When applications fall, trouble often follows. So when Drexel University saw about half as many applicants this year as last, it braced for a smaller freshman class — and less revenue.
In June the institution laid off a few dozen employees, part of a restructuring plan already underway to save $18 million while reducing tuition increases. Those cuts went hand in hand with a new enrollment strategy, says John A. Fry, the university’s president: “We were trying to hedge our bets, knowing we were going to be in uncertain territory.”
Still, he’s confident. To understand why, it helps to go back a few years, when Drexel was breaking records and crowing about it. In 2008 the Philadelphia institution called itself “one of the hottest schools” around, with an unprecedented 24,000 applicants. The plan was to quadruple that number. Last year the tally hit 55,000. That called for trumpets, right?
Mr. Fry didn’t think so. After taking office, in 2010, he dug into enrollment data. Although applications kept soaring, he found, “yield” — the percentage of accepted applicants who enroll — kept falling. Just as troubling, less than 70 percent of students were graduating within six years. “Those were the two canaries in the coal mine,” Mr. Fry says. “On the surface things looked great, but, in fact, this wasn’t sustainable.”
So Drexel did some institutional soul-searching, a familiar exercise these days at tuition-dependent colleges facing enrollment challenges. Among the insights that emerged: Marketing can help in some ways, harm in others. Growth strategies that make sense one day might not serve you well the next. And an enrollment office is not an island unto itself: Whom it recruits — and how — affects just about everyone on the campus later on.
Drexel had long embraced an aggressive, high-volume marketing plan. Each year it zapped “fast apps” to tens of thousands of high-school seniors around the nation. Built for speed and simplicity, the emailed applications arrived with students’ names and addresses already filled in, allowing them to apply by clicking a few keys, no essay or application fee required. The tactic, used by hundreds of colleges over the years, seemed to suit Drexel’s goals. The university wanted to increase enrollment, often hard to do without more applicants.
By some measures, the strategy worked. Drexel welcomed nearly 3,100 freshmen in 2013, up from about 2,500 just five years earlier. Yet the university had created an application monster with a insatiable appetite. Already spending over $12 million annually to drum up applicants, the institution needed more and more of them each year to bring in a class of the same size. Last year Drexel accepted nearly 80 percent of those 55,000 applicants, and its yield fell to 8 percent, an alarmingly low number.
The statistics reflected what some people there already knew. Too many students applied on a whim, some without even knowing what city Drexel was in. Too many came to the campus with little or no understanding of its co-operative education program, in which students get paying jobs linked to for-credit courses. And too many struggled and dropped out.
All of that threatened the university’s reputation — and its bottom line. “Our recruiting efforts,” Mr. Fry says, “were not matching up with the needs and expectations of students who came.” So Drexel overhauled its enrollment strategy. The new emphasis: attracting not just applicants, but future alumni.
‘Where Have You Guys Been?’
First, that meant taming the application monster. Last year Drexel abandoned the more-is-more strategy many colleges have embraced, and ditched the free fast app. The university now uses the Common Application exclusively, charges a $50 application fee, and follows a holistic-review policy, evaluating students’ nonacademic achievements and the rigor of their high-school curriculum. The hope: Such changes will attract applicants who are legitimately interested in the university.
“It’s harder to do that when it’s almost as easy to apply as responding to an email,” says Randall C. Deike, senior vice president for enrollment management and student success. “As we populated the pool with more and more students who didn’t know us well, we lost the ability to inform them well. When you don’t really know which students have the most interest, the variability just increases exponentially.”
The shift in admissions strategy is just one piece of a broader plan. Mr. Deike, who came to Drexel last year from New York University, leads a new division that oversees all aspects of students’ experiences, from recruitment to graduation, including academic advising, student affairs, and the career-development center. “Fundamentally, it’s about going back to a model where we can build relationships,” he says.
When Drexel went whole hog on direct marketing years ago, it cut way back on travel. Instead of visiting scores of high schools, admissions officers often communicated with students electronically.
Mr. Deike, an enrollment veteran with an old-school streak, has reinstated travel. Recently, he and a colleague visited several high schools to reconnect with college counselors. “The general reaction,” he says, “was, ‘Where have you guys been?’”
Daniel F. Evans applauds Drexel’s new direction. As director of college counseling at the William Penn Charter School, in Philadelphia, he has seen fast apps short-circuit thoughtful discussions of college choices. Although he advises students to take ownership of their searches, when fast apps arrive, he says, sometimes all that counseling is “thrown aside in preference for the path of least resistance.” That can lead to frivolous applications, and a mismatch between students and the colleges they end up choosing.
This year, Drexel’s scaled-down recruitment netted 28,000 applications. The university’s yield increased, with about 2,900 students (14 percent) accepting offers. That’s about 300 more than the university’s goal, and just a handful shy of the number of freshmen who enrolled last fall. So far, “melt” — would-be freshmen who make other plans over the summer — has been minimal. And most important, Mr. Deike says, the incoming class, as measured by grades and test scores, is stronger than those in recent years.
Defining Success
Recruitment, of course, is only the first chapter in a long story. Drexel is also doubling down on keeping students engaged and on track. To that end, the university adjusted its approach to financial aid, which had been much heavier on merit than need. Many students who left the campus, the university found, had both academic and financial challenges. Often, weaker students were also the ones receiving less aid and taking out big loans. Now, Mr. Deike says, the university is seeking a balance between aiding top students and supporting less-affluent ones with grants.
That encourages Ludo C.P. Scheffer, chairman of the Faculty Senate, who, like many of his colleagues, was concerned by the recent cuts. He describes the new philosophy as a necessary change that might help the university “right-size” its enrollment. “When you’re feeding this constant hunger to get X number of applicants,” he says, “there’s an ethical implication of what you’re doing to students.” Colleges, he believes, have an obligation to bring in those most likely to be a good fit.
Over the years, Mr. Scheffer, a psychology professor and director of undergraduate studies, has seen what he and others describe as a “bimodal distribution” in their classes: a gap between the well-prepared students and those who are far from it, with few in between. “If you need bodies, you accept students you otherwise might not have accepted,” he says. “Then faculty and TAs spend more time trying to catch them up.”
In short, the metrics that define success in news releases don’t guarantee it down the line. Yet presidents, boards, and consumers tend to equate application totals with quality, which fuels the drive to increase that tally each year.
“It’s like a drug,” says Richard A. Hesel, principal at the Art & Science Group, a higher-education consulting firm. And it’s easy for colleges to inflate their numbers, he has found, easier than to improve their offerings. “Growing apps doesn’t necessarily get you there,” he says.
That’s why Drexel’s president, Mr. Fry, is looking to a new measure of success. “There’s no longer a big celebration about how many apps we got,” he says. “The big celebration’s going to be about how many of them graduate.”
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
