By Jeremy Tiers, Senior Director of Admissions Services
1 minute read
Wondering why an admitted student is hesitant to submit their deposit, why they haven’t registered for your admitted student day, or just in general why you’re getting the feeling there’s something they don’t like about your school?
Go ahead and ask them, but do it in an intentional and direct way.
Taking the approach of, “Is there anything I can answer for you?” is not an effective strategy to generate engagement with this generation of students (or their parents).
Do that and you’re likely to get a two or three-word response (something like, “No, we’re fine”) just like my 12-year-old daughter used to give my wife and I when we asked her about her day at school. I say used to because we no longer take that approach. We’ve adapted just like you may need to.
You will yield more students when you stop asking your admits things like, “Are we still one of your top choices?” Instead, I want you to ask them, “Walk me through two or three things you’re still trying to answer about <College Name> whenever you picture yourself being here as a student.”
That kind of wording gets them to do something extremely important – It gets them to picture what they’re thinking, and then describe it to you.
Here’s one more example. Instead of asking, “Did you enjoy your visit to campus?”, ask “When you were here for admitted student day, what was one thing that you saw that surprised you?”
Getting them to picture something and then relay their thoughts or feelings to you will result in important, useable insights. You can then take those insights and figure out how to keep the conversation going, or what needs to happen before action can occur.
This simple concept will work with prospective students and parents regardless of grade or stage and could be career changing in terms of improving your conversion.
I can confidently make that statement because I’ve seen it happen numerous times in the weeks and months following one of our training workshops.
If you’d like to talk more about something I said in this article, let’s do it. Simply reply or email me here.
And if you found this article helpful, forward it to someone else on your campus who could also benefit from reading it.