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Five Website Tips for International Student Recruitment

Even as the demand in international markets for a US education continues to rise, more institutions are responding to budget pressures in part by stepping up recruitment of international students, who typically bring significantly more tuition revenue than domestic students. According to the Institute of International Education, in 2008-09, more than 26,000 Chinese students were enrolled in college in the United States, up from 8,000 students eight years earlier. The New York Times has playfully dubbed this “the China Boom.” US colleges continue to see rising enrollments from India and other nations, as well, with India’s top education officials seeking partnerships with US institutions for help in boosting college attainment rates. Even enrollment of international graduate students is rising after a recent lull, according to an annual report by the Council of Graduate Schools. However, if you are not an Ivy League school with a well-established reputation in your target countries, how can you ramp up your international recruiting efforts swiftly? PRIMERS ON KEY RECRUITING STRATEGIES Recruiting International Students: Getting Started (November 2009) Recruiting Chinese Students: What You Need to Know (May 2010) Web marketing guru Bob Johnson, president of Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC, notes that your website is the first […]

Student Philanthropy: The Academic Impressions Model

In 2007, Academic Impressions researched the top student philanthropy programs in the United States and identified a student philanthropy model that highlights three core components shared by the most effective student philanthropy programs:     The Academic Impressions Student Philanthropy Model This model provides a conceptual framework for examining the components of an effective approach to inviting students into your long-term donor pipeline: Creating awareness: Do your students know how their education is funded? Do they understand the importance of private giving to their school? Developing gratitude: Do your students express gratitude for the support they have received? Do your students feel grateful for the role of private support in their educational opportunities? Cultivating giving: Have your students acted on their awareness and gratitude with a philanthropic gesture? “To successfully cultivate committed, lifetime donors, student philanthropy cannot be a series of ad hoc initiatives — it has to be a thoughtfully crafted strategy that spans the student life cycle and has leadership support.” Naomi Nishi, Director of Program Design and Customization, Academic Impressions Awareness Lay out expectations for students regarding their relationship with and responsibility to their alma mater, do so unapologetically, and do so starting at the beginning of freshman […]

Future Support Starts with the Student Experience

Amid the decline of state support for public institutions and a less forgiving fundraising climate (a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy study showed a 12% decline in giving for 2009, the sharpest drop in 50 years), ensuring the future financial health of your institution will require more intentional footwork in establishing a reliable pipeline of invested donors. To develop a stronger donor pipeline, the key is to start earlier. However, institutions attempting to raise giving rates for young alumni are often rebuffed. In a study of the attitudes of young alumni conducted this summer, the Engagement Strategies Group confirmed that the majority of young alumni are reluctant to give due to high tuition costs and a lack of understanding of how institutions of higher education are funded and how institutions do (and don’t) draw on endowment spending to finance their needs. Colleges and universities need to solicit more support from their former students, but what such reports demonstrate is that the best opportunity to create an ambassador for your institution is to cultivate them while they are still students on campus. It is more expensive and much more difficult, if not impossible, for the development office to repair relationships after commencement. […]

Translating a Positive Student Experience into Lifetime Support for your Institution

November 2010. Institutions’ strategic initiatives and plans are increasingly reliant on financial support from alumni and donors, yet most institutions aren’t particularly strategic in their approach to cultivating and sustaining support. Relying solely on your development office to garner this support is both more expensive and less effective than leveraging the efforts of each department that interacts with students during their time on campus. Students will build the capacity to give over time. The more strategic question is, “How do you build propensity to give?” Defining a comprehensive student life cycle and being intentional about every touchpoint a student has before, during, and after their on-campus or online experience puts your institution in the best position for success when you ultimately make the ask. That’s why we’ve taken a whole-campus approach to addressing the issue of building lifetime support for your institution. We’ve asked college presidents and professionals across admissions, student affairs, and advancement for advice on cultivating students as campus stakeholders—at every point in the student life cycle. We hope their advice will be useful to you. Chapter in This Report Read the report

Between Convocation and Commencement: Developing Undergraduates as Stakeholders

Truly laying the groundwork for long-term private support requires rethinking how your institution manages its relationship with students. From the moment of their transition to your campus, it is critical to treat students as stakeholders, not merely consumers or “kids.” This mindset has implications for how offices across your campus interact with students. Each office — academic advising, admissions, financial aid, residence life, campus safety — has a responsibility to ensure a successful and positive student experience that can lead later to an engaged and positive alumni experience. Inviting students to see themselves as stakeholders also entails informing them (in an open and transparent manner) about key issues the institution is facing and inviting their input and help. We interviewed Raj Bellani, associate provost and dean of students at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Jim Langley, president of Langley Innovations, to learn how institutions can develop students as both short-term and long-term stakeholders in your institution’s success. Bellani and Langley suggest: Audit the services you offer students — solicit student feedback, correct inefficiencies that may drive “wedges” between student and institution Invite students to participate in open dialogue with administrative and academic leaders about the financial challenges faced […]

Research Consortiums: What Can Academic Libraries Do Today?

A report from the Association of Research Libraries (pdf) offers four scenarios for predicting the research needs that faculty, students, and other researchers will have in the year 2030, and offers strategic objectives for academic research libraries who will need to build capacity and collections to meet those needs. One of those objectives involves building capacity through consortiums and other cooperative efforts between research libraries: “Collaborative capacities serving groups of research libraries or the full community of research libraries allows for increasing opportunities to develop a strategy for maintaining and sharing open and rich general collections. Opportunities for cross-pollinating research activities and the potential for shared endeavors are also viable strategies.” From The ARL 2030 Scenarios: A User’s Guide to Research Libraries Paul Gandel, professor of information studies at Syracuse University and a thought leader on this issue, points out that research libraries are caught in a Catch-22, in two ways. First, academic libraries need to share resources in order to build capacity, but that sharing has competitive implications. “Most universities have invested in their collections as a competitive advantage,” Gandel notes. “To open up those resources to everyone has political implications, because the institution has made a significant investment […]

Recruiting for the Humanities

With philanthropic monies flowing to the sciences, and sharp declines in the number of students declaring majors in the humanities (8% of US undergraduates in 2007, down from 17% in 1996, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences) as students increasingly look for disciplines linked to specific career outcomes, there is a growing sense in higher education that the future of studies in the humanities — though the humanities are nominally core to a liberal arts curriculum — is threatened. “Within the general college-bound public, the understanding of the liberal arts is fuzzy at best and distorted at worst. Despite our best intentions, noblest desires, and most sincere efforts, the higher education community has been unable to educate the public about what the liberal arts represents.”W. Kent Barnds, Augustana College Without underplaying the importance of enrolling and graduating more students in STEM fields, many university presidents have recently begun promoting the humanities in their speeches on campus and abroad, and some — at institutions such as Cornell, Dartmouth, and Harvard — are pledging to boost their efforts to fundraise for their literature and arts disciplines. There is still a critical question to address — how can institutions recruit more students to […]

Retaining and Rewarding High-Performing Faculty

The news is filled with accounts of extended pay freezes and tightened departmental budgets. More than ever, it is crucial to identify creative, meaningful, and low-cost ways to reward and retain high-performing faculty. Mary Coussons-Read, professor of psychology and acting chair of the department of physics at the University of Colorado Denver, reviews low-cost practices that can make a difference. Rethink Performance Rewards “Don’t get so caught up in the trees that you don’t see the forest,” Coussons-Read warns. “The forest is the need to help your faculty feel good about the work they do. There are many trees you can shake besides the salary adjustment tree.” While rewarding performance will rarely be free of cost, you can consider a variety of low-cost and one-time expenses that allow you to appreciate faculty. The difficulty of a salary increase is that it is a permanent addition to the ongoing budget.  There are many options for rewarding performance for which that is not the case. Look for one-time expenses. Beyond salary increases, you can recognize faculty achievements and, at the same time, use those achievements to encourage a high-performing faculty culture by: Making the most of your faculty awards competition Inviting high-performing […]

Piloting Mobile Learning

The Urgency of Going Mobile Several recent reports have highlighted a rising rate of adoption for mobile devices: Gartner, this week, released a projection that tablet devices such as Apple’s iPad will see more than 19 million units sold worldwide this year, most of them in the US; Gartner also anticipates that this figure will grow to more than 200 million units in 2014 In September, International Data Corp. (IDC) upgraded its forecast for sales of smartphones, suggesting that the end of 2010 would see a 55.4% increase since 2009 In short, though most universities in the US are only in the earliest stages of implementing mobile marketing initiatives, and though few universities are actively piloting mobile learning, there is growing urgency in the need to do so. “In a short period of time, much of what you do will need to be available on mobile devices. Don’t think of this as just an experiment to try. The majority of your students, even your returning adult students, are using mobile devices to manage a large part of their communication and to access information. So your most critical educational activities and resources need to be delivered on mobile devices.” Lynne O’Brien, […]

Key Strategies for Retaining Men

This week, the Washington Post highlighted the efforts many smaller colleges are making to add football programs as a strategy to recruit more men — one of several strategies colleges are currently employing to enroll more men (other efforts include adding academic majors that commonly appeal to men). However, recruitment is only the first part of the solution — colleges also need to address the growing gender gap in student retention. We interviewed W. Kent Barnds, vice president for enrollment, communication, and planning at Augustana College, who recently facilitated an Academic Impressions workshop on the issue, to learn more about where colleges have opportunities to engage male underclassmen. Barnds directs attention to the research collected in Why Boys Fail by Richard Whitmire and Teaching the Male Brain by Abigail Norfleet James, and then offers the following tips for applying the findings to practical strategies an institution can undertake to improve retention of men. Engage Men with Career-Oriented Experiences “Take a step back. Adding sports to attract young men is a good step, but beyond that, are you asking the critical questions to learn if your academic environment and your academic support environment will help you keep them?” W. Kent Barnds, […]