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On this Valentine’s Day I’d like you to start a conversation on your campus that’s all about showing your prospective undergraduate students a different kind of love.
Let’s start by channeling Maslow.
Humans want to feel the love. It’s right in the middle of that colorful pyramid. We all yearn to belong; we all want to feel wanted. Arguably, a young adult’s need for it is on overdrive.
Great recruiters routinely show love to their recruits by lavishing them with lots of attention, by sharing especially relevant and resonant information, and by making each one feel as though s/he is at the top of the prospective student V.I.P. list.
Technology now allows us to really pile on the love by sending “personalized” messages via every imaginable channel, each remarkably tailored to the recipient’s peculiar interests.
But the most influential of all “love gifts” that colleges and universities show prospective students comes in the form of scholarships and grants. Free money. Deep discounts. Great deals. All designed to help the recruits we love conquer what they view as the ridiculously high price of higher education.
Our own market research bears this out.
Research and Strategy Director Grant De Roo confirmed today what we’ve known—but resisted admitting—for years when he told me, “We’ve seen in survey after survey that students place greater importance on the size of their scholarship and financial aid package than on the actual net cost of attendance. We’ve seen that in the ratings exercises we do in many surveys.” Grant continued, “This tends to align with what a lot of folks in Admissions see and hear…especially in the spring when students are asking schools to match offers they receive elsewhere, regardless of whether the bottom-line cost is lower.”
At this pivotal moment in the heritage of higher education, increasing numbers of colleges and universities are contemplating—and executing—price resets and other pricing-model modifications. The rationale for most is simple: many schools’ brand value simply isn’t judged by their traditional consumers to be worth the tuition and fees those schools are charging.
For schools that reset tuition, the size of the gift aid packages offered to their future students will likely pale in comparison to the gift aid offers from competing schools who continue to stand by their traditional high-price/high-discount models.
So while out-of-pocket costs at both types of schools in a competitor set may be nearly identical, scholarship and grant packages may be, in some cases, radically different.
This scenario queues up the question: Other than gift aid, what valuable symbols of affection can your institution offer students you want most? Here’s a handful of thought-starters:
- Priority/preferred registration.
- Priority/preferred housing or parking assignments.
- Athletic coach-like attention from music/theatre directors, student group leaders and sponsors, and other co-curricular personalities who are engaged in activities of interest to the prospective student.
- For new students with children, priority placement or discounted day care services.
- Assignment of a “career mentor” (an alumnus/a working in the student’s intended career field).
- Assignment of a “peer mentor” (college junior) who will be a senior when the prospective enrolls as a freshman.
- Assignment of a “peer family” (family of current student or recent grad) to provide unofficial, on-demand trusted counsel to incoming freshmen parents.
- Local host family assignment to offer first-year students a home-away-from-home.
- Academic advising/consulting during high school senior year.
- Multichannel outreach/attention (webinars, text messaging, social media initiatives, correspondence, event hosting, high school or home visits, etc.) by the student’s major professor or department chair.
Unorthodox thinking? Yes, by traditional recruitment standards. But to borrow (and butcher) an old saw, “Different times really do call for different measures.” It’s looking like that time is now.
Eric Sickler has helped the nation's college and universities clarify and more fully engage their brands for more than three decades. You can reach him at The Thorburn Group, a Stamats company.
