To get to Lafayette College, follow Third Street up a steep hill that rises above the rooftops of downtown Easton. Turn left on McCartney Street, then left on High. Walk to the top step of Markle Hall, the admissions building, and then turn around.
There unfolds a stirring view of the campus, its green slopes rolling under Skillman Library’s glass walls, and Van Wickle Hall, with its brown bricks and gabled roof, and on past Colton Chapel, whose stone tower rises over the pink dogwoods and a soaring linden tree. On a spring day, this sight alone would seem enough to persuade any prospective student to enroll here.
If only it were that simple. Lafayette, as picturesque as any campus in the nation, is but one leafy liberal-arts college in a region full of leafy liberal-arts colleges. Selective institutions do many things to impress admitted applicants besides just stroll them around the grounds, but Lafayette reaches out farther than most. This year, for instance, the college offered more-personalized campus tours and enlisted alumni to contact the admitted.
Call it the science of small gestures: Each spring after acceptances go out, admissions officers do much to woo high-school seniors and their parents, with follow-up letters, e-mail messages, telephone calls, big receptions, small gatherings, and various on-campus events. All this is meant to ensure good feelings among applicants and, in turn, a good “yield” (the proportion of admitted students who enroll) for the college.
These traditions are old, but they have new urgency. As enrollment outcomes have become more difficult to predict in recent years, many colleges and universities have put more time, money, and thought into postadmission recruitment. That’s especially true at small institutions with relatively high price tags, which must state their case in an era of economic uncertainty.
“It’s more important than ever because the stakes are higher,” says Robert J. Massa, Lafayette’s vice president for communications and acting dean of admissions and financial aid. “College is more expensive, and there’s much more competition for students.”
Last year Lafayette had to go deep into its waiting list to enroll a freshman class of 616, just shy of its goal of 620. This year the college hopes to avoid that scenario, which is one reason admissions officers here have thought hard about how to better communicate with its 2,200 admitted applicants during the weeks leading to the May 1 deposit deadline.
There are only so many ways to reinvent the recruitment wheel, however. Over time, Lafayette has not overhauled its yield strategies so much as fine-tuned them. This spring, the college has led a highly coordinated charm campaign, involving more volunteers than ever.
The overall goal is to convey the message that the college personalizes each of its students’ experiences, yet personal touches are tricky. “You want to build on the relationship you’ve been building for months or years,” says Carol A. Rowlands, Lafayette’s director of admissions. “At the same time, you don’t want to reach out for the sake of reaching out.”
‘The Feel of the Campus’
It all starts with acceptances. Since the early 1990s, Lafayette has personalized the letters it sends to admitted applicants. These days, each one receives a letter that includes a passage about his or her academic performance and refers to his or her high school by name. The letter mentions activities the applicant has participated in.
There’s also a sentence or two about the student’s application essay. An example from this year: “We read with great interest your essay describing how you have tapped the power of music, using it as encouragement to become a doctor and as a way to raise funds for local charities.”
This spring, for the first time, all accepted applicants received a follow-up letter from one of 12 Lafayette alumni, representing various professions. Among them was Donald W. Landry, M.D., a 1975 Lafayette graduate who is now chairman of the department of medicine at Columbia University. Dr. Landry’s letter went to applicants who had expressed interest in the natural sciences. Describing his academic and professional career, he wrote that the college had prepared him for graduate school better than a large university could have done: “Lafayette clearly set me on a path to success.”
Each of the typewritten letters invites students to contact the sender “personally” if they have questions, and provides a Lafayette e-mail address. This is not exactly what it seems: Messages sent to those accounts go not to alumni, but to the admissions staff, which follows up with students who ask more-general questions (applicants are told that alumni had forwarded their message to the college). So far at least one student has asked a specific question about the letter’s writer’s experiences at the college; the admissions office forwarded that one to the alumnus.
Lafayette graduates are not the only ones helping out. In recent years, the college has asked parents of current students to send letters to the parents of the undecided, inviting them to ask questions. This year, Lafayette asked parent volunteers to pick up the telephone instead. “If you start engaging someone in a conversation,” says Ms. Rowlands, “the more likely they are to think of questions they want to ask.” So far the feedback has been positive.
Current students are dialing, too. For the second straight year, the admissions office has enlisted the help of students who work for the alumni office. Instead of making fund-raising calls, they spend several weeks in the spring calling prospective students between 6:30 p.m. and 9. This year, Lafayette planned to reach about half of its admitted pool.
Asad Akram, a freshman, has called dozens of students this spring. First he asks if they are still considering Lafayette. If so, he reminds them about campus-visit days. And he asks them if they have any questions. Many do not, but some ask away. “They’re trying to get the feel of the campus, the overall atmosphere,” says Mr. Akram.
Many students want to know about the social scene—parties and Greek life. More than a few young men have asked callers to rate the attractiveness of female students.
The conversations do not sway the undecided one way or the other so much as affirm their hunches, according to Hamish MacPhail, a freshman who has contacted many prospective students this spring. He recalls how he felt last year when a Lafayette student called him. “I was already sold on Lafayette,” he says, “but the call just kind of backed up everything that I already felt about the place.”
Another freshman, Christopher Yarnell, remembers it differently. “I was like, “I don’t want to talk to you!” That call was short.
A Personalized Approach
Measuring the effectiveness of all this outreach is difficult. The why of college choice is often a mystery, even to students. Lafayette knows that applicants are about three times as likely to enroll if they have visited the campus, but the college is more likely to land those students to begin with.
Still, the college has gleaned some insights from regular surveys of students. Some of the responses suggested that visitors wanted more options. So this year, Lafayette revamped its weekday visit program, previously known as Fridays at Lafayette. The college redubbed it YourTime@Lafayette, and the new name corresponded with other changes.
For the first time, the college offered prospective students the opportunity to schedule one-on-one meetings with faculty members of their choice, as well as with coaches, staff members, or students. Want to have lunch with a double major in engineering and music? The admissions office would set it up.
This spring 88 accepted students attended one of the four visit days, up from 71 last year. All but 17 of the students requested one-on-one meetings, and the college accommodated each one.
“It’s a lot of extra work,” says Lauren Carballo, an assistant director of admissions, who runs the program. “But if it shows that personalization, then it’s worth it.”
On the third Friday in April, the last of the YourTime@Lafayette visits, Ms. Carballo introduced undecided students and their parents to a panel of current students, which included Zach Cleary, a senior who charmed his audience with unscripted riffs on campus life, describing the rigors of the engineering program and the wonders of going to Milo’s Place, a bar, for beers and karaoke.
In the audience was Alexandra Koliatsos, a high-school senior from Baltimore who was still deciding between two very different campuses—Lafayette and George Washington University. In her application essay for Lafayette, she described what she had learned from watching a crossing guard who wears Mickey Mouse gloves. She was impressed to find the essay described in her acceptance letter from the college.
That alone did not tell Ms. Koliatsos everything she wanted to know about Lafayette, but it did make her notice something about the other acceptances she received. “They were just the standard letter,” she said.
