Your goal is to attract and retain successful students in order to achieve enrollment and graduation goals. That means you want someone that selects your institution, registers and attends classes, remains enrolled each and every semester, maintains a solid GPA and graduates.
Yet most new student recruitment programs focus on activities that attract the lowest cost per inquiry or the highest number of completed applications!
That’s wasteful.
Instead, look at your student records and identify behaviors that you consider best exemplify a successful student. For example, look at continuous enrollment, successful completion of courses and grade point average.
Once you rank your students based on these elements, you should identify shared characteristics that will help you identify and recruitment new students that are most like your successful students!
Start with basic demographic data as well as your marketing reports that identify what activity motivated the individual to contact your institution.
Next, talk with them and find out how they came to your institution. How did they first learn about your institution? What motivated them to contact you? Why did they select you over another? What have they liked about their experience at your institution? What haven’t they liked about their experience?
Now you’re ready to go out and recruit a higher quality prospective student!
