Category: admissions and student recruitment

Friday Five: Social media and student recruitment, according to #SocAdm14

This week’s Friday Five comes to you thanks to Mallory Wood of mStoner, who recently shared (via mStoner’s “Intelligence” e-newsletter) some key points from the 2014 Social Admissions Report from Chegg, Zinch and Uversity. In her email, Mallory shares five great data points from the research, all of which support her assertion that admissions marketers should “put your visitors (prospective students) in direct contact with current students, other admitted students, and admission counselors” through your social media channels, rather than trying to mediate the relationship through more traditional PR and marketing approaches like “second-hand stories and student testimonials.”

From the #SocAdm14 report: How often prospective students report using various social media platforms. Instagram and Twitter come out on top. LinkedIn and Snapchat are practically irrelevant.
From the #SocAdm14 report: How often prospective students report using various social media platforms. Use of Instagram exploded between 2012 and 2013.

But it would be too easy to merely repost mStoner’s five points. So I dug into the data to bring you five other interesting takeaways from that report. As for mStoner’s five takeaways, they’re embedded in this post by Michael Stoner, who got a sneak peek at the data prior to release. (He has connections.) But you should also sign up for mStoner’s Intelligence newsletter so you don’t miss out next time. That’s the intelligent thing to do.

Key takeaways: 2014 Social Admissions Report

  1. Prospective students are connecting to your institution on social media. The percentage of students who follow official social media accounts grew by nearly 47 percent between 2012 and 2013 (from 49 percent to 72 percent). That would suggest that your official social media presence is important for student recruitment.
  2. They’re checking you out on mobile, too. Ninety-seven percent of the prospective students surveyed for this report say they’ve looked at a college or university’s website on a smartphone or tablet. (OK, I did re-use one of Mallory’s bullet points. But it was worth repeating.) As the report says, “Mobile is not the future. Mobile is now.”
  3. McKayla Maroney makes a cameo appearance in the report.
    McKayla Maroney makes a cameo appearance in the report.

    But they are not impressed. According to this research, nearly two-thirds of those students who viewed our websites on mobile devices said the experience was “OK” at best or “challenging.”

  4. Ditch the mobile app. Three-quarters of the students said they wouldn’t download an app for a school they were researching. So don’t bother.
  5. They’d rather talk to students and counselors. Nearly three-quarters of students (74 percent) surveyed said it was either important or very important for them to talk to currently enrolled students in social media. Sixty-nine percent said the same about admissions counselors. They don’t care that much about talking to faculty, alumni or administrators.

Want to talk about this research on Twitter? Or see what others are saying about it? Use the hashtag #SocAdm14.

For student recruitment, rankings still matter

Here’s some disturbing news for those of us who wish college rankings would just go away:

According to recently publicized results of a poll of prospective college students, the rankings of college and university programs by media outlets like U.S. News & World Report continue to have a significant impact on the college search process.

The consulting firm Art & Science Group, conducted an online survey with 846 college-bound high school seniors in November and December 2012. Here’s what they found:

  • Two-thirds of students surveyed indicated that they had taken college rankings into account in their college application decisions.
  • Students with the highest SAT scores (1300 or higher) were more likely to have considered the rankings in their application decisions than students with SAT scores of less than 1300.
  • Nearly two-thirds of students surveyed “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that the rankings are “very important in trying to sort out the differences between colleges.”
  • About two-thirds, respectively, somewhat or strongly disagreed that the rankings “don’t matter” and that they “don’t matter to me, but they matter to my parents.”

So, yes, the rankings remain relevant. And with the proliferation of new ranking organizations out there, and the White House’s push to have a grading system for higher education, these types of numbers games will continue in a variety of forms. Just in the past year, we’ve seen the rise of many “ROI” (return on investment) rankings, like this one. Look for this trend to continue. Since U.S. News owns the reputational ranking category, other groups, from publications like Forbes and Washington Monthly to salary-information services like PayScale, will focus on ranking schools by ROI or affordability.

Beyond the rankings

But the Art & Science Group folks suggest other factors may play an even greater role in students’ decisions on picking a college. Things like “substantive and atmospheric insights and information from the campus visit, interactions with parents, information on the web and in print materials, and more personal forms of contact with prospective students … can have a greater influence than rankings.”

Furthermore, “we would argue against spending too much institutional time, money, and energy on hand wringing over rank per se and on attempts to improve it. For most institutions, it would be far better to focus on planning strategy that strengthens an institution’s competitive position on a substantive basis: differentiation based on educational approach, student experience, innovative teaching, and the like.”

In other words, your time is better spent developing and refining your institution’s brand persona and messaging, and developing ways to deliver that messaging to your prospective students.