Canton, Mo., is a small town located between two sharp bends in the Mississippi River — and not near much of anything else. It’s the kind of remote and sleepy place that’s pretty much invisible to college students looking for somewhere bustling to spend four years. But it is home to Culver-Stockton College. Back in the mid-aughts, when Misty McBee was an admissions counselor at the Christian institution, the campus had become rundown, and the college had fallen off the radar. “Folks in our region knew we existed,” she says. “But the challenge that we saw is they really didn’t know much more than that.”
Your college is bustling and brimming with talent, but it’s in a traditionally distressed downtown or a rural Nowheresville. How do you get the word out to students who would thrive there?
Over the next decade, Culver-Stockton introduced a new academic calendar, changing 15-week semesters to 12 weeks with a three-week miniterm to enable students to fit in internships or travel. New offerings included online master’s programs in business administration and education. Culver-Stockton also began a $10-million capital campaign, eventually raising $14 million. It used some of the money to improve the campus. Ms. McBee, now executive director of admission and college marketing, led the efforts.
The admissions office started reaching out to high-school sophomores and juniors, so that “by the time their senior year rolls around, they’ve known about us for two years,” Ms. McBee says. The college poured more marketing material and admissions personnel into St. Louis, the nearest sizable city and in the past a good market for prospective Culver-Stockton students.
These days Ms. McBee and her staff focus on communicating with parents, “even to the point of almost carbon-copying them on our communication to students, because they want to be involved more than ever, and so we want to take advantage of that.”
Canton is still small, isolated, and quiet. That’s part of the appeal for many students, but students from 20 countries study there, and the miniterm enables students to travel and study, Ms. McBee says. The college also boasts a full schedule of after-hours athletics and campus events.
All these efforts seem to be paying off. Culver-Stockton has increased its full-time campus enrollment from 730 in the fall of 2010 to 969 in the fall of 2017, an increase of nearly 33 percent.
Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.
