Higher Education

Alumni development can’t be delegated to just a few people. It takes the whole institution to develop successful and satisfied alumni. For more than 40 years, I was involved in the oversight of admissions offices and the processes of recruiting and admitting students. Since my earliest days in the admissions area, I have believed that one of the most important tasks of an admissions office was to begin the task of developing satisfied and successful alumni.

At that time, college education was definitely a family decision. The most significant people in helping prospective students with their college selection process were the parents. You must remember that this was more than a half century ago. At that time, students were different than they tend to be today. The over-whelming majority of students were traditional age (18 to 25 years old). Most of those students started college immediately after high school or a short stint in the armed services. My first administrative position was in a traditional liberal arts, residential college, with almost no commuter population. One of the largest tasks of the admissions office was to sell the campus experience.

I wanted our recruitment efforts focused on two ideas or pictures. The first was to help prospective students picture themselves as students on our campus. They had to see themselves on campus. What would that look like? How would they fit in? In developing these pictures, we could not forget the parents of these prospective students. Parents needed to see how our institution would assist their students in furthering the process of development that the parents had begun.

The second picture that I wanted to help prospective students develop was the picture of themselves as successful alumni. What did they want to do with their lives? What was the ministry, vocation or career to which they felt called? How would our college help them achieve their goals? I also wanted to plant the seed of the question: “As a successful alumni, how could they give back to their institution so that others could have the same experience?”  Not forgetting the parents, the institution needed to also show them the possibilities of what successful alumni were doing and could do. If their students were successful, these parents would become powerful allies, in their communities, as well as their social and professional circles, for not only the admissions effort, but also for the advancement office.

As I noted in a previous post in this series, the selling job does not stop once a student applies, has been admitted, or even enrolls. College admission did not guarantee graduation. The path from matriculation to graduation has been a hard journey for many students. Retention very much depends upon students seeing that their goals are stronger than the challenges that they incur. To assist in that process, we had to put faces on the successes of our alumni. Students needed to know that others had previously trod this path and successfully traversed it. It could be done. Success stories are an ecnouragement to those still on the journey.

To help paint the picture of successful and satisfied alumni, I recruited alumni to assist our efforts. I asked alumni to distribute materials and talk to their family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. I asked alumni to host admissions parties for other prospective students and their parents to meet real alumni and students, as well as the paid recruitment staff. Sometimes, I was even able to convince faculty to become involved in these efforts.

Once the prospective students became enrolled students, I continued my effort to involve alumni. I recruited alumni to become volunteer career counselors via telephone contact or campus and off-campus visits. At this point of time, email was a fledgling idea and not a practical option.  I used alumni in internships and practicum placements. I encouraged faculty to invite alumni into their classes to speak about the career opportunities in their fields or to give guest lectures about specific topics. This did two things. It kept the alumni involved with the institution, and made them feel good about giving back to the institution. It also planted the seed in the minds of students of the possibility of doing the same thing after they graduated.

The selling job on alumni is not even finished at commencement. The institution has to keep meeting the needs of the alumni. This definitely involves maintaining vehicles for the communications network that students had begun to develop while enrolled. This could also involve the maintenance of a placement office for career assistance. Another option is the provision of life-long learning opportunities involving faculty, staff, and other alumni as instructors and participants.

In the next post in this series, I will address some of the substantial educational questions involved in helping and guiding students from matriculation to graduation, and hence to alumni status. Happy, successful and satisfied alumni are much more eager to be involved alumni at all levels.

The tenth of Richardson and Basinger’s laws of fundraising was:

Law #10: The Law of Uncertainty. People will do whatever they please. To paraphrase an old expression, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink or give.” Likewise, “don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

This post will consider how this fits into the process of student recruitment, retention, and alumni development.

Recruitment: For many years the student recruitment industry used the concept of an admissions funnel to describe the process of recruiting, admitting, and enrolling students. At this time, some admissions experts are saying that the new electronic communication age has made the concept of a funnel obsolete. I will agree that some aspects of how institutions worked the funnel previously are no longer applicable. However, I believe that in talking about the numbers of people interested and in contact with your institution at any one time, the funnel is statistically still a viable concept.

In the old model, the institution would pour a very large number of prospects into the wide mouth of the funnel by advertising or buying names from direct mail sources. That number dropped off dramatically as the prospects either lost interest in your institution or found institutions that were more appealing. You worked your prospects until you had your list of inquiries. At this point, you worked your inquiries to attempt to get them to take the next step of commitment and apply. They were now applicants.

At this point the institution stepped in to whittle this number down further by taking the step of accepting students for admissions. The institution was saying to the student, we want you. Different institutions had different strategies in accepting students. Some institutions are more selective in their choice of students, while others took a more “open door” approach.

With an offer of admission, the process was now back in the lap of the prospective student to decide whether or not he or she would accept the offer of admission and pay a deposit to confirm that decision. However, even with the payment of a deposit, the job of recruitment wasn’t necessarily complete. Not every deposited student would enroll.

With the advent of internet and television, some admissions experts suggest that institutions no longer have to necessarily go out as aggressively and identify the names and addresses of prospects.  Institutions can let the prospects shop anonymously until the prospects make the first move. At this point the institution can aggressively pursue them.

Although the landscape of higher education is changing, I believe that this new process is most effective for institutions with good reputations already established. If your institution is not well-known, you may still have to do some things the old-fashion way. You have to earn the trust of prospective students. You may also have to find ways to make your institutional mark with the general public. Surveys of enrolled students indicate that an overwhelming majority of students had their first introduction to the name of their college before they began junior high. I’ll leave that topic for another post.

Earlier I alluded to the statistical basis behind the admissions funnel. In institutions with which I have worked, it was not unusual for the number of inquiries to be less than 2% of the number of prospects. At these institutions, an average of 10% of the inquiry pool actually completed applications. Of the completed applicantions, on average the institutions accepted 70%. Of the accepted students, these institutions had 65% confirmed acceptance with a deposit. From the deposited students, on average of 85% enrolled. Thus to enroll a new class of 500 students, these institutions had to start with a prospect pool of more than 250,000. From this prospect pool, the institutions had to generate almost 13,000 inquiries. From the inquiry pool, they had to generate almost 1,300 applications, from which they admitted approximately 900. Of this admitted pool, approximately 600 paid a deposited. From this confirmed pool, finally a new class of 500 enrolled students emerged.

Retention: Once a student enrolls, in other posts we have emphasized that the job is not done. An institution must work to keep the students involved and interested. The national average of matriculates graduating is less than 50%. At the institutions at which I worked, I liked to track year-to-year retention.

As an example at one institution, when I arrived the graduation rate was less than 20% and the first-to-second year retention rate was less than 50%. Think of the strain this puts on an institution, if it must replace half of its students every year. With a first-year program in place, the first-to-second year retention rate went up to 85%. With the addition of a second-year program, and then a senior-year program, the year to year retention rates also increase dramatically. The second-to third year retention rate went from 65% to 80%. The third-to-fourth year retention went up to 90% and the percent of seniors that graduated kicked up to over 95%. This produced a matriculate graduation rate of almost 60%, much better than the national average. However, it still meant that 40% of entering students did not graduate. No matter what you do, people will do what they please or what they have to do.

Alumni: If you have done a good job in tying individuals into your institution while they are students, the job of keeping them interested and involved as alumni is much easier. In a major assessment project, I worked with more than 50 institutions in surveying their alumni two years after they graduated. Although there was a great variation in individual statistics, from all 50 institutions we had valid contact information for less than 50% of all graduates. You can’t hope to keep people involved in your institution, if you don’t have contact information.

This says to me that there are several major difficulties. The first is that the institutions didn’t sufficiently meet the needs of these graduates when they were students. Otherwise, I would have thought the graduates would have made an effort to remain in contact with the institution. If the graduates did try to make contact, then the institution either didn’t respond or keep track of contact information. This means the institution has many more problems to fix.

Without a spark of interest on the part of the alumni or proper contact information, there is no hope of developing further alumni invovlement. Even with alumni interest and proper contact information, it is possible that the alumni will refuse the institution’s advances. People will do what they please.