campuses and experiences. For example, higher education has abundant opportunities to analyze and evaluate experiences to help improve processes, accelerate efficiencies, and learn new ways of optimizing the business of our profession.

Likewise, there are abundant technologies on the market that allow higher education practitioners to conduct such analysis. And, there are no shortages of opportunities.

For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic provided learning opportunities across our campuses and within our profession. As institutions begin to reset from the previous years of the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment managers (in particular) face a tenuous recruitment climate at the nexus of intense completion among institutions, demographic changes, economic forces, and cultural expectations from prospective students and families that continue to place pressures on our systems. These driving forces of demography, economy, and culture have collided to create an intensely competitive enrollment landscape that will shape enrollment for the foreseeable future. However, as enrollment managers and campus leaders learn to adjust in this new environment, the quality of our response should be guided by the principles of a learning organization.

So, what have enrollment managers learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that will help our institutions improve our position in the upcoming years?

First, consider the following - for two recruitment cycles during the COVID-19 pandemic, students were removed from normal admissions activities (i.e. pre-pandemic) and had to adjust to virtual recruitment events, limited contact events, or were completely cut off from the college fair/campus visit process altogether. During this time, solutions like virtual campus visits, virtual information sessions, virtual events, video content, and social media became the tools that many colleges and universities employed to maintain recruitment operations. In this landscape, the disruptive forces of demography, economy, and culture further complicated the digital recruitment space with intense competition for prospective students. During the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions that already had the position of high brand visibility, strong market share, and loyal consumer clientele enjoyed the good fortune of continued strong enrollments despite the shift to digital recruitment. In other words, the shift to digital marketing and recruitment during COVID-19 – while challenging for all institutions – did not appear to negatively impact well-positioned institutions. However, institutions that struggled with lower brand visibility, weak market share, and soft market position found the digital marketing and recruitment space even more challenging – and enrollments at these institutions suffered as a result. The evidence is clear – students and families regressed to the mean of familiar name-brand institutions during the pandemic as lesser-known institutions found it difficult to capture the attention of prospective students in the immensely crowded digital space.

What lessons and experiences will enrollment managers carry forward in a post-COVID recruitment environment?

Asking how we know when we have emerged from the pandemic is like asking how we know when we have emerged from a recession. There are both leading and lagging indicators that provide signals, but time is the real deciding factor. In the meantime, as we reflect on the insights learned from the past two years, a few guiding principles – The Three M’s – provide a structure around how enrollment managers can structure their engagement in student recruitment for the upcoming recruitment cycles.

“As enrollment managers and campus leaders learn to adjust in this new environment, the quality of our response should be guided by the principles of a learning organization”

The Three M’s:

The “Three M’s” (Mindset, Market, and Media) provide a framework for enrollment managers that can guide decision-making to establish post-COVID strategies, goals, tactics, and operations for new student recruitment. Notice, not all of these considerations of “The Three M’s” assumes a continuance of digital or virtual recruitment practices. No doubt, both students and parents (and our colleagues) have complained of “Zoom fatigue” and have indicated that they are eager to return to in-person, on-campus experiences. However, it is hard to deny the benefits that many digital and virtual technologies (like Zoom) have had when it comes to improving access and convenience to student recruitment. Virtual recruiting technology is here to stay; but enrollment practitioners have the benefit of knowing how to use it more judiciously and in a way that optimizes the recruitment experience. Suffice it to say, it may be too early to tell at this point; but I suspect that the trend will begin to slightly shift away from the reliance on digital recruitment media as students and families welcome a return to more in-person and on-campus recruitment experiences. Below are guiding questions, principles, and considerations, using “The Three M’s,” that should help enrollment managers and campus leaders discern how and why they engage in digital recruitment technologies in the upcoming recruitment cycles:

Mindset: What observations have you detected about the degree and quality of engagement with your prospective students? Has it been mostly online, or have you also noticed an increase in on-campus visits? Have your encountered any particular drivers of mindsets that may have changed from pre-COVID activity? For example, did you encounter more students (pre-COVID) who approached higher-education from a free-spirited and exploratory frame and now has been replaced with students who are more focused on measureable outcomes, job placement and/or an emphasis in professional degree programs? Do these considerations require you to shift your approach for recruiting students who are focused more on outcomes - like job placement, graduate school placement, and lifetime earnings? As we engaging students in a post-COVID environment, the student mindset will be the core variable that will inform how, when, and why we recruit. Understanding student mindset is also important to help respond to the drivers of demography, economy, and culture.

Market: Here are a few questions for your consideration as you examine your market position. Do you expect the same (or better) performance from your primary and secondary markets in the next few years? Have you detected any signals of distress from markets that, otherwise, would perform strongly? How are your local markets? Are your markets performing the way that you have anticipated? If not, was the change expected and how did you prepare for those changes? Market considerations help to identify and address the disruptions in demography, economy, and culture in a way that also relates our efforts in comparison to the efforts of our competitors. Sadly, many lesser-positioned institutions have lost market share to competitors in an alarmingly precipitous way during the COVID pandemic. Institutions with stronger market position certainly had the advantage of attracting students that otherwise may have attended lesser-positioned institutions. The question for enrollment managers is how to win back that market share. Do you start with investing in your local market (within 60 miles from campus), investing more in your primary and secondary markets, or investing in new exploratory markets and programs that have the potential to pull market share away from competitors?

Media: While digital recruitment is just as important as ever, many studies are demonstrating a strong return to in-person and on-campus preferences for students and families. In this sense, media and modality are important considerations when planning events, scheduling travel and school visits, and hosting on-campus and off-campus admitted student receptions. Likewise, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital and social media recruitment practices. Perhaps, with a low-effort internal audit, you recognize that your social media efforts are not producing results. Or that your drip-campaign e-mails have low open and click-through rates. If that is the case, the post-COVID environment is a great time to retool your digital media efforts and/or consider pausing efforts for later evaluation (or even abandoning efforts) that are not producing measurable results.

Applications and Insights

How might you use the Three M’s to help reset goals, strategies, tactics, and operations in your student recruitment and marketing efforts I think a fair assessment is to say that most institutions learned how to “manage through” the shift to digital recruitment strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than celebrating that institutions “successfully adopted” digital and virtual solutions. That is not criticism, but a constructive critique. I am not convinced that any institution completely mastered how to make the jump to digital or virtual recruitment experience equal to or better than the live recruitment experience. However, some institutions did better than most. The question is, will prospective students embrace the adoption of digital recruitment post-COVID in the same way they did during the pandemic? While the disruptions of demography, economy, and culture continue to complicate the renormalization of student recruitment, my observations indicate that enrollment managers need to understood how to broadening our marketing aperture by balancing a presence in the digital space just as much across other forms of media.

Marketing

Digital Marketing