Five Steps To Close Enrollment Gaps
It a sad fact - sometimes April showers bring disappointing enrollment results
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Yesterday I presented at the Niche Virtual Enrollment and Marketing Summit and thank you for all of you attendees who just subscribed. I’m so happy you’re here! This post contains some of the same ideas I discussed during the summit.
At the end of this post there are links to several past posts about admissions and enrollment that I have un-paywalled for your perusal, including the fabulous interview with Browning Chief Communications Officer Jan Abernathy.
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Enjoy and I hope they’re helpful.
Five Steps To Close Enrollment Gaps
There are schools that have record enrollment and congratulations to you! Your hard work paid off and the stars aligned. Enjoy! Woo hoo!
Then there are the results that can range from a bit disappointing to downright panic inducing. I’ve been there. It’s no fun, plus you can’t help but keep turning over in your head where you went wrong. Our school is so great and everyone worked so hard!
It happens. Demographics are unfavorable to schools in many areas of the country. Schools at the higher end of the food chain are admitting more kids who in the past would have been delighted with an acceptance at a mid-tier school. Rinse and repeat down the chain. Tuition is high and competition from all sides keeps increasing. Trends sneak up on you and trickles of changes in behavior patterns are all of a sudden floods.
And remember, it’s always easier for families to choose the public school option! Many public schools are outstanding, free and have no application process.
But now it’s April and you have even more work to do but this work is scrappier and opportunistic, it has less of the nice ritualistic markers that roll out over the academic year calendar - the open houses, the application deadlines.
I have been there! More than once. You have my sympathy.
And more importantly, you should have hope. While I always found the period from mid-April to Labor Day anxiety inducing, every new enroll was also cause for celebration. We all got to know individual families better. My director of enrollment management put up with me haunting his office multiple times a week to go over the pool. We partnered. We problem solved. Both with families and with each other. We made it happen, even in those cycles where it felt it took every ounce of our collective effort.
So here’s five thoughts on how you can move the needle now.
1. Re-enrollment/potential attrition
Remember how the admissions office is also responsible for re-enrollment? It’s so not-sexy compared to enrollment but it is crucially important.
Is everyone who’s coming back re-enrolled? If not, work with those families now! Don’t make assumptions!
Have you settled everyone’s financial aid? Get this squared away!
And are there any currently re-enrolled families in danger of attrition? What are you hearing through the grapevine? If you do hear rumors, reach out to the family in a compassionate way. Sometimes - often! - people don’t want to complain because if their child stays at the school they worry there will somehow be reprisals of some sort. You may need to be proactive. And if it’s a financial issue, sometimes people have no problem coming forward but other times it is a source of pain and shame. And maybe just a little more financial aid can make a world of difference.
Remember - it is so much easier to retain a student than to recruit a brand new one!
Tips for the future: Make sure your re-enrollment process starts early and the information going out to parents is clear as to what is expected of them. Be warm and be professional. Be buttoned up. This is important and can be an easy victory for your overall enrollment picture.
2. Revisit all the “we never”s
Here are a few popular “we never”s:
We never take new students during the school year.
We never take new students in grade (x).
We never take students who need more than light academic support.
We never take students who may need to miss school for other obligations.
We never take English language learners.
We never take students who have financial need more than (arbitrary number or percentage)
We never take students from (consultant with a specific area of speciality that falls into the historic “never” column)
We never take homeschoolers.
I keep thinking of “nevers” I’ve heard about over the years and could keep going!
This is the time to interrogate each of these practices, even if they are only unofficial. What would it take to turn a “never” into a “sometimes”? Are there applicants in your current pool, or who inquired or went through part of the process who could come back into the pool if that were the case?
And then there’s a whole bunch of “sub-never”s related to admissions office practices - we never allow campus tours for families who have not completed the application or we never review a file until all the documents are complete - you can keep going. Do you really want to hold up the process because one recommendation is missing?
Tip for the future: It’s one thing to reconsider the nevers in “let’s make this work” mode but the never list is also a great topic for an administrative or admissions office retreat. Where did these practices originate? Are they still relevant? What resources would be needed to make these go from “nevers” to “sometimes” to “please come in.” And would there be a market advantage to doing so?
3. Partner with communications and leave no stone unturned
Heads of school - at this point in the year, it’s not going to help anyone for you to haunt your comms director with directives around a flood of social media posts. The comms director doesn’t have time for it and it’s not going to help. It might feel like doing something productive, but it’s not.
Instead, how can you all partner to first look at the “nevers” and see what you might be able to easily shift to “sometimes,” and also examine where you are actually getting traction - what grades, what programs, etc.
Look at the funnel info - are there any potential candidates who drifted off who could be revived?
Are there strategic marketing moves to be made to connect with specific demographics or students with specific interests?
Are there educational consultants who have reached out to you in the past who could be of help?
Are there simple ways to bring families to campus for a fun student event that highlights a specific program? Back in the day, when we were looking at a gap, we put together a STEM event and eventually enrolled a few students who would not have otherwise applied.
Are you treating every prospective family like an important constituent? Do you consistently pick up the phone for cold calls? Are you adaptable, patient, responsive, curious? How can you partner with your comms office to up your constituent relations game tomorrow?
Tips for the future: In the next year’s budget process, it is worthwhile to discuss how you can prioritize resources for areas where you’re getting traction and trim what’s no longer working. And next year, allocate time to strengthen your admissions/communications partnership and make sure each office understands the other and treats each other as collaborative partners.
4. Strategic use of financial aid
What’s left in your financial aid budget? What’s the strategy? If you have a financial aid waiting list, what’s your strategy for admitting these families?
And most importantly, you need to be partnering and collaborating with the head of school and CFO when it comes to financial aid and the three of you can’t be afraid to put hard questions on the table and “what ifs.” What’s the cost/benefit analysis of increasing the financial aid budget and belt tightening elsewhere, for example? If you end up spending a lot more money on an incoming class in a down year than expected, how are you going to mitigate for what I used to call (brace yourselves) the mouse going through the snake?
This is also an opportunity for the head and CFO to get real about next year’s budget. The more you think about realistic Plans B and C, the better prepared you’ll be to implement and to lead the community.
Sometimes schools reject families in April who can pay partial tuition but would welcome with open arms this same profile in August. If you’re doing this, stop - admit them now!
Tip for the future: If you don’t have a strategic approach to both setting financial aid number and financial aid distribution, next year is the time to develop one. Sometimes a bit of financial aid is what it takes to yield a mission-matched family on the fence.
5. Don’t throw spaghetti at the wall
Things are stressful enough. Don’t do any of the cliches - throw spaghetti at the wall, reinvent the wheel, run around with your hair on fire. It’s normal and feelings are feelings, but feelings are not facts.
Schools have down years. Don’t panic and kill the golden goose i.e. gutting programs and people to save some dollars. That’s a topic for a whole other post, but follow your strategic plan, lean into and invest in what’s working, trim what’s not. The best strategic thinking does not happen when everyone’s heart is in their throats. Feel the fear and then swallow it and look at solutions. Focus on how you can best serve kids and families with what you have rather than panicking over what you don’t have. And as I said above, maybe there are some things you can easily add? Successes, even small ones, breed more success.
Tip for the future: Is your strategic plan helpful and fully envisioned? Did it help guide you in a tough time? If not, it might be time to either go back to the drawing board or give it a good revision during the school year.
Finally, the more real you are about the situation, the more solutions begin to emerge. It’s not easy and it takes time. But it’s months until school opens next year - you have some time.
I know admissions directors and enrollment managers have tough jobs and as soon as the job is done, it starts all over again. Even when you’ve had a successful cycle, it’s exhausting. You’re constantly on and you’re managing up to the head. The CFO might be giving you the hairy eyeball. Faculty are frequently complaining that kids in the “old days” were better prepared than the kids you bring in. I see you and schools can’t do their good work without you!
So enjoy the weekend, take a break. There’s always a prospective family just around the corner.
See you next week -
Julie
Stony Creek Strategy is here if you need us for admissions/communications partnership assessments and “Where Do We Go From Here?” strategy consulting.
Reach out here or at jfaulstich@stonycreekstrategy.com.