‘Act Now!’ Say Hello to the New Enrollment Playbook

In mid-January, a college applicant in the suburbs of Chicago received an enticing offer. It came from an admissions counselor at Illinois Wesleyan University, who left him a voicemail message and followed up with a text. “You have been selected,” the text said, “to receive an extra $2,000 per year in scholarship money!”

There was one stipulation. Because funds were limited, the university would hold the offer for just two weeks. “If you deposit by February 1st,” the text said, “then you are guaranteed the extra 2k. Let me know if you have any questions!”

Later that day, the young man shared the news with Augustana College, in Rock Island, Ill., which had sent him a financial-aid package weeks earlier. Could Augustana, he asked, match Illinois Wesleyan’s latest offer? He needed an answer by February 1.

That snapshot from the heartland shows how the admissions realm is changing. It increasingly resembles the rest of the commercial world, in which come-ons relentlessly pelt consumers’ skulls, incentives drive decisions, and everyone expects to bargain. Here’s a 40-percent-off promo code! We will not be undersold! Act now — this special offer expires soon!

The 2019-20 admissions cycle marks the end of student recruitment as we know it. Colleges are using fiercer tactics, and the official rules of competition are kaput. Last fall, under pressure from the Justice Department, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as NACAC, deleted portions of its ethics code that federal investigators deemed “anticompetitive.”

Now colleges can offer incentives to early-decision applicants. Continue wooing teenagers after they’ve submitted deposits to other colleges. And recruit students attending other four-year institutions who haven’t inquired about transferring. Moreover, NACAC has put a moratorium on enforcing its remaining guidelines; for now, the entire code is unplugged. That’s why some institutions are chipping away at a near-sacred practice: giving regular-decision applicants until May 1 to consider all of their admission and aid offers.

Though the code lacked the force of law, it expressed a consensus about what was OK and what wasn’t. It reminded a data-drenched profession that decisions made by adults in enrollment offices affect living, breathing teenagers. Although some institutions broke, bent, or just plain resented those rules, colleges belonging to the NACAC club generally followed them.

Like it or not, the demise of the guidelines is hastening the industry’s push into murky territory. New tactics — like Illinois Wesleyan’s offering applicants extra aid in exchange for a deposit three months before the traditional deadline — could affect hordes of colleges. Even those not trying new strategies of their own must decide how, or whether, to counter a competitor’s gambit.

This year, predicting yield (the percentage of admitted students who enroll) and protecting the bottom line will become more challenging for many colleges. “This recruitment cycle will be bipolar,” one longtime admissions officer tweeted in February. “There will be a continuing emphasis on getting an early commitment paired with a late push to sway or bribe those who are going elsewhere.”

If you believe that unbridled competition can help many cost-conscious families get a better deal — and plenty of people do believe that — you still should ask which families will most likely gain. Those with little money and guidance, or the savvy, affluent folks whom the process already serves so well? The safe bet’s on the latter.

But let’s forget about money for a minute. The shifting landscape of enrollment raises ethical questions, too. A year after the Varsity Blues scandal gave the public even more reasons to distrust admissions offices, the profession must ask itself: Where’s the line beyond which supercharged sales tactics and drawn-out recruitment might harm students? The answer surely can’t be found in a spreadsheet.

As spring nears, conflicting forecasts abound: Nervous doomsayers. Cheerful optimists. Cautious wait-and-see-ers. They all have theories about what this era of relaxed restrictions and newfangled strategies will mean for applicants and colleges alike.

The early evidence suggests that student recruitment will continue to look and feel more and more like the big, breathless business that it is, only bolder, looser, less predictable, and more desperate than ever.

Exciting offer! Submit your transfer application today! Time is running out!

Uncertainty grips every shoulder in the enrollment business. On many small, tuition-dependent campuses, that grip keeps getting tighter.

Greg King can feel it. He’s dean of admissions at Illinois Wesleyan, a liberal-arts institution in Bloomington, Ill., where the average annual cost of attendance is about $30,000. The campus sits in the middle of a state with a shrinking pool of high-school graduates. In November 2018, Moody’s Investors Service lowered the university’s outlook to negative, citing a trend of declining enrollment and net revenue. Last spring the institution announced $1.1 million in cuts, and months later it enrolled 409 first-time, first-year students, down from 494 the previous year.

So King and his colleagues had every reason to consider what they could do to make the university more attractive to prospective students this year, as the profession’s guidelines have changed. “I grew up with those guidelines,” he says. “Hurting students in this process — that’s not something I ever want to come close to doing.”

With the ethics code shelved, though, King saw an opportunity. After a half-hour of brainstorming, he and his colleagues came up with an idea that involved working around the May 1 deposit deadline in a way that once would’ve been a no-no.

First, Illinois Wesleyan started sending aid packages to admitted applicants in December, earlier than before. Then, in January, the university offered the extra $2,000-a-year incentive to dozens of those students. Some offers went to applicants who had made a strong impression; others went to those who had gaps in their aid awards, or who had expressed concern about costs.

Giving them a February 1 deadline to accept that offer was a way of speeding things up. “If a student was close to choosing us,” King says, “we wanted to get them over and through that process, to help them make that commitment and move on with their senior year without all the anxiety.”

A skeptic must pause here to ask whether an out-of-the-blue, soon-to-expire financial offer might, in fact, stoke the anxiety of hormonal teenagers. Especially those who are waiting on financial-aid packages from other colleges or expecting to weigh their options for three more months.

King doesn’t think the offer puts too much pressure on families. Some applicants asked for more time to decide, and the university extended the deadline for them. “Over the last few years, we’ve heard from a lot of families that said we’re their number-one choice, but they were reluctant to commit or ask for additional funds,” King says. “This is aimed at letting them lock that decision down.”

The move, of course, has potential benefits for Illinois Wesleyan. Above all, it’s an assertive yield strategy: The more commitments a college can secure well before the traditional May 1 deposit deadline, the better its chances of hitting its enrollment and revenue targets.

The offer has also allowed admissions officers to gauge an applicant’s likelihood of enrolling. That’s valuable information to get before April or May, when suspense fills many admissions offices. “This gave students an opportunity to tell us that we’re not on their list anymore,” King says. After that, the admissions staff could move on and offer the money to other prospective students.

Illinois Wesleyan offered the incentive to fewer than 150 of its 1,700 admitted applicants. Though King says he hasn’t tallied up how many students committed as a result, enrollment deposits are up by 10 percent over the same time last year. “This was a way of engaging earlier,” he says. “Some families who’ve come to visit said they really appreciated it.”

But the young man from the suburbs of Chicago might not be coming. He has indicated that his first choice is Augustana, which upped his aid award to just about match Illinois Wesleyan’s offer.

Such bidding wars have always occurred in April or May. This one began two weeks before the Super Bowl.

That unsettled W. Kent Barnds, head of enrollment at Augustana. His competitor’s strategy, he thought, put applicants in a tough spot by forcing them to make a quick decision. But he didn’t hesitate to increase the Chicago student’s aid award. “The stakes are so high and the environment so unknown,” he says. “We can’t afford to take any risks by just sitting back and not responding.”

The early bird eschews a wait-and-see approach. It just swoops down for that worm.

Though many colleges stood pat after NACAC changed its ethics code last September, several did something new. On some campuses, that meant offering incentives to early-decision applicants.

In an email to prospective students last fall, Reed College, in Portland, Ore., explained that accepted early-decision applicants would get “the added bonus of choosing your residence hall.” Their “preferred” status would guarantee them their first- or second-choice dorm.

After NACAC’s rules changed, “this felt like a natural thing for us to do,” says Kevin Myers, Reed’s spokesman. The main reason, he says: Each year many prospective students express concern about the availability of campus housing.

Milyon Trulove, Reed’s dean of admissions and financial aid, says he doesn’t consider first dibs at dorm rooms a major incentive: “We’re not trying to fill our class with ED applicants. I’ve never heard a student say, ‘I’m coming to your school because of this room.’”

Early-decision programs allow colleges to lock in a portion of their freshman class well before the May 1 deposit deadline. It’s a means of hedging against uncertainty. For applicants, the benefit is clear: a better chance of getting in.

Yet the appeal of early-decision programs has always been greatest at highly selective colleges. Generally, applicants didn’t have as much of an incentive to commit early to less-selective institutions, where regular-decision seats are relatively easy to snag. And unless cost was not an issue, committing early was risky.

But now that colleges can load incentives onto early decision, “the logic of it fundamentally changes,” according to a recent report from EAB, an enrollment-services company. For less-selective colleges, it says, early-decision incentives can “promote early capture of student mindshare” — you know, hook them — and give applicants “access to a practically unlimited range of benefits.” Translation: The age of incentives could compel more colleges to create or expand early-decision programs.

Last fall, Clarkson University, in Potsdam, N.Y., emailed prospective applicants to announce a new benefit called the Early Decision Incentive Scholarship. The pitch: Students who applied by December 1 would, if accepted, get an additional $2,000 a year for four years.

It was a strategy that Brian T. Grant, vice president for enrollment and student advancement, once would have resisted. Over the years he had leaned on the NACAC ethics code when trustees now and then asked why the university couldn’t encourage early applicants by, say, offering them preferred housing.

Because, Grant would explain, the guidelines barred such incentives. The spirit of the rule was this: Teenagers should choose a binding early-decision program because the college suited their needs — not because they got perks. If Clarkson were to give even a sweatshirt to early-decision applicants, he would say, it must give one to regular-decision applicants, too.

“I believe in it,” Grant says of the ethics code. “It’s always been the playbook we go by.”

But when the playbook changed, Clarkson officials decided, after some careful discussions, to change their game plan. Over the past five years, Grant had heard from more and more families who said that though the university was their first choice, they didn’t feel comfortable giving up the chance to weigh competing financial-aid offers.

He describes the four-year, $8,000 discount as a small incentive that speaks to that big concern: “Every dollar matters to families in this day and age.”

This year, early-decision applications increased by 25-percent over last year. That’s welcome news for a small college in upstate New York, where a shrinking pool of high-school graduates has intensified the competition in a crowded field of public and private institutions.

“The more students we can get in on the front end,” Grant says, “the safer we are — if there is such a thing in admissions anymore.”

Daemen College, in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., offered early decision for the first time this fall. In early October, it sent 22,000 prospective students an email with “Important Information” in the subject line. Early-decision applicants who committed by December 20, the message said, “will have their tuition rate GUARANTEED for all four years.”

“We have to look for ways to distinguish ourselves,” says Gregory J. Nayor, vice president for strategic initiatives. “And at the end of the day, dollars are what matters to students.”

Daemen expects to enroll 400 first-year students this fall. Early-decision applicants probably will account for about a quarter of them. Their tuition will be frozen at the 2020-21 rate; the guarantee doesn’t apply to room, board, and other fees.

Nayor welcomes the post-guidelines era. This year, he says, the use of a new incentive helped Daemen gain an edge in marketing.

Still, he believes that the ethical core of NACAC’s guidelines matters a lot. For instance, he thinks pressuring regular-decision applicants to commit before May 1 is wrong. Many of his peers, he predicts, won’t cross such a line.

“You’ve got to be aggressive and be strategic,” Nayor says. “But you can’t bring in students who aren’t a good fit. We’re still talking about people’s lives here.”

An elaborate process facilitating an exchange of wealth, goods, and services: One could think of the admissions process as nothing more than that. College X offers a student a discount, and College Y comes along and doubles it, gaining a commitment and another stream of tuition revenue. The student gets a better deal. The end.

But college-selection doesn’t happen in a ledger. It plays out in the wilderness of emotions known as real life, and Phil Trout has a front-row seat.

In January, Trout, a college counselor at Minnetonka High School, in Minnesota, faced a dilemma when one of his students bounded into his office and exclaimed, “I’m so happy to be done!” The young woman had applied to five colleges via nonbinding early-action programs. She got an acceptance from each one, including her top choice.

But Trout knew something that she didn’t. One of the other colleges planned to substantially increase its merit-scholarship offers to accepted students in April, whether they had indicated that they were enrolling elsewhere or not. He considered telling the student that, no, everything wasn’t done.

“But she was ebullient,” Trout says, “and I couldn’t ruin the moment.”

Some students would surely welcome a bidding war. For their families, such competition might deliver a more-affordable option that eases their financial burden. But Trout worries about the consequences of dragging more and more students into a prolonged season of pot-sweetening.

“It’s not going to be a very pleasant situation,” he says. “It’s going to cause those students, who up until that moment thought they were in happy land, to ask ‘Have I made the right choice?’”

Yet Trout suspects that the most intense competition won’t be for incoming freshmen. It will be for students who are already attending other colleges.

Last fall the mother of a 2019 Minnetonka graduate contacted Trout to say that her son, a college freshman, had received transfer solicitations from seven institutions. He hadn’t even applied to three of them.

“She said, ‘This isn’t right,’” Trout recalls. “And I said, ‘Well … actually, now it’s allowed.’”

As a result of the NACAC rule changes, colleges are free to recruit students enrolled at other four-year colleges. In a poll of more than 150 enrollment leaders, EAB found that 35 percent were considering offering transfer incentives to previous applicants who were attending other four-year institutions. An additional 11 percent said they were considering going after students enrolled elsewhere whether they had previously applied or not.

Those campaigns are well underway. One freshman at a four-year college got an email last fall from Carroll University, in Waukesha, Wis. “Just checking in to see how you’re doing,” it began. “I hope you’re pleased with how your fall semester is going, but if your situation hasn’t turned out exactly as you expected or it’s not quite the right fit, it might be time to think about making a change.” The email included a link to Carroll’s “no-hassle transfer” application.

A freshman at another four-year campus got an email from St. Ambrose University, in Davenport, Iowa. “I think you might be ready to transition to a university education focused on meaningful success,” it began. The “special invitation” included a list of “exceptional advantages” and “perks,” such as waived application fees and no essay requirement. The message urged recipients to apply soon to avoid the “December 1 rush.”

Elsewhere, a freshman got an email last November from North Central University, in Minneapolis. “Looking to transfer for spring?” it asked. “Are you having second thoughts about your current college or university?” The message invited the student to visit the campus and enjoy a free cup of Starbucks coffee.

Those messages signal new, especially fertile ground for competition. After all, 19 percent of students who start at one four-year college end up transferring to another, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. A recent EAB survey of 2,000 freshmen found that fewer than half (48 percent) “definitely” would choose the same college again.

The same survey asked freshmen about incentives that would make them consider applying to a college they previously had considered. Saving money was the big one: Thirty-four percent of students would consider transferring to another four-year college offering a scholarship that lowered their current cost of attendance.

Recruitment of potential transfers promises to become more sophisticated. In its report, EAB described how an unnamed private college in the Northeast started a marketing campaign during the Thanksgiving holiday to attract admitted students who had enrolled elsewhere. Students who enrolled out of state were invited to “come back home.” Those who enrolled at large public institutions were promised a setting where they would “be heard.”

By trying to nail down commitments early, as well as by wooing students later on, colleges are waging a war against uncertainty that, Trout and many other high-school counselors believe, will just prolong many students’ own uncertainty.

Choose your college early! Would you like to reconsider? Are you ready to start over at a college that’s right for you?

Before anyone gets carried away, let’s take a deep breath and remember a few things. First, the enrollment business has always been just that. Today’s tactics might seem louder, more over-the-top than before, but student recruitment has long been a dog-eat-dog affair. It’s just that the most intense competitions don’t often involve colleges whose names appear in front-page articles about admissions.

Also, many institutions that recruit, enroll, and educate students don’t belong to NACAC — never have, never will. The association represents one band of higher education, and its most influential members occupy a privileged perch.

The recent hullabaloo over NACAC’s ethics code has revealed a rift: admissions officials who are shocked to hear about colleges using once-barred tactics, and admissions officials who are shocked to hear that anyone’s shocked. After all, in some corners of the industry, some practices forbidden by the ethics code are old hat. Like throwing money at a competitor’s committed students after the May 1 deposit deadline.

“A lot of it’s been happening forever, but no one really talked about it,” says Patricia Maben, president and co-founder of 3 Enrollment Marketing Inc., who previously worked at a handful of private colleges. “Colleges have always been walking a fine line, with some crossing over it. Now, with the guidelines loosening up, it’s OK to talk about it.”

Maben argues that more competition will help students, by promoting better service and delivering more options. She, like many enrollment experts, thinks students will see through marketing gimmicks and insist on choosing a college by asking the old, essential questions: What can I afford? How far is it from home? Will I get a great education, in a place that fits, with people I feel good about?

NACAC’s ethics guidelines lie at the crossroads of an important debate about what’s best for applicants. Did the code, as the Justice Department concluded, work against students’ interests by limiting competition that could benefit them? Or did it protect students from the cruel hand of commercial pressure, thus enabling them to make sound decisions?

“Many people have described it as something that protected students, but it was really meant to protect colleges from each other,” says Barnds, head of enrollment at Augustana. “Saying, ‘These students are off-limits at this time,’ that’s a clear anticompetitive practice, but it made us feel that the students in our class were safe from aggressive competitors.”

Still, Barnds saw good in the guidelines, which, to some degree, brought order to the admissions process. A provision barring colleges from establishing application deadlines prior to October 15, he believes, benefits families by giving seniors a chance to catch their breath as the school year begins.

“Some guidelines were about what’s appropriate for a student’s development,” Barnds says. “Think about students who are going through their first year of college, trying to figure out whether it’s a good fit. Some places are going to really exploit that vulnerability.”

Now it’s easy to find examples of the freewheeling marketing strategies.

In early February, Albion College, in Michigan, advertised an “Early Deposit Sweepstakes.” Admitted applicants who pay the $250 deposit fee before March 6 will be entered into a drawing. The prizes include free room and board for a semester, a free meal plan for a semester, and a $350 vehicle-registration fee paid for one year. The sweepstakes ends soon, Albion’s website says, “so make sure you are in the running.”

The University of Mount Union, in Alliance, Ohio, advertises a similar array of prizes through its “Early Deposit Awards Program.” Students who submit a deposit by March 1 have a chance to win one of 22 perks, including “early class registration passes.”

Last fall, Colorado Christian University advertised a “Preferred Admission” program. Accepted applicants who paid a deposit by December 1 got a $1,000 annual scholarship, a travel voucher, early registration for classes and housing, and a “special invitation to the President’s Christmas Brunch at Denver’s famous Brown Palace.”

Your opinion of those solicitations might say something about the kind of college you work for. Is it one of the rare campuses that’s blessed by wealth, name recognition, and a zillion eager applicants? Or is it among the great bulk of institutions that fit other descriptions?

As colleges weigh their responses in the post-guidelines era, they must consider possible trade-offs. EAB’s recent report included a chart showing how enrollment leaders viewed the potential consequences of holding firm versus embracing a no-holds-barred strategy.

One risk of sticking with the status quo? Losing students to aggressive competitors. One risk of recruiting more aggressively? Attracting negative press.

The latter was labeled “the lesser evil.”