Student recruitment information... print or website?
Working today on a slightly overdue pre-conference presentation for the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference in early July, "Student Recruitment in an Online World: Creating a Marketing Communications Plan in a World Without Paper."
In searching for relevant material, I returned again to the Noel-Levitz website at www.noellevitz.com to review a 2008 survey report on online recruiting practices and a 2007 report on what students would like to do on college websites if colleges gave them the chance to do it.
More than 50% prefer online information over print
For this presentation, the answer to one question in the 2007 report was most important: 57% of high school students headed for college would prefer to receive information about the college online rather than in print.
That can easily be a glass half-empty or glass half-full result, depending on your point of view.
From my perspective, and in keeping with an overall migration away from traditional print information sources, it means that the resources spent on print communications vs. those spent to build a stronger online effort are seriously out of wack.
Recruitment budgets don't support strong online efforts
Match that 57% answer with another from the 2008 survey: 67% of private colleges and universities reported spending less than $25,000 of their student recruitment budgets for online activities, as did almost 47% of 4-year public institutions.
Recommendation: read through the Noel-Levitz reports with your online budget and your online capability sheet close at hand. How well does your resource allocation match what future students want to do online?
That 57% figure reported above isn't going down anytime soon.