Dozens of high-school seniors and their parents have arrived on the campus at a make-or-break moment for Ohio Wesleyan University. It’s late April, the university’s last chance to woo these admitted students in person. Every one of them counts.
For Ohio Wesleyan, as for many small- and medium-size private liberal-arts colleges, tuition is the primary source of income. That makes hitting enrollment goals crucial. Demographic shifts are reducing the number of high-school graduates in Ohio. And competition for top students everywhere has never been more intense. The size of incoming classes at the university has gone up and down over the past five or six years, resulting in inconsistent tuition revenues.
And so, as at many colleges these days, the admissions team at Ohio Wesleyan is trying everything it can think of to seal the deal.
It’s less than two weeks before the May 1 deadline by which most students will decide where to enroll, so Ohio Wesleyan is making a big play. The prospects assembling in the student center on a Sunday evening for the Slice of College Life overnight event will spend Monday meeting professors and checking out dorms, but tonight they’re sent off in groups to stack Oreos on their foreheads. The game of Chocolate Unicorn is meant to break the ice, but it’s also part of a jam-packed evening of carnivalesque activities designed to present Ohio Wesleyan as a fun place — and to help prospective students imagine themselves there for four years. (Their parents are shuttled to the home of the president, Rock F. Jones, for a cocktail reception.)
Colleges have long tried to curry the favor of their admitted students, checking in with them and inviting them to open houses. But in the past five years or so, what was once a fairly relaxed process has intensified into a full-court press. It’s known as "yield marketing."
Ever since Ohio Wesleyan sent out information about financial aid the first week of March, the admissions office has been in almost daily communication with the 2,900 or so students the university admitted for the Class of 2019. University counselors email them and their parents, send postcards, and call. (Current students, faculty members, and alumni call, too.) Staff members pitch a video series and a class Facebook page. They run contests, giving out a $1,000 scholarship, for example, to the admitted student who takes the best selfie with his or her admissions packet and posts the photo to Instagram.
Much of the yield-marketing effort focuses on shepherding interested but still undecided prospects toward attending the two Slice events, which are designed to offer a taste of what daily life would be like at "O-woo," as visitors learn to call it.
Like many private liberal-arts colleges, Ohio Wesleyan needs to convert as many of these prospects into future alumni as possible. The university has set a goal of enrolling 480 students in the fall. But the percentage of admitted students that colleges succeed in enrolling has fallen in recent years. A report this week from the National Association for College Admission Counseling found that average yield rate slipped from 39.5 percent in 2010 to 35.9 percent in 2013.
"We’re all in this mode that you’re doing so much in hopes that something sticks," says Susan Dileno, vice president for enrollment management.
75 Calls a Week
Ms. Dileno has worked in admissions since 1987, including at Case Western Reserve University, Hartwick College, and Baldwin Wallace University. She came to Ohio Wesleyan last summer. Not many years ago, she says, "you’d send out your open-house lit, and that was pretty much it."
Now she and her staff of nine admissions counselors "spend a lot of thought and time and money" on coming up with ways to reach students and win them over in just a few weeks.
She estimates that the university spent about $116,000 this year on yield marketing, not counting staff and routine expenses like printing and postage.
On the calendar Ms. Dileno keeps for yield-marketing activities, almost every day in March and April is covered: A reception in another city. An email or letter to go out. A video chat for prospective students or their parents. A Facebook ad scheduled to pop up in their news feeds. And the phone calls, always phone calls. Each counselor is expected to make 75 calls to admitted students each week. Ms. Dileno makes calls, too.
The phone calls usually check on a particular piece of application information or follow up about an invitation to an event. (In addition to the Slice overnights in April, there is a visit in February for early admissions and a separate visit for honors students.) Some emails direct prospects to a website with regularly updated video content — a primer on O-woo slang, say, or a thumbnail guide to Columbus, the nearest sizable city. Other emails direct admitted students to personalized "microsites" with information about their prospective majors.
Such aggressive practices are more and more common among colleges, says Robert Moore, president of Lipman Hearne, a branding-and-communications firm. The competition for students has grown more intense, given demographic shifts and tuition dependence, and the channels for contacting them have multiplied, thanks largely to social media. Colleges, he says, have to gear up their yield marketing to keep up with their peers.
But there’s only so much that Ohio Wesleyan or any other institution can do to persuade students with emails and information about academics. "The real deal closer is getting them to campus," says Mr. Moore. Of course, he adds, "there are a whole lot of people who come on a campus visit and go somewhere else."
Quest for a Good Fit
Ask students at the Slice event why they’re here, and most will repeat some variation of the answer that Soraya Dehkordi gives: "I came to try to see if I would fit in."
Katie Paull has made several daytime trips already to Ohio Wesleyan from her home, near Cleveland. This time, she says, she’s "mostly interested in meeting other students that are coming here, and seeing if I can thrive."
That’s why Ohio Wesleyan trots out Chocolate Unicorn and other party games, along with a raucous improv-comedy performance and food trucks, to accompany such activities as sitting in on classes or meeting with the career-services office. If prospective students have fun with one another, and with the university’s current students serving as activity leaders and tour guides, then they may have an easier time imagining themselves as Battling Bishops.
What a small liberal-arts college has to sell is "the full experience," says Ryan R. Chapman, assistant director of admission. Prospective students aren’t just trying to decide "where do I want to sit in a class for the next four years," he says. "It’s where do I want to live for the next four years, and be surrounded by these people?"
About 90 families come to each Slice event, Ms. Dileno says, and last year about 60 of the visiting students put down deposits for fall housing after each of the weekends. But other colleges, too, are contacting the same students almost every day with invitations to visit their campuses. And with the advent of the Common Application and electronic filing, students are applying to more colleges than ever before, and being accepted to more, which means yet more competition.
Ms. Dehkordi, who plans on a premed major, says she was admitted to 10 colleges. She’s visiting Ohio Wesleyan from Colorado, and as she arrived for the overnight, California Polytechnic State University had a slight edge as her top option. But Ohio Wesleyan is her father’s alma mater, and it offered her the most financial aid of any of the colleges to which she was admitted, so it’s still in the running.
Ohio Wesleyan has paid her a lot of attention, too. She appreciated the emails and calls from her admissions counselor.
Of all the colleges that admitted her, she adds, only two have called her every week. She says that she did not intend to enroll at the other college, which she declines to name, but that its admissions staff was still calling her; in fact, it did so again during Sunday dinner at O-woo.
The Slice event and other campus visits are "the linchpin" of the university’s yield-marketing efforts, but what shapes students’ final decisions remains idiosyncratic and unpredictable, Ms. Dileno says. And sometimes the decisions aren’t simple choices based on how well students feel they fit in.
Gabe Jones says he loves Ohio Wesleyan’s close-knit community and small-town campus, and he’s eager to come here to study zoology. But his other top choice, nearby Otterbein University, is more affordable. His decision, he says, may come down to "a matter of making ends meet on my end."
Rising Need
In the end, the campus visit closed the deal for Ms. Dehkordi. The small classes she attended on Monday impressed her. The financial aid helped as well. She will attend Ohio Wesleyan in the fall. Ms. Paull, meanwhile, will attend the University of Dayton. Mr. Jones will attend Otterbein.
On the whole, the news was not good for Ohio Wesleyan. As of May 1, the university was about 30 students short of its enrollment goal of 480.
Money, not marketing, presented the biggest challenge to filling the class, Ms. Dileno says. This year’s applicant pool was a needy one financially, she says. The median expected family contribution for the previous year’s pool was $14,367. For this year, it’s $13,177. But, while prospective students needed more aid, Ohio Wesleyan didn’t have much more to give than it did last year. In fact, tuition and fees rose by $1,310 from last fall. "We can’t fund all those with need," Ms. Dileno says, "and we’re watching that segment grow."
Ohio Wesleyan’s admissions staff is now working to fill seats with athletes, international students, and other late admissions. At the same time, the counselors have already started to reach out to high-school juniors for next year’s class.
Ms. Dileno, too, is looking ahead. Next year she might make some of the same types of appeals to prospective students, but before the last-minute burst of yield marketing. Spending the money and making the effort to reach students with some of the same tactics might make more sense in the fall, she says, when they might help build up the applicant pool.
But it remains tough to tell what prompts a given student to apply or, eventually, to enroll. "It’s just the randomest things," Ms. Dileno says. "It’s maddening."
Once, when she asked a student what had made the difference, he told her about an interaction with an admissions-staff member. That person had sent him a standard reminder about some missing information on his application, and at the bottom she had scribbled a smiley face. The smiley face did it.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Persuade-Admitted/230007