Recruiting the e-Generation: smart admissions administrators are now using the Web to increase yield. (Online).

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project 2000 (www.pewinternet.org/reports), nearly three-quarters of young Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 go online regularly, and about half of all American high school students go online every day. More than half of these teens (55 percent) have visited a chat room, and nearly 24 percent of them have created a Web page.

It's no wonder then--with the Internet such a large part of a teen-ager's daily routine--that colleges and universities are catching on to the potential of the Web. They're now using it not only to attract students, but as a means to increase the number of admitted students who actually enroll

The Internet as an Admission Tool 2001, the third annual survey conducted by the consulting firm Education Now (www.ednow.org), revealed that admission and enrollment managers are awakening to the larger communications potential of their Web sites. Sixty-two percent of the respondents said they see the conversion of accepted students to matriculants as a relevant future issue.

For some pioneers in college admissions, the future is now. They are the campuses already using the Internet as a means to achieve their primary goal of attracting, admitting, and yielding high-quality students. Admissions officers at these schools have discovered the Internet offers a level of customer service that the traditional paper world lacks, making it easier to attract those better students.

"As students' SAT scores go up, yield goes down because those students are more competitive," says Jip Inglis, Senior VP of Connexxia (www.connexxia.com), manufacturer of the Web-based AdmissionsGenie, designed to help schools in all phases of the admissions cycle. "The battle to get those high-quality kids is super intense, so anything you can do to show them more personal attention and to make them see how well they would fit into your school, helps." The Internet can also help to distinguish a school from its competition, say e-recruiting pros--something that has become more and more difficult to do with the standard recruiting materials.

"There's a lot of noise out there," says Dennis Matthews, VP/Enrollment at Georgia's Oglethorpe University. "It's harder than ever to distinguish your institution in traditional ways. Even accurate descriptions become confusing when all sorts of schools use the same words to describe themselves. That makes it increasingly challenging to rely solely on print materials." What's more, he continues, "With Caller ID, part-time jobs, and tons of competing activities, it becomes harder and harder to wage effective telephone campaigns to prospective students. Electronic communication is an important supplement. We did not think we could ignore this direction."

BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE

Companies such as Connexxia and ApplyYourself (www.applyyourself.com) are positioning themselves to help colleges and universities like Oglethorpe leverage the power of the Internet to increase yield. Proponents say the Web-based programs and services (starting at $5,000 for ApplyYourself's i-Class, and $30,000 for AdmissionsGenie--and priced according to desired features) can enhance the recruitment process by boosting the level of customer service in the following ways:

Offering personalization through customized e-mails is more effective than generic one-way paper communications, say the experts. HTML e-mail with lively graphics catch the eye, while content can be defined for various target audiences (regional, national, international, gender, minority). Yon simply need to determine what the goal of each message is, advises Anne Made Pascoe, ApplyYourself marketing/communications manager. By targeting messages based on recruitment objective, stage of the admission process, and audience, she says, a school can create an effective communications calendar from which to work. Types of e-mail messages can include:

* invitations to recruiting events and receptions

* newsletters

* Links to the online application

* application deadline reminders

* detailed program information (based on the applicant's specific interests)

"In our research, we discovered that students have a tremendous desire for personalized two-way communication," says Connexia's Inglis. "Most schools tend to send out generic, one-way communications that lead the student to interpret the whole admissions process as, `That's a big school out there, and there's just little me down here: Such communications can be intimidating-even confusing and frustrating--to them."

Enabling communication in minutes, rather than weeks, via highly interactive Web sites, e-mails, chat rooms, and message boards. "Once a school gives a student an admissions decision, there is a four- to eight-week period when the student is trying to decide where to go," says Len Methany, President and CEO of ApplyYourself. "That's a critical time when the school needs to be in touch and show that it really wants that student. In the traditional paper world, the school is probably achieving only one con tact with the accepted student during that yield campaign. With the Internet, a school can achieve three or four different touches in that critical period." Scholarship/financial aid information; alumni, student, and faculty profiles; and invitations to receptions being held in the student's area are all messages that the technology can expediently deliver to students, to help them make enlightened decisions.

Achieving increased efficiency with message hoards. Message boards can free up the limited human resources in the Admissions office. "When a student asks a question, she gets to see not only her question and answer but everyone else's questions and answers," says Craig Fulton, Director of Admissions at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. "That keeps us up from getting into e-mail responses with each individual student, which frees up our staff time." Instead, says Fulton, that time can be spent on more value-added tasks, such as meeting with students, or speaking with them on the phone. It also gives admissions officers extra time to read applications more thoroughly.

Connecting students with similar interests by encouraging them to create proxies. The Internet makes it easier for students to build connections and develop friendships, even before they get to campus. "It's exciting," says Fulton: "Admitted students can create a Web profile by putting together a photo, a description of their interests, and their e-mail address. If someone is an admitted engineering student, he can search the site and rind all the other engineering students who have been admitted. It's pretty dramatic; once students feet part of a community it's harder for them not go to the school." Most schools also allow admitted students to read profiles created by enrolled students.

"If a student hasn't decided to enroll at a school yet, reading the profiles of the kids who hove decided to come is a great sales tool," Inglis says. "When she sees the enthusiastic responses of the kids who have already committed, it increases her own likelihood of enrolling."

Providing sophisticated tracking and reporting features. With these tools, schools can more closely follow a student's behavior throughout the admissions process, beginning with the application. In the traditional paper world, schools have no way of knowing who has started an application" who needs a deadline reminder; who needs to be informed of an upcoming school-related event in his area. In contrast, a school utilizing an online application service may have the ability to query applicants-in-progress and communicate with them via e-mail (even though schools are prevented from accessing student profile information until the application is officially submitted). But with basic ID data a school can, for instance, query the system to find all of the applications in progress, and send out deadline reminders. Or, it can notify applicants-in-progress that an open house may be coming up in their area.

Another benefit that an online service offers is the ability for a school to send to a prospect an e-mail that contains a link to that prospect's record, so that the student can update any personal information that may have changed. This capability ensures that schools always have the most up-to-date information about their prospects so that they are able to communicate most effectively.

In addition, online services offer the ability to record and track an action history for each prospect: Each time a school sends an e-mail, invitation, deadline reminder, etc. to a prospect, it is recorded in student's action history. In that way, the school has the ability to track which e-mails/messages have been received, and which campaigns have been most effective.

YIELDING RESULTS AND CUTTING COSTS

Does the Internet enable colleges to recruit students to matriculation for less than the cost of a simple print-based funnel? Some argue that the Net can certainly replace some facets of traditional recruitment, but if in the long run those efforts are not as effective as print-based efforts, the savings are not real.

Officials at the University of Dayton say they have effectively used the Internet to increase yield and, at the same time, lower recruitment costs. Back in 1996, they began working with LiquidMatrix Corporation (www.liquidmatrix.com), a Web site design and content management firm, to make substantial changes to the school's Web site. The result was the delivery of services that gave students the option to personalize the UD Web site to receive information tailored to their interests, apply online, check the status of their admission, and submit a financial aid estimator.

Since 1996, UD's enrollment has increased, overall, by 10.7 percent, according to Chris Munoz, UD's vice president for Enrollment Management. Getting students to personalize UD's Web sit has been key to that success, says Munoz. In 2000, he reports, overall yield was 29.8 percent, but the yield of those student who personalized the site was 35.5 percent. The following year, the gap increased: Overall yield was 29.7 percent but yield of site personalizers was 38.1 percent.

Munoz says their success stemmed from knowing how and when to use the Internet--not an arbitrary replacement of print efforts. He points out that placing an entire viewbook online would not be effective, and could be as costly as a traditional viewbook. But intelligent use of the Internet can lead to cost reductions: UD, he says, has brought down recruiting costs per student from $473 in 1996, to $390 in 2001. And with the Internet as adjunct (viewbook course descriptions were moved to the Web, for instance), UD has been able to reduce the size of its print viewbook, as well, cutting costs even further. In addition, recruiters at UD are now traveling less (and bringing down travel budgets) because of electronic recruitment.

TARGETING TOP STUDENTS

At UNC Charlotte, Fulton wanted to boost out-of-state yield and at the same time attract better students--all without increasing travel time or expenses. He believed the Internet would be a natural way to achieve those goats. He was right: For the fall of 2001, the school increased out-of-state enrollment by 9 percent. The yield bump has created a "dramatic increase all the way down the line," he says, explaining that "out-of-state students pay more to attend the university, and they Live on campus, which means they pay room and board. Add another kid from town, and you lose that extra revenue--he lives with morn and dad.

"It's not just about increasing the yield percentage points," Fulton says. "We're going after better students. You have to work harder to get better students because they have more options." The average SAT score of incoming freshman in 2001 was up 10 points from the previous year, he points out, adding that this year, campus officials continued to be more selective and did not have to admit as many bottom-tier students who fall into the high yield range. At press time, UNC Charlotte was ahead in commitments by 6 percent over the previous year.

"Right or wrong," says Fulton, "there is the perception that if you have a cool Web site, you're a technologically savvy institution. I never used to think a Web site could make a difference. I thought students would visit the campus, talk to their friends, see if a school was affordable, and then make a decision. They still do all of those things, but they do it after they check out your Web site."

Nicole Rivard is Departments Editor of University Business.