Learning Center

Since COVID-19 wreaked havoc on every facet of life, colleges and universities have experienced an enrollment decline of about 1 million students, which is more than 5 percent in a little more than two years.¹ 

Strategic Enrollment Management (or SEM) has never been more critical for institutions that are working to attract the right students, balance academics with the needs of the market, and focus on long-term student success—especially in today’s environment where increasing numbers of students are ditching college altogether. 

Your higher ed admissions team has an appointment scheduled with an interested prospective student … now what? 

Will the prospective student answer the call when the appointment time rolls around? Does the prospective student understand the importance of the call? Does the prospective student recognize that this call will help them determine if the institution is a right fit? 

Many teams simply wait for the scheduled appointment time, perhaps automating a few reminder emails, while hoping for the best. 

Why do only 8% of our leads convert into students?

We spent an enormous amount of energy and resources on generating new leads for my admissions team. So what happened to the other 92% of prospective students we generated? Why didn’t they enroll and what can my admissions team do to increase these conversion rates?

We at Enrollment Builders love in-person networking events. We're so glad that most higher ed organizations are hosting their admissions and enrollment management conferences in 2023.

Now, almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything, it's starting to feel like "normal" again. We are grateful that conferences have mostly returned to business as usual.

Last year we compiled a short guide to admissions and enrollment management conferences and sent it to our clients. We received such a positive response that we wanted to make it even more comprehensive and share it with more people, earlier in the year. 

There’s no shortage of leads coming to your higher ed admissions department every day, but your team still struggles to grow new student enrollment. 

They are overwhelmed and stressed. There’s overall dissatisfaction among your employees, which looks like high turnover or counselors with decades of seniority who now function as little more than seat warmers. They dislike being on the phone all day, making and answering calls.

They say they’re being asked to do work they weren’t hired to do. They’re bored, resentful, and desperately want the bandwidth to do the work they’re passionate about: counseling potential students and leading them to enrollment. 

You’re not sure what to do next or where to turn.

“When enrollment is up, praise marketing. When enrollment is down, blame admissions.” 

If you’ve heard this quip on your higher ed campus, chances are there is a strained relationship between those two offices. At most colleges and universities, the admissions office and marketing department are separate, having two distinct functions. 

The main goal of the marketing office is to generate awareness and interest for the institution’s brand. The focus of the admissions office is to engage with prospective students and cultivate those relationships throughout the recruitment and enrollment process. 

Some institutions have worked to correct this problem of division, either establishing a recruitment marketing function within the enrollment management division, or having the vice president oversee both enrollment and marketing. However, even with this setup, there can still be friction between the two offices. 

In order to hit new student enrollment goals, though, your higher ed institution needs both departments functioning optimally and working together. 

It may not seem obvious, but the request for information (RFI) forms on your college or university’s website can make or break your new student enrollment goals.

Each of your RFI forms is one of the first interactions a prospective student has with your institution. They should: 

• Be easy to locate and clearly marked
• Be quick and easy to navigate and submit
• Collect only pertinent information 
• Have correct information and be functional

The information gathered from RFIs on your site is crucial to converting website visitors into active inquiries. If the RFI isn’t functioning properly, your outreach is affected, and new students are lost. 

You’re working hard to lift enrollment numbers. You’ve identified the problems in your admissions process, and you’re ready to work with a partner who can help you. 

You’ve built excitement around a solution but are shot down when you seek purchase approval: “That’s too expensive! Can’t we do this in-house?” 

Maybe you’ve heard this before from leadership. 

How can you convince your leadership that change is necessary?

You can hope that you are able to do enough without investing in additional resources. 

But, hope is not an enrollment strategy.

Institutions have thousands of leads and wonder why they don’t turn into students. The answer is that the institution doesn’t build a relationship with each lead. Colleges and universities flood prospects with email, one-off calls, and print pieces designed to inform the prospect about the institution. When there’s no consistent, systematic approach to building a relationship with those prospects, then the “relationship” that’s built is simply transactional (e.g., Apply Now! Complete your FAFSA!). Think about it. In your regular life, that me-centered approach is not how you get a date. It’s not how you make a friend. How does it make sense, then, for one-way, transactional communication to create enrollments? EB knows that this just isn’t the most effective way to create long-lasting relationships.   

Here at Enrollment Builders, we’ve worked with many traditional and non-traditional institutions, and we know what it takes to engage your prospective students. In the end, you need to provide each prospective student with an engaging, consistent experience. To stabilize the admissions funnel and ensure that no interested prospective student is missed, Enrollment Builders has created cadences.