By Jeremy Tiers, Vice President of Admissions Services
2 minute read
Does this sound like you?
You’re looking for a restaurant recommendation or maybe you’ve recently moved and need a new doctor or dentist. You ask your friends, or you go to Google and do a search.
The result? You get like 10 different answers or recommendations and of course they’re all “great”.
You’re back to square one and you still have the same problem.
Prospective students actually deal with this same issue. Your school is one of 10 colleges and universities they’re interested in, and most of the emails they receive, as well as the campus tours they take, all say things like:
- We have a welcoming community.
- Experience an elite education.
- You will be challenged here and have lots of opportunities.
- Our degree is going to open up doors.
- 95% of our recent graduates are employed in a career they love within a year.
“Everybody’s saying the same thing! Tell us what makes y’all different. Why should I choose your school over my other options?”
Quotes like that one from a high school senior continue to appear every single time we conduct surveys.
Just like you want to know why a restaurant or doctor is so great, students are also looking for the ‘why’ during their college search.
To be clear, I’m not saying you need to negatively recruit against a competitor. Instead, I want you to positively outline why your current students (and/or recent grads) think your campus and student experience are a little bit different, and a little bit better.
For example, if you want to emphasize that you have a welcoming community, provide specific examples of activities (and people) that help new students adjust to college life. You could also gather direct quotes about your community by asking current students to describe the campus atmosphere.
Give prospective students some detail about a problem, a challenge, or a decision that a current student faced and how someone or how a specific resource at your school helped them.
We all need those reasons in order to separate one message from the others.
You also might have noticed that I emphasized getting and sharing the current student point of view. Current students can be your best advocate, and prospective students crave their feedback because they feel it’s more authentic and a “real” portrayal of student life.
As you build relationships and recruit this next class of students, be sure to insert your opinion, and the opinion of your current students. It will make a difference, and help your inquiries and admitted students a lot as they look for someone to lead them through this confusing college search process.
Finally, if you’re wondering what happens when students can’t clearly differentiate – many default to making the safer, less risky choice – meaning, they’ll choose the cheapest school on their list, the one that’s closest to home, or the one all their friends are going to.
If you have a question about something I said in this article simply reply back, or email me here.
And if you found this article helpful, please forward it to someone else on your campus who could also benefit from reading it. Sharing is caring 🙂