The drastic decline in student enrolment rates in 2023 and 2024 led 41 universities across the United States to shut down permanently.
Experts at EAB, a leading insight-driven solution provider for higher education institutes, predict a continuing decline in enrolment. By 2030, 449 colleges are projected to experience a 25% drop in enrolment, with 182 colleges facing a 50% decline.
The situation is expected to worsen by 2040, with 566 colleges seeing a 25% decline and 247 colleges enduring a 50% decline.
The most prominent reasons why universities are expected to continue facing these challenges are:
Implementing an AI-driven Customer Data platform (CDP) to personalize student experience across diverse touchpoints will help boost student enrolment.
Discover how your institution can use a personalized student nurture plan to boost enrolment in part 2 of this three-part series.
Nurturing strategies across different industries are known to facilitate over 50% increase in sales-ready prospects.
In higher education, student nurturing strategies can help:
All of this will eventually ensure more students move down the admissions funnel and ultimately enroll.
But the question remains; how does one craft an effective nurturing strategy to keep students hooked?
Employ the following nurture strategies across the student journey to boost enrolment.
1. Map the Student Admission Journey
2. Personalize Communication across channels
3. Leverage Predictive Analytics
The first step is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire student journey, from initial awareness to enrolment.
Diverse student groups demand that institutes identify core student motivations and tailor their offerings accordingly. This can only be achieved by effectively leveraging different digital touchpoints.
Prospective student interactions, like the following, are important sources for gauging potential.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Lytics can aggregate data from these different interaction sources to create unified student profiles that are a holistic representation of their interests.
Lytics also facilitates continuous data synchronization to ensure that student profiles stay up-to-date. This helps universities continually refine their outreach and communication strategies to meet the changing interests of students.
Once a holistic understanding of student interests has been acquired, the next step is to personalize student experiences.
Students actively seek authenticity that is devoid of generic fluff. Personalized communication, therefore, remains at the core of any good student nurturing strategy.
Officials at the Ferris State University identified that GenZ students expect personalized experiences from universities.
They implemented website personalization to guide students through the lead, inquiry, and final application stages of the admissions journey. This led to:
Further, the content was personalized using geotargeting capabilities to specifically cater to out-of-state students. This led to a much larger application pool.
The Lytics CDP can help achieve similar outcomes by:
Managing a large number of student visitors and potential leads can make it challenging for universities to prioritize them. It's crucial to determine each student's stage in the application journey, their likelihood of engaging with a marketing campaign, and the best way to guide them forward.
Leveraging Predictive Analytics to accurately score potential student leads can help do this efficiently. Lead scoring involves assigning numeric values to each prospective student to determine communication that would best suit their requirements.
In 2012, Georgia State University adopted predictive analytics to better support its students. By tracking 800 risk factors for over 40,000 students, they facilitated 90,000 interventions in just one year. These timely interventions, prompted by early alerts, helped students avoid costly mistakes and stay on course.
Since implementing predictive analytics, Georgia State University has seen a 7% increase in graduation rates, saving students $18 million in tuition and fees.
For every 1% increase in retention, the university's revenue grew by $3.18 million.
This approach significantly benefited low-income and first-generation students, leading to a 103% increase in bachelor's degrees awarded to African-American students.
Lead scoring accounts for a number of behavioral metrics, including:
Lytics uses Machine Learning (ML) to evaluate behaviors, demographics, and engagement patterns. It assigns scores based on the likelihood of prospective students applying or enrolling.
This allows universities to prioritize high-potential leads, tailor communications, and allocate resources more effectively.
The Lytics CDP is well-equipped to capture real-time data and provide detailed analytics on the effectiveness of different campaigns and touchpoints. This enables users to:
To effectively address the challenges of declining student enrolment and enhance your institution's admissions process:
By following these steps, you can enhance your student nurturing efforts and boost enrolment, ensuring a more sustainable future for your institution.
Need more help in boosting your student enrolment?
The experts at Axelerant can help.
Schedule a call to know how.