Did you see that brand-new survey of prospective college students?
No, the other one.
Wait, sorry. Those came out last week.
This one came out today.
Oh, FYI, two more are coming out tomorrow.
As Covid-19 spreads uncertainty throughout higher education, college officials are fretting about how the pandemic will affect their enrollments. Meanwhile, various companies are surveying — and surveying and surveying — prospective students as if the health of an entire industry hangs in the balance. Which, you know, it does.
Now, as April nears, one set of findings after another seems to feed the flames of worry. It’s enough to overwhelm anyone whose job involves bringing in enough revenue. What, exactly, does all this surveying add up to?
Sure, various data points offer snapshots of students’ in-the-moment thinking about how this unprecedented crisis could affect their college choices. But these surveys are also a means by which consulting firms and other companies in the higher-education realm can publicly assert their in-house expertise, thought leadership, and data-informed on-the-ball-ish-ness.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Let’s review a bit. Last week The Chronicle reported on the results of a recent survey of nearly 500 high-school seniors by the Art & Science Group, an education-consulting firm in Baltimore. A key finding: Because of the pandemic, one in six prospective college students were reconsidering their plans to attend a four-year institution. Two-thirds were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to attend their first-choice institution.
In a email announcing the findings, the Art & Science Group included a link to an assessment tool it had created to help colleges predict the impact of the novel coronavirus on their prospective-student markets, “quickly and in real time.” As David Strauss, a principal with the firm, told The Chronicle, colleges shouldn’t apply the results of a national survey to their own particular enrollment challenges. You need to drill deeper for that.
Anyone jarred by the finding that one in six students might cancel their four-year-college plans can — perhaps — take heart from a robust new report from Carnegie Dartlet, a marketing-communications firm in Westford, Mass., that works with colleges. Last week it published findings from a survey of nearly 5,000 high-school seniors. More than one in three said Covid-19 would not cause them to postpone college “under any circumstance,” and another third said there was only a slight chance of its doing so. Just 1 percent said they had plans to delay their education.
About two-thirds of high-school seniors — minority students, especially — said they would need time beyond the traditional May 1 enrollment-deposit deadline to make a final decision. Carnegie Dartlet recommends pushing back deadlines to June 1, which dozens of colleges have done, but most have not (and some have suggested that it would be outlandish to do so).
In its analysis of survey responses, the company examined how demographic and confidence factors (like confidence in paying for college) related to respondents’ comfort level with the May 1 deadline. “The more confident a person is that they can pay for college,” the report says, “the less likely it is that they would need to delay their decision date.” Surely, officials at colleges that insist on keeping their May 1 deadlines already know that.
But they might not guess that half of high-school seniors want to hear from college administrators about the Covid-19 crisis. Eighty percent want to communicate with admissions officers, and about 45 percent want to connect with current students.
In an email to The Chronicle, Meghan Dalesandro, a partner and chief operating officer at Carnegie Dartlet, acknowledged that some people in higher education might be inundated with data, but she suggested that the alternative could be worse. “Even if it’s just a handful of folks that find value, leverage it for their on-campus conversations, or use it to make some hard decisions even the slightest bit easier,” she wrote of the report, “then we feel it was worth it.”
‘A Lot of Nothing’
Wait, there’s more. Maguire Associates, an education-consulting firm in Concord, Mass., surveyed nearly 7,000 students and parents (report available here). It found that 12 percent of high-school seniors were considering delaying their enrollment to the spring or fall of 2021. And 16 percent said they were now considering a college closer to home than their first-choice institution.
Yet Maguire Associates also found this: Most students — 75 percent — said their personal ranking of the colleges on their list hadn’t changed as a result of the Covid-19 crisis.
Primacy, a marketing firm, surveyed 200 prospective college students. Twenty-nine percent said they strongly or somewhat agreed that “I have considered deferring attending college until Covid-19 passes.” The firm suggested confronting the “deferment threat through empathetic communications while offering persuasive value-added offers.”
Niche, a Pittsburgh company that runs a college-ranking and college-review website, surveyed more than 25,000 high-school students, college students, and parents. Thirty-six percent of the high-school seniors said they were rethinking the colleges on their list, but 40 percent were not rethinking them. And 35 percent were planning to choose a college closer to home because of the pandemic.
OK, raise your hand if your head is spinning. How useful is this big ol’ mountain of data, really?
On Sunday, The Chronicle posed that question to enrollment officials on Twitter. This decidedly unscientific survey yielded mostly skeptical responses.
“Honestly, haven’t read them all,” Owen Bligh, associate dean of admission at Providence College, in Rhode Island, wrote in a tweet. “I read the first one, and it confirmed what I suspected. Not sure what value they’re adding.”
“It’s important to note that the survey results are only valid for so long,” wrote Tony Sarda, director of undergraduate and graduate recruitment at Lamar University, in Texas. “Surveys would likely have yielded very different results 30 days ago and may look very different 30 days from now.”
“One survey of three or more high-school seniors > opinion of one enrollment VP,” Robert Springall, vice president for enrollment management at Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania, tweeted. “But 500 surveys < opinion of 500 VPEMs.”
The findings might be useful for large institutions, Mark Campbell, vice president for enrollment at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York, suggested in a tweet. “For others, the generalizations don’t help much,” he wrote. “When you attempt to apply them to your idiosyncratic institution, you get a lot of nothing.”
A Homegrown Survey
One kind of survey, though, might prove especially valuable right now. It’s the kind a college conducts itself.
Recently, Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania, sent short surveys to its 3,000 admitted students, as well as to about 3,500 high-school counselors. In an upside-down world where prospective students can’t visit the campus this spring, which forms of outreach might help them make their decisions?
“There are a lot of rabbit holes you can go down,” said Shannon Zottola, vice president and dean of enrollment management. “We did this to see where we needed to spend our time, what would be most valuable to our students.”
Responses from a total of 272 high-school counselors affirmed the importance of virtual tours and opportunities to chat with current students online. Most of them said it would help students and parents if Ursinus moved its deposit deadline to June 1, which the college has since done.
The findings on the desirability of interactions with current students informed the college’s planning for question-and-answer “Fellow Fridays.” The online sessions let small groups of admitted students chat live, via video, with a student ambassador.
Ursinus’s survey of students — 168 of whom responded — served more than one purpose. “As an enrollment manager,” Zottola said, “you know that if a student takes the time to complete this survey, they’re probably interested in the college.”
That’s especially useful information now that vast disruption has tossed many predictive indicators of yield — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — out the window. In mid-March, before Covid-19 shuttered the campus, Ursinus had received about 40 percent more deposits than it had a year ago. Now, Zottola said, “everything has stagnated.”
So knowing that, say, Susie Jones really wants to have a telephone conversation with a faculty member has helped the admissions office tailor its outreach to a prospective student’s needs right away. In a time of doubt, maybe some surveys can help bring a dash of clarity, even calm, to this year’s chaotic enrollment process.
Then again, there’s another way to look at them. Last week, amid a flurry of surveys purporting to unlock thousands of teenage minds, Patricia Maben, president and co-founder of 3 Enrollment Marketing, tweeted a note of caution.
“I worry,” she said, “these surveys are causing students even more angst.”
