When more than 6,000 college admissions professionals gather in Louisville, Kentucky for the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) National Conference later this month, most of them will have an important priority in common. Regardless of the size or location of their institutions, they all need to attract and enroll “best-fit” applicants faster and more effectively. Yet many are operating in a vacuum, unsure how to gauge the success of their efforts and unaware of the strategies other schools are using to reach high-value students first.
They also have something else in common: the opportunity to find answers to those questions by attending “The 2018 Inquiry Response Project,” a NACAC panel discussion that will feature Jennifer Crump, associate director of admissions at Central Methodist University and Suzanne Sharp, executive director of enrollment management consulting at Liaison.
This session will share the results of Liaison’s undergraduate inquiry response project, in which researchers posed as prospective students and visited web pages for nearly 300 schools across the country, submitting request information forms when they were found.
The goal was to find out how accessible schools were to interested students requesting information, how fast they responded, how relevant their responses were and how many communication channels they used. The results of the study may surprise you — Some schools only sent one email response, some schools only sent a print piece, and a few didn’t respond at all.
How does your school’s inquiry response strategy measure up?
After attending this session, you’ll be able to identify trends around student engagement, compare and contrast your strategy to those of other schools and plan strategic changes that will help drive applications and increase yield.
One of those strategic changes may involve partnering with Liaison’s proven enrollment marketing experts. “There is nobody else doing what Liaison is doing right now,” says Dr. Christopher Smith, executive director, enrollment management and marketing, at Kansas State Polytechnic Campus. “Collaborating with them is like having a combined admissions and marketing department.”
If you prefer hard numbers to testimonials, consider the results other schools have achieved by partnering with Liaison to build better classes more efficiently:
- 75% reduction in time to decision (Temple University)
- 88% decrease in application review time (Weill Cornell Medicine)
- 10% increase in enrollment — and $1.1 million+ increase in tuition revenue (Minnesota State University, Mankato)
- 100% increase in international applications (Oregon Health & Science University)
- 198% increase in campus visits (Pfeiffer University)
- 39% increase in deposits (Northeast Ohio Medical University)
- 15% increase in admitted-to-enrolled ratio (St. Martin’s University)
To learn how you, too, can do a better job of identifying and achieving your admissions office goals, make plans to attend “The 2018 Inquiry Response Project” at the NACAC conference.
If you can’t make it to the session, then visit Liaison at Booth #320 to learn more about the project’s findings — and how Liaison can help your school enroll better classes each year.
NACAC’s 75th National Conference takes place in in Louisville, Kentucky from September 26th – 28th. You can learn more about it here.