LipmanHearne Blog » yield

Community Colleges Earn Accolades for Real Results

ElizabethW — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 22:28:27 +0000

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of higher education knows that “college completion rates” and “data-driven solutions” have become more important than ever before in public debates and media coverage. National and state-level policymakers, along with college presidents, are paying closer attention to these issues – or at the very least, they are pledging to focus on them.

Traditionally, these imperatives have put community colleges in a tough spot. There is a natural tension between their institutional commitments to open-access for all students, and their characteristically low graduation rates.

This challenge has made it particularly gratifying for us to partner with Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. Since 2008, we have been working with ATD – which has received significant funding from Lumina Foundation for Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – to help community colleges stay true to their role while improving their outcomes. What began as a 26-college pilot program in 2004 has blossomed into a network of 130 such institutions spread over 24 states and the District of Columbia.

The success of this initiative receives some much-deserved credit and recognition in this Sept. 6th cover story in Community College Week. By highlighting the practices some “leader colleges” have employed to boost their graduation rates, the article provides ample food for thought for institutions struggling with similar challenges.

A WILD CARD IN THE SELECTIVE ADMISSIONS GAME: NO-LOAN AID

Tom Abrahamson — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:59:04 +0000

When Princeton University announced in 2001 that it would replace all student loans with grants, a chain reaction was set in action, slowly but surely. Students weren’t so much being enticed to choose Princeton—an attractive enough option on its own—as they were being lured away from Princeton’s nearest competitors.

It wasn’t just that Princeton had found a new way to appeal to students; this particular offer helped reverse a strange decline in matriculation at elite colleges among a particular subset of the college-bound population: high-achieving students from low-income families. A growing body of research tells us that these students—even when they know on an intellectual level what they might go on to earn in their chosen fields—are averse to debt.

As a demographic group, these students are more diverse than the college-bound population as a whole, and are also more likely to be first-generation students. They are also rare among subsets of the college-bound population in that they are growing in number, while the overall college-bound population shrinks.

In the years that followed Princeton’s announcement, the rest of the Ivy League colleges and several other highly selective institutions followed suit. Since 2001, the number of colleges replacing loans with grants for low-income families or all families who qualify for aid has more than doubled every two years, reaching a total of 39 in 2009*. Even as the policy adds pressure to already stressed endowments, many schools report that delivering on the no-loan promise remains a high priority. We haven’t begun to see, much less measure, the total seismic shift in applicant and admitted student demographics this change has brought, but some early signals are interesting.

At Princeton, 60 percent of students in the incoming class of 2013 will receive financial aid. A total of 487 students from minority backgrounds represent 37.4 percent of the entering class. That’s a minority student headcount increase of 60 percent over nine years ago, when just 305 students were from minority backgrounds. At the same time, selectivity has increased since 2001.

Lipman Hearne’s 2009 report High Achieving Teens and the College Decision offers insight into the values and motivations that drive students to make the choices they do. Particularly in this climate of increasing economic pressure on both family savings and college endowments, how critical is financial aid to high-achieving students? What do students need to know from the colleges that want them, and how, finally, do they choose from among their options? We’re far from knowing all the answers, but we look forward to beginning a lively discussion—with you.

- Tom Abrahamson, Managing Director & Principal

*Excludes another 23 colleges that make this offer, but limit eligibility by residency or GPA.

Confessions of a Campus Tour Guide

Colleen Ryan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:13:30 +0000

“We’re walking, we’re walking…”: Anyone who has been through the rigors of a multi-college campus tour knows that Bonnie Hunt must have modeled her character in the movie Dave by shadowing a college campus tour guide. The backwards-walking, über-perky tour guide that can rattle off anecdotes that date to the 1800s has reached the level of cliché in pop culture. Only recently have there been signs that colleges are finally ready to remake the campus tour so that a very important communication channel (our research shows it is #1 among information influences ranked by high-achieving seniors) is no longer relegated to joke status.

We decided to do a little reconnaissance of our own to uncover how institutions can improve their tours.

We interviewed a campus tour guide from a prominent, top-ranked public university and uncovered that the cliché is alive and well. Our insider crafted the following top ten ideas to improve a university’s tour-guiding game:

1.    Be consistent with the institution’s brand or help defy stereotypes
2.    Remember what students care about
3.    Make it interactive
4.    Keep it punchy
5.    Save the cheese for the dining halls
6.    Tailor the tour
7.    Tell stories
8.    … but don’t narrate novels
9.    Prompt questions
10. Be honest

Check out the full interview.

Advice to enrollment managers and college marketers: It’s more than yield.

Tom Abrahamson — Thu, 14 May 2009 14:32:30 +0000

There is a plethora of news stories emerging right now about colleges – particularly elite schools – and the trouble they’re having making their fall 2009 class. The focus is typically on yield — the percentage of admitted students who enroll at an institution. Why yield? Because this metric has long been considered the bellwether statistic that defines a college’s brand power and popularity. It’s the measure of first-choiceness. It’s the win rate. It’s bragging rights for colleges, students, and parents. It’s a measure of health to a bond-rater or financier. And it has been dropping steadily across the country as students apply to more colleges on average each year. After all, a student can only attend one college at a time, and the percentage of freshmen who apply to six or more colleges has gone from 18 percent to 28 percent in the last decade. So, it’s no wonder the selective college world, already feeling a bit devalued lately because of overall slumping yield rates, is now in a tizzy because home finances have collided with college dreams and aspirations.

So, what to do? The answer is to effectuate a marketing mind-set around return on investment, do the best research and planning you’ve ever done, and become a champion on your campus.

Read my full point of view article that details nine tips on how to become an enrollment management champion.

- Tom Abrahamson, Managing Director & Principal

Lipman Hearne Point of View on Yield –