News

The Changing Student Demographic: What You Need to Rethink

Increasingly, academic leaders are becoming aware that the traditional, 18-year-old high school graduate enrolling as a freshman at a four-year institution is a shrinking demographic. According to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES): Three -fourths of today’s college students are nontraditional 49 percent are enrolled part-time 38 percent work full-time 27 percent have dependents of their own at home These adult learners interact with your institution — from admission to commencement and beyond — in ways markedly different from traditional students. A diverse, heterogeneous demographic, adult students comprise working mothers, career-aged adults seeking a career change or a safe harbor amid a troubled economy, military veterans, and adults of all ages returning to complete a degree. These nontraditional learners are often both hard-working and determined. Unless compensated by an employer, most are paying for their tuition out of their own pocket, and many are allocating time to their education that could be devoted to family, commitments within their community, or other career-building activities. In other words, it’s likely that most adult students enrolling at your institution have the will to achieve and the will to complete a degree. Yet many unintentional barriers persist to a positive student experience at your institution — barriers that represent […]

Report: Optimizing Your Campus and Curriculum for Adult Students

In this report: Most college and university administrators know the story of how demographics are shifting in this country. They don’t need the latest data from NCES — they see it every day on their campuses. Nontraditional students now make up a significant majority of college enrollment. But many institutions, especially regionally-focused public and private four-years, did not make the decision to intentionally serve this market. They are reacting to the demand as opposed to being out in front of it. Adult students have different experiences, expectations, and educational goals than traditional-age students. Institutions that successfully serve this market have retooled enrollment policies, course offerings, and student support services, and have even begun thinking of ways to earn their support as alumni. That’s why we’ve gathered a host of experts from across the institution to help you better meet the demands of this growing population. We hope their advice will be useful to you. Read the report

Boosting Adult Persistence

Beyond offering flexible course scheduling, what are the real keys to persistence and academic success for adult learners? Janet Daniel, director of the office of adult students and evening services at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, distills the current research into four key points that, when present, make a difference: A central unit on campus to coordinate cross-departmental efforts to support adult learners, and which serves as a single, “one stop” point of contact for adult students An intentionally designed orientation to help adults transition back into the college experience Academic advisers (and faculty) who understand adult learners’ unique needs Extended office hours for key services and a campus-wide emphasis on availability and convenience A Coordinated Approach, with One Point of Contact Many campuses have particular services and staff that are equipped to help address the needs of adult learners, but they are seldom coordinated. Daniel speaks to the importance of a “one stop” approach to offering services for adult learners. Many adult learners are either first-generation students or have been removed from the college experience for enough years that they are not familiar with what offices to contact and when, or where to go to locate critical campus resources. Adopt a “one stop” […]

Recruiting and Admitting Adult Students

Because enrollment policies and practices have long been tailored to traditional-aged students (especially at four-year institutions), efforts to recruit and enroll adults offer special challenges. To learn more about key actions at each stage of the admissions funnel that can have an impact on the enrollment of adult students, we reached out to adult-recruiting veteran Mike Barzacchini, director of marketing services for Harper College, who has seen considerable success in this area. Here are his practical tips for increasing inquiries, applications, and admits. Increasing Inquiries from Adults First, Barzacchini suggests a two-pronged approach to generating leads: Mine your historical data to identify past stop-outs and other cohorts that have shown interest in a degree at your institution Create an adult-friendly website RE-ENROLLING STOPOUTS Stop-outs are those who did not attain their degree — not for reasons of low academic performance, but because of the intervention of life circumstances. An audit of your records can tell you which past students stopped a few classes shy of a degree. Many of these students may not even realize how close they would be to completing if they were to re-enroll. To learn more about the barriers faced, read our July 2010 article “Re-enrolling Stop-Outs: Overcoming the Barriers.” Institutional […]

Taking On-Campus Student Employment to the Next Level

by Daniel Fusch

September 29, 2011 The 2010 census data paints a bleak financial picture for recent graduates, and as the recession lingers, it’s clear that many of the students enrolled at your institution will be graduating into a very difficult market. There has rarely been a better time to conduct an aggressive rethinking of your on-campus employment opportunities. We reached out to Brett Perozzi, the associate vice president for student affairs at Weber State University and a key thinker and innovator on this issue, to learn more about how on-campus employment opportunities can be structured well to enhance student learning and prepare students well for entry into their future careers. Perozzi offered us advice on these four items: “The key that I have found is selecting specific learning outcomes (for example, outcomes focused on critical thinking, communication skills, problem-solving skills, leadership), and then teaching and training students around those specific skill sets. Often we think: “Well, of course students will become better problem-solvers after these employment opportunities.” But you need to train for this and provide structured opportunities for this learning to occur. Good on-campus employment programs select specific learning outcomes, provide relevant and targeted training, and assess progress.”Brett Perozzi, Weber State […]

Millennial Alumni in the Recession: How to Reach Them

2010 census data emphasizes the plight of millennials in their 20s — recent college graduates who are struggling to find work, many of them living with their parents and struggling to launch careers as they find themselves under-employed. Given the recession’s toll on this decade of young alumni, it is especially crucial for annual giving directors to: Take stock of what motivates millennials to engage and give Be intentional in strengthening their base of millennial givers as these donors age into their early 30s To gather practical suggestions, we turned this week to Jeff Mavros, director of the Wesleyan Fund at Illinois Wesleyan University, who has led a very intentional effort to research the motivations and affinity of IWU’s alumni and to craft deliberate strategies for acquiring and stewarding millennial donors. Drivers of Millennial Giving While the characteristics of millennials are well-documented, Mavros calls attention to several key drivers at play in the ways that millennials choose to interact with their alma mater: This cadre of young alumni are more likely to place their trust in an individual they have connected with personally than in an institution, even in one whose mission they believe in While this cadre is transient […]

Recruiting Latino Students

In this article, we want to highlight the practices from an interview we conducted in November 2010 with Judi Diaz Bonacquisti, the associate vice president of enrollment services at the Metropolitan State College of Denver (MSCD). In the past few years, a number of institutions in Colorado have been investing in efforts to become Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) — institutions at which more than 25 percent of the students are Latino, and which are thus eligible for specific federal funds. The most successful effort in Colorado has been at MSCD, an urban institution with a mission focused on serving the immediate metropolitan area, a significant percentage of which is Latino. Metro State enrolls more than 24,000 students, and in 2010 saw an increase of 1,054 over the previous fall; of those 1,054 students enrolled at MSCD last fall, 735 were Hispanic. As institutions strive to become more competitive in their outreach and recruitment of Latino students, Bonacquisti has advice for what can be learned from recent successes at MSCD. Engage the Community Where MSCD has seen success — and where Bonacquisti suggests other institutions seeking to serve Latino students better might also see the most success — is in engaging the target community closely. This entails moving beyond the traditional […]

Marketing to Adult Students

Increasingly, academic leaders are becoming aware that the traditional, 18-year-old high school graduate enrolling as a freshman at a four-year institution is a shrinking demographic. According to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES): As colleges and universities strive to enroll more of the growing adult student market, they face significant challenges: at most four-year institutions, the website, marketing messages, and the academic experience those messages promote are tailored to the needs of traditional-aged, high-school graduates. We turned to Bob Sevier, senior vice president of strategy at STAMATS, for his insights on factors in college choice for adult students, and where colleges can see gains in marketing to adults. College Choice: Adult Students “‘Adult learners’ is a broad tag that covers many types of adult students with many motivations for returning to college, but in the main, if there’s one thing you need to stress, it’s flexibility.” Bob Sevier, STAMATS It’s key to understand that adult students have more demands on their time. Sevier suggests that adult students are also more likely than traditional students to perceive their college education as a means to an end. “For many traditional students, the campus experience and the process of gaining education is an […]

Crafting a Naming Opportunities Plan

by Vincent E. Duckworth, CFRE

As institutions navigate a prolonged recession, many are launching new fundraising campaigns in response to decreased funding sources — some of them quite ambitious in their scope (most notably, the University of Southern California’s recently announced $6 billion campaign). Even as more institutions look to launch new campaigns, donors are increasingly interested in attaching their names to philanthropic projects representative of their values. To capitalize on this trend, institutions must develop procedures and policies for establishing, managing, and marketing naming opportunities. In 2010, we ran an article featuring advice from Vincent Duckworth, partner and chief marketing officer at ViTreo, offering specific tips for handling the renaming of facilities, and also spoke to the importance of crafting a naming opportunities plan that will allow you to identify and prioritize naming opportunities prior to a campaign. Now, we have reached out to Vincent Duckworth again to learn more about how institutions can identify and manage naming opportunities from the very start of a campaign. An Additional Training Resource: Nuts & Bolts of an Effective Naming Policy Register online now to learn how to develop a naming policy appropriate for your institution. Utilizing real examples from American and Canadian institutions, participants will learn the […]

Fundraising for the Library: Building Shared Purpose

The academic library faces increased demand for services and the increased costs of acquisitions, digitization, and facilities upgrades, even as many institutions are trimming budgets. This has led to a growing awareness that library leaders need to devote more energy to partnering with advancement and academic leaders to raise external funds for the library. Yet because the academic library is a central resource on campus and lacks a direct alumni constituency, fundraising for the needs of the library has often been difficult. We turned to Jeffrey Trzeciak, university librarian at McMaster University, for his tips for success for other university librarians. Trzeciak spoke with us about McMaster University’s unique model that raised more than a quarter-million dollars by involving senior and reunion classes. For this article, we asked him for advice on some of the thinking that needs to underlie such an effort: Here’s what Trzeciak suggests. Partnering with Academic Leaders “We need to focus not just on our own funding needs, but also on playing a role in the fundraising for the institution as a whole — even if it means assisting in bringing in gifts that don’t directly fund the library.” Jeffrey Trzeciak, McMaster University Trzeciak stresses the importance of founding partnerships […]