The Commons

That Ol’ Fat Envelope:

May is “sweeps” month in the higher ed community, when deposits are  made, when students for once in their lives value fat over thin (we’re talking envelopes, here), and when colleges and universities nervously track their yield and fry the bushings in their financial aid calculators.

We’re privileged to have a handful of high-achieving high school students among our staff families, kids who were accepted by Oberlin, Tufts, Washington University, Carleton, Macalester, University of Illinois, Skidmore, Knox, Berkeley, Michigan, Yale, Princeton, Hope, and others.

So we put our crackerjack intern, Katie – a junior at Northwestern University – on a project to look at the acceptance packages that each of them got from those schools.  Check out her resulting presentation:

• Getting to Yes: Part 1
• Getting to Yes: Part 2

(For those of you who like to know how the story ends before it begins, click here for my quick interview with Katie about her overall take on what she observed).

The big takeaway?  The acceptance letter itself – how it’s presented, how it’s handled, how it’s supported – can make a real difference in an otherwise neck-and-neck yield race.

Think about it: it’s another moment of “reverse polarity” in the admissions cycle.  First, institutions market themselves to students to build the applicant pool.  Then, applicants market themselves to institutions to be admitted.  Finally, institutions market themselves to the students they want to matriculate – and the first moment of that final push is the acceptance package.

-Rob Moore, Managing Partner

Getting to Yes: Encouraging Admitted Students to Enroll –

Tags: admissions, brand personality, higher education, nonprofit communications, nonprofit marketing