Once upon a time, May was not so manic. Although admissions officers have long fretted about enrollment outcomes, they used to fret under fewer microscopes. Application totals were more predictable. Enrollment projections were more reliable. And newspapers had yet to turn the admissions cycle into an annual tally of percentages and prestige.
These days, “yield” is a familiar term. The proportion of accepted applicants who enroll is a crucial number, watched carefully by presidents, governing boards, and faculty members. Now that the May 1 deadline for submitting admissions deposits has passed, enrollment officials have a much better sense of what this fall’s freshman classes will look like. Colleges will finally know, more or less, their yield.
This big, round number is tricky, however. It tells you only so much about a class. College guides publish an institution’s overall yield, but admissions officers study many subsets of numbers—the yields inside the yield. How many applicants from California enrolled? How many black students? How many aspiring engineers?
With such questions in mind, I recently asked several deans to describe what they’ve seen in their applicant pools this year. Behind the enrollment numbers lie several of the key story lines in college admissions. Here’s a look at five themes, playing out at five colleges.
1. In an era of application inflation, managing uncertainty is an evolving science.
It’s no secret that more students are applying to more colleges, complicating yield predictions everywhere. The trend also relates to a growing concern on many campuses: applicants who send enrollment deposits but don’t end up enrolling.
In recent years, this phenomenon, known as “summer melt,” has been a big worry at Beloit College. Between March and August of 2009, for instance, 48 students canceled their deposits—nearly 15 percent of the Wisconsin college’s incoming class of 325. Especially at small colleges, the financial consequences of such shortfalls are serious.
Melt happens for many reasons. Some students change their minds; others get late offers from colleges that had put them on wait lists. Yet Beloit officials knew that some students they were losing had sent deposits to two or more colleges so as to buy more time before making a decision (and, perhaps, to secure more financial aid).
Last year Beloit raised its deposit fee, which had been $200, to $500. Nancy Benedict, vice president for enrollment, hoped that the hefty, nonrefundable fee would discourage double-depositing. “This is a good signal that you’re committing yourself to us, just as we are committing to you,” she says.
Last year the number of canceled deposits dropped to 28, almost 60 percent less than the previous year. How much did the new fee explain the decline? Ms. Benedict isn’t sure, though she suspects that the fee increase might explain, in part, why deposits were slower to arrive this spring. “With a larger fee,” she says, “maybe you wait until after you’ve paid the gas bill.” In other words, a policy meant to reduce one kind of uncertainty might have helped prolong another.
Then again, admissions deans at many other colleges, too, say applicants took their time deciding this spring. The sluggishness reflects all kinds of doubts among families, says Jim Zielinski, Beloit’s director of admissions: “Gas prices have doubled, and people are asking, ‘What can I afford?’ and ‘Am I gonna have my job?’”
In this climate, Beloit’s admissions officers have sought to build stronger connections with prospective students. Recently the college started paying its student tour guides, enabling the admissions office to recruit and deploy more-effective guides. “These touch points with prospective students have become more important,” Mr. Zielinski says.
Beloit has also embraced social media designed to convey its culture, quirks and all. (Recent videos feature talking squirrels.) Mr. Zielinski has started presentations by describing reasons students might not want to attend Beloit—a clever way of getting at the question of fit between applicant and college. That message goes hand in hand with the college’s decision not to waive its application fee, as many colleges have done in hopes of getting of more applications.
This year Beloit saw a 5-percent increase in applicants, which is just fine with Mr. Zielinski. “It’s not about apps’ being up,” he says. “It’s about real apps’ being up.”
2. Transfer students are becoming a higher priority.
People love to talk about “traditional” applicants—those 17- or 18-year-olds who enroll at four-year colleges months after graduating from high school. But Kimberly Johnston, dean of admissions at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia, has been thinking more and more about students who fit a different description: transfers.
“They’re coming to the forefront of so many of our conversations,” she says.
Although Mary Washington’s overall application totals have held steady in recent years, its transfer applications have been rising steadily. Since 2006, applications from transfer students have increased by 15 percent, and their enrollment has increased by 19 percent.
Many of those applicants have spent at least a year at one of Virginia’s community colleges. “A lot of this is driven by the economy,” Ms. Johnston says. “Some students are saying, ‘Look, we’ve been accepted here, but we can’t afford it, so we need to live at home for a year or two.’”
That means admissions officers are building longer-term relationships with prospective students. The teenager whom a counselor meets today might not matriculate until two years from now.
Cris Hairston, assistant dean of admissions, oversees the transfer program. More students and parents, he says, are calling the admissions office to ask about the two-year route to the university. Although some worry about getting off track, he says, he believes that the community-college path is losing the stigma it once carried among some families.
Mary Washington, which already has credit-transfer agreements with several two-year colleges, plans to establish more, Mr. Hairston says. He suspects that the university will also increase its outreach at two-year colleges in southwestern Virginia and Tennessee.
How are transfers changing the admissions equation? “Diversity,” says Mr. Hairston, who notes that many of the university’s transfers are first-generation students. They tend to be mature and goal-oriented, something that cannot always be said of traditional freshman.
“With transfers,” he says, “you’re able to grow your student population in a much different way.”
3. Colleges are redefining international recruitment.
Colleges big and small are receiving more and more applications from Chinese students. That surge is no accident. Over the past decade, admissions officials at American institutions have recruited heavily in China, a gold mine of eager and highly qualified teenagers.
The boom has encouraged many colleges to cast wider nets around the globe. Some institutions are even scaling back their recruitment in China because it’s proved so successful: “The numbers have grown so significantly that we worry,” says an enrollment official at a private college in the Midwest. Worry, that is, about being overwhelmed with applications.
Nobody’s complaining about Chinese applicants. Admissions officers who pride themselves on the geographic diversity of their domestic applicants are simply thinking harder about how to achieve greater diversity among their foreign students.
“We could fill our entire class with students from certain countries, like China or India, but we have to look at the kind of student experience we’re trying to achieve,” says Douglas L. Christiansen, vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions at Vanderbilt University. “We’re thinking about that singular student from Finland, that singular student from Morocco.”
Over the past five years, Vanderbilt has intensified its international recruiting. Now a handful of admissions officers spend 25 to 30 weeks overseas each year, often traveling with representatives of other colleges, and on trips sponsored by associations or the U.S. government. The team has developed a “communication plan” for rising 10th, 11th, and 12th graders in other countries.
Vanderbilt also plays host to college counselors from other countries. This spring Mr. Christiansen visited Qatar, where he spoke with educators from 40 nations about financing an education in the United States and writing effective letters of recommendation. This summer he will travel to China.
Not surprisingly, Vanderbilt’s numbers are soaring. For the fall of 2006, the university received 250 applications from foreign students. For this coming fall, it received 1,833. Foreign students account for 5 percent of undergraduates; the university plans to bump that up to 8 percent over time.
Vanderbilt’s financial resources, allow the university to do things other colleges cannot. Still, enrollment experts generally agree that international recruitment is evolving rapidly, expanding to new shores.
“There’s the initial power of going to a country where you can produce a lot of applicants quickly,” Mr. Christiansen says. “But you have to look at this through a cultural-diversity lens. We are dropping the ball if we are not bringing in a broad array of perspectives from overseas.”
4. State universities are struggling to square their missions with bottom-line necessities.
State-budget cuts are crippling public universities, a reality that will very likely shape national enrollment trends for years to come. “We’re going to have to rely on tuition revenues more than ever before,” says Robin C. Brown, vice president for enrollment and access at Colorado State University. “This is going to have implications for access, and we’re going to need to think outside the box.”
Recently, Colorado State proposed a 20-percent tuition increase for in-state students to offset a $23-million loss in state funds. The proposed hike, which the university’s Board of Governors will probably approve in June, would raise in-state tuition by about $1,000 annually.
That’s just one latte a day for some families but a big deal for others, says Ms. Brown. She describes the university’s applicant pool as increasingly “income bipolar.”
Colorado State has introduced a financial-aid program for middle- and lower-income students who do not qualify for federal Pell Grants. Under the new Commitment to Colorado plan, in-state families who earn $57,000 or less a year pay only half of the standard tuition rate.
Like many public universities, Colorado State has also increased its focus on out-of-state students, who pay three times the in-state tuition rate. Last year the university received 6,218 applications from out-of-state students; this year the number rose to 7,265. In recent years, the percentage of nonresident freshmen has grown steadily, to 21 percent from 15 percent.
Colorado State has long offered three levels of scholarships ($5,000 to $9,000 annually) to out-of-state students who meet specific academic requirements. Recently the university added a scholarship of $3,000 for nonresident applicants whose grades and test scores fall just below the traditional minimums for awards.
Those students receive certificates signed by Ms. Brown and the university’s president. “This says two things: ‘We recognize your academic performance,’ and ‘We want you,’” Ms. Brown says. “Many weren’t expecting it.” She thinks the new strategy could increase out-of-state yield substantially this year.
As officials at Colorado State continue to seek a balance between in-state and out-of-state students, they are also planning for demographic changes, particularly the growth in the state’s Hispanic population. The university has developed partnerships with 10 rural and urban high schools that serve diverse communities, and which don’t get much attention from colleges.
“Changing demographics are really forcing us to look at strategies for reaching students who, because of where they live, are less prepared,” Ms. Brown says. “If we want them here on our campuses, it’s going to be incumbent on higher-education institutions to reach out to K-12 schools.”
5. Admissions offices are redefining their operations for leaner times.
Here’s a paradox: In an era of high-volume applications, many admissions staffs are smaller than they were a few years ago, before a crumbling economy forced staff cuts and hiring freezes.
Such is the case at Middlebury College, in Vermont. Gregory Buckles, director of admissions, has lost about 20 percent of his staff since 2008. “We’ve had to do as much or more with less,” he says. “But it’s really doing less with less.”
The admissions office has eliminated all of its print materials, including inquiry cards and viewbooks, long staples of the recruitment process. Mr. Buckles has reduced his staff’s travel, scaling back high-school visits. And he relies more on part-time readers to help evaluate applications.
Like many colleges, Middlebury is embracing a regional recruitment model. Two years ago it opened a “satellite office” in Austin, Tex.—a one-man wing of the admissions team.
“It allows us to have a presence there that we couldn’t afford to have otherwise,” Mr. Buckles says. “He can go to conferences, he can visit as many schools as possible, and he can accept invitations to junior parents’ nights. It’s about organizing things from the ground up.”
Middlebury has also brought its alumni into the admissions fold as never before. Mr. Buckles restructured his staff, designating one employee to coordinate alumni outreach, which accounts for four-fifths of that staffer’s time. This year 70 percent of the college’s applicants were interviewed by Middlebury graduates throughout the country.
That’s just one example of how admissions officials are enlisting more help from those outside their offices. “As a staff, we don’t have our hands in as deep in as many things, and that’s a little scary,” Mr. Buckles says. “We’re at a new border in admissions.”
