Challenges Faced by Universities to Enroll Prospective Students

Over the last decade, it has become increasingly challenging for universities to convert prospective students to enrolled students. 

Why?

First, the affordability remains important. In light of these financial concerns, questions about ROI and measurement of outcomes have become increasingly important. This is especially important because major decision making process on undergraduate education still rely on the parents themselves, as they are most likely to choose a school that will give a meaningful values for their investment.

Second, the rise of social and digital media means prospective students can tap into peer opinions and student reviews versus relying solely on traditional sources of school information, such as prospectus, flyers, brochures, and rankings.

Third, beyond cost, advancements in IT has created increased competition, especially among business schools focused on skill-based and technology-based businesses. The rise of start-ups have becoming a huge interest for prospective student to choose a course that enables them to acquire skills and knowledges to build their own business or start-ups.

This situation is exactly what my almamater faces now. They are challenged to deal with a low student intake numbers, which has been decreasing or remain low, since i graduated from there. And yet, they still have to compete with other universities or business schools who are relatively new, but they are seem more compelling and interesting for the students.

Despite the long reputation of one of the best accredited university and business school in Indonesia, and the strategic location right at the heart of the city of Jakarta, and competitive tuition fees, they still struggle in finding and implementing the marketing best practices to reach more students.

Looking at the situation they face, I have found that they lack of brand story. They clearly have no stories, the compelling and influencing ones, to tell and/or share. They still rely on the same old story that is clearly not compelling enough to drive prospective students. While the other schools around the world, particularly in Indonesia, have built a different stories everyday to establish themselves as or should be a number 1 choice for the prospective student.

They are also unable to build a good positioning or value propositions to offer to the prospective students and/or businesses - the propositions that is distinctive from the competitors, desirable by students, and deliverable by the school itself. To help them rethink their strategy, there are important questions to answer:
a) What are the key influencers in the higher education decision process?

b) What types of best practices are prospects most interested in at each stage of the decision journey? 

c) How can school better connect with prospects using relevant messages that resonate with their key motivations?

Understanding Educational Consumer

For any university, marketing approaches create values among a university's stakeholders. These stakeholders are prospective students, current students, alumni, employers of graduates, and financial supporters.

Today, as competition among universities has increased and as resources constraints have become more intense, addressing specific student and/or stakeholder needs has become even more important.

Attracting and retaining students requires developing and offering a unique value proposition; the only way one can know what constitutes a different value equation is to know and understand the market as individuals. Well-defined marketing segmentation structures ate important to well-executed direct marketing programs.

Developing Best Practices

Highly customized and personalized marketing offers can best be tailored to the particular needs and preferences of selected student prospects by using multiple marketing channels of distribution that support direct contact with students. The new era of direct multi-channel marketing requires creating multiple touch points with each student prospect.

Gaining access to and securing response from existing and prospective students via online and offline channels are rapidly becoming the norm for successful student marketing within the market context of higher education.

Today, the Internet enables prospects to self-educate by gathering information on schools anonymously.  And if the school doesn't include in the prospect's short list during the early part of the decision process, then most likely it's very difficult for the school to be considered when it comes time to make an enrollment decision.

That means it's up to the marketing department to keep relevant messages in front of prospects. A large part of this task includes content marketing and lead nurturing early in the decision cycle.

Defining Values

Attracting and retaining students requires developing and offering a unique value proposition; USP is s something that distinguishes your product/service from others in the same sector. It helps to build the foundations of the advertising message. Your proposition has to attract new students, as well as prospective students.

To define brand positioning, it starts with answering one vital question : What are the unique characteristics that define the school and its academic mission?

The question above then broken down to these two following question to identiify and define the best value propositions that the school can offer.

• What students are genuinely pursuing as they compare your school to other?
• And which school will employer choose to partner with?

And through my research, I can identify the answers to those two questions, and which has become the key drivers or factors for prospective students in choosing the school they want and need :

• Opportunity : The chance to gain market-focused knowledge, enhance skills and career possibilities.
• Challenge : School work and program that challenging, given by first-class academic staff and excellent facilities.
• Innovation : The chance to learn how to build a business. As well the chance to create new thinking and to do things differently.
• Excitement : An exciting university life at cosmopolitan campus.
• Support : A full support throughout school activities from the academic staff and alumni.
• Advancement : An excellent investment for future career.

Escalating tuition costs, a challenging job market that doesn't guarantee employment, and the draw of entrepreneurial start-ups have many prospective students questioning the return on investment of a bachelor's degree. 

Yet, given all this, higher education degrees are still in high demand. To meet this persistent demand and respond to these new challenges, schools must understand what things have influenced the prospective student to choose school, and what things that schools should do to influence their decision and finally choose their school over the other.

Source:

1. Connecting with Today's Prospective Student, LinkedIn.
2. Quality Leads to Successful Graduates, LinkedIn