Why hunt for more leads when you can improve lead conversion instead?

Previous Education & Enrollment

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Understanding Prospects' Prior Post-Secondary Experience

I want to like nectarines. There’s a nectarine tree in my parents’ yard and every summer they rave about the sweet fruit fresh off the branch. But I’ll never know, because years ago I bit into one and didn’t realize that, in addition to a pit, this particular nectarine also harbored a small spider. Since then, I’m more partial to a peach.

My summer fruit preference is obviously not important, but I share it to illustrate the way our experiences shape our perceptions. Do all nectarines contain spiders? Of course not. Would most people ever even consider that? No again. But I do, because of my experience. I’m sure you have examples of this in your own life. Maybe a particular liquor you no longer drink after an enthusiastic overindulgence or a place you think of fondly because it’s where you met someone special.

Our previous experiences shape our perceptions and expectations, which is why when a prospect inquires with your school it can be crucial to understand that individual’s previous educational experience in order to best support them.

Do you know what percentage of your prospective students have previous post-secondary experience?

Our recently published research report The Hidden Motivations of Prospective Students, compiled from input of over 250,000 prospective students, found that 38.9% of all prospects surveyed have some type of previous post-secondary experience.

Pie Graph of Prospective Students with Previous Post Secondary Education vs None

Generally speaking, that’s almost 1 in 4 career school prospects with some post-secondary experience before they inquire with your school. That prior post-secondary experience can have a huge impact on prospects’ approach to career training.

Does your current admissions interview process incorporate questions about previous education? The sooner you’re able to gather this information, the better you’ll be able to shape a valuable conversation with your prospect.

For prospects that HAVE attended other post-secondary, important follow-up questions include:

  • What type of program were you enrolled in?
  • Did you complete your program?
  • (If they completed) What type of degree/certification did you receive?
  • (If they did NOT complete) What held you back from completing?
  • What was your previous experience in school like for you?
  • (If you are a Title IV school) Did you receive Financial Aid & do you know the status of your loans?

Knowing whether a prospect has had difficulty, for one reason or another, completing a previous program can be crucial to your evaluation of their fit for your program and knowing how to best support that prospect.

TIP: Stories from successful graduates of your school who have previously attended other schools can be particularly powerful. These types of personal testimonials can lend incredible credibility by speaking directly to the experience many prospects have and can help to allay doubts that may linger for some prospects if they have had negative experiences with post-secondary in the past.

Previous Post-Secondary Experience by Career Area of Interest

For careers that typically attract a younger demographic, such as trades and beauty, the instances of prior post-secondary experience are lower. The 3 career areas that showed the highest percentage of prospects with prior post-secondary education are:

  • Social Services (55.3%)
  • Education (56.2%)
  • Hospitality (57.7%)

If your program tends to attract career-changers, i.e. individuals who have been in the workforce a number of years already and are ready to make a change professionally, it’s even more important that your admissions process allows opportunity to explore and address the prospect’s prior educational experiences.

Know Education Status Before You Reach Out to a Lead

When a lead comes in, do you have background information like previous education experience or do you have to uncover it in your conversation? When your lead generation tools, such as signup forms on your website etc, allow room for prospects to share details beyond their immediate contact information, Admissions teams are prepared to better serve that individual prospect’s specific needs.

If you’re interested in how to gather more information about your prospective students without compromising leads (even increasing lead flow), click here to request a demo of Enrollment Resources’ innovative lead capture platform Virtual Adviser.

Want to see more from this in-depth research? Access the Hidden Motivations of Prospective Students Research Report here.

Focus on Fulfillment

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On an airplane. At a party. Ran into an old friend. In line for the bathroom. These are just some of the places you might be asked, “so, what do you do?” It’s the ubiquitous question of our times. We ask one another this question because “what we do” for a living goes beyond earning the income we need to survive. For a lot of people, in addition to ideally some financial stability, work contributes to a sense of identity and even purpose.

In our recently published research paper, The Hidden Motivations of Prospective Students, gathered from the survey of over 250,000 prospects in an array of program areas, we identified one motivation factor that outweighed others when it comes to future goals of individuals considering career school: Fulfillment.

More than financial motivators like “I want to make more money” or “I want to have more financial security”, which did rank highly. More than pride or material gains. The most common selection in the cumulative results of all prospects when asked to identify their goals for the future was “I want to feel fulfilled.”

When asked about their goals for the future, 87% of prospects across disciplines, age ranges and geographic areas selected “I want to be fulfilled”. Obviously, your graduates can’t live on fulfillment alone. But it’s an important reminder that even in times of economic uncertainty and rising costs of living, prospective students collectively share a drive for personal fulfillment.

These results were echoed elsewhere in the research where prospects were asked what they would change about their current employment situation. The response that beat out “better pay,” “better schedule” and “opportunity for advancement” was “work that interests me.”

In both of these research sections, prospects were able to select more than one response. Lots of people indicated they want better pay as well as work that interests them. But even still, at 64.37%, “work that interests me” was the top response across the board for all prospects.

We weren’t surprised to see the responses related to upward mobility such as earning more and opportunity for promotion ranked highly. But in multiple places when asked what they want for their future, more than earning more money, respondents expressed a desire for work that interests them. Today’s prospects know they need to work in order to survive, but they are tired of putting so much time into work that doesn’t offer any personal fulfillment.

“Whether I’m promoting Cosmetology or Automotive Tech, it never ceases to amaze me that ads with headlines like ‘Pursue Your Passion’ and ‘Love What You Do’ perform the best.”
– Trenton Crawford, Conversion Leader, Enrollment Resources

So, what does this mean for you as an EDU Marketing or Admissions professional?

Take a look at your website and landing pages. Do they speak to the potential personal satisfaction outcomes of the careers your graduates are prepared to pursue? In admissions meetings, do you and/or your reps take time to get to know the prospect and what’s important to them in order to determine whether the career they’re considering will have the desired outcomes, not only financially but also in terms of personal fulfillment?

When it comes to the way you present your career programs, things like employment statistics and wage data for your area can be incredibly important. But given the immense importance your prospects place on their personal satisfaction and fulfillment in their future careers, things like graduate testimonials and personal accounts from working professionals who can speak to what their job means to them can also be incredibly valuable.

Review your marketing materials and admissions process to see whether you communicate the ways in which your programs are a solution to your prospective student’s drive for personal fulfillment. Schools that recognize the importance of their prospect’s personal satisfaction in their future careers, and are able to clearly position themselves as a partner in that goal, will make meaningful connections with more prospects and ultimately serve more satisfied graduates.

Are you curious how you can gather prospect motivation insights unique to your school while also increasing your leads and booked tours? Click Here to Find Out How.

Want to see more from this in-depth research? Access the Hidden Motivations of Prospective Students White Paper here.

35% of Prospect Student’s Can’t Do This ONE Thing

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EDU Research Reveals Surprising Barrier to Enrollment

“Dream Big.” “Reach for the Stars.” “If you believe it, you can achieve it.” These types of sayings feel omnipresent in career counseling offices, right up there with the frazzled kitten precariously dangled from a tree branch whose soft face and dark saucer eyes implore onlookers with the caption “hang in there.”

Kitten hangs from tree branch

Where did every guidance counselor get this poster?

Most people hear these platitudes about goal setting their whole lives, but far fewer are given the tools to follow through. What does it actually look like, in a practical sense, to pursue your goals? 

Enrollment Resources recently published findings from extensive EDU market research that included data from over 250,000 prospective career education students across North America and a surprising finding stood out:

When asked about goals for the future, 35.62% of prospective students surveyed selected the response “I want a better life for sure, I just have trouble imagining the details.”

How Thoughtful Admissions Practices Can Help Prospects Clarify Goals & Remove a Hidden Barrier to Enrollment

The application of practical goal setting is something many people are never taught. Those of us in EDU, especially those at private career colleges, are in a unique position to help prospective students break down the practical steps that can help them build a brighter future. A student may inquire about a particular program or know that they need some sort of professional skills in order to get ahead, but it’s not uncommon for them to struggle to imagine details beyond that. That’s where you come in.

Below are three steps to keep in mind when you help prospective students to imagine their potential future. 

#1. Break it Down: Practical, Achievable Steps
The gap from initial inquiry to new career can seem gargantuan when you don’t know the steps. It would be like trying to drive from L.A. to NYC without a road map, just two distant points with no clues of how to get from one to the other. If you had infinite time and resources that mapless road trip might be fun, but that’s not the case for our prospective students. As an Admissions professional, you can fill in that road map.

Much smaller than the gap between where a student is when they inquire and where they want to ultimately end up in their career is the gap between speaking with you and speaking with Financial Aid or other staff. That’s a manageable first step. What’s the next step in your enrollment process? And the step after that?

When you break down the enrollment, school and employment pursuit process into simple steps, you help prospective students gain an accessible road map to their future.

#2. Get Clarity: The Power of Specificity
Specifics take “pie in the sky” dreams and ground them in reality. It’s the difference between “I want a new car” and “I want a gently used 2012 Mazda3.” “I want to get married” and “I want to marry my best friend’s husband Todd.” Perhaps more relevant to our situation, it’s the difference between “I’d like to help people” and “I want to work as a patient care aide at the long-term care facility near my house.”

Thoughtful questions like “what motivated you to reach out today?” and “what makes you interested in this field?” not only help you get to know the prospect you’re speaking with, they help you to understand the prospect’s drive. This forms the foundation for the portrait of the prospect’s future you’re helping to build.

#3: Explain Potential Challenges
Have you ever hit the gym hard on January 1st only to fall off your “New Year New You” exercise regime weeks later? (No. Me Either :P). Often when we get off track from long-term goals it’s due to a failure to address potential challenges that may arise. Sometimes even just the fear of getting off track is enough to derail us.

As humans, we are motivated not only by achievement but by the anticipation of achievement. When you address potential obstacles, and help prospective students to visualize the ways they have within their means to overcome those difficulties, you go a long way to illustrating the way in which successful graduation and the pursuit of a rewarding career is within the prospects’ abilities to accomplish; this can provide incredible motivation.

TIP: Remember to Meet Prospects Where They Are
As an Admissions professional, it’s vital to remember what it was like to NOT know all the ins and outs of your school and things like education financing. Work from a place of empathy and remember that many prospects will be learning about career education for the first time.

In this role, you are uniquely qualified to provide clarity for prospective students about your school and their future. When you utilize goal-setting techniques you can help students to practically envision the steps along the way to their desired future and remove a sizable barrier to potential enrollment.

Want to see more from this in-depth research? Access the Hidden Motivations of Prospective Students report here.

New Video in the Library: High School Marketing 101 with Lee Doubleday of Imagine America Foundation

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We have something exciting for you!

We have a video and transcript available of our latest EDU marketing insights webinar to share with you. On March 17th 2022, as part of Enrollment Resources’ Partner Webinar Series, Lee Doubleday, Director of Operations at the Imagine America Foundation, gave an insightful look into why post-secondary schools need to maximize their marketing and recruitment efforts in the high school market.

He touched on the best practices to help get a campaign started, what it requires, and how having a scholarship program helps separate your school from others.

It was an amazing session, full of ideas and insights.

You’ll learn:

  • Who the high school student is and how they’re influenced
  • Why you should care about high school recruiting
  • How to create a 5-step strategy for high school recruitment

Watch the video and read the summary here:

High School Marketing 101 with Lee Doubleday of Imagine America Foundation

Tweaking Tiny Processes in Your Enrollment Management Funnel

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In this video, Gregg Meiklejohn and Sterling Simpson will demonstrate how tweaking a couple tiny processes in your Enrollment Management Funnel can make significant improvements to your school’s bottom line. They will take you through how our fictional “Gregg’s Beauty School” tweaked a couple of tiny processes and blew results out of the water.

See:

  • How improving the internet contact rate by 5% can improve the Enrollment Revenue of a small Cosmetology School by $53,000 a month.
  • How improving the ‘Show Rate” by 5% can increase monthly revenue by $41,000 a month
  • And much more…

Watch this walkthrough, then go press the link and run some scenario planning for yourself!

To do your own Lost Revenue Finder click here!

AI-generated transcript here

Are You Ready For A Strong January?

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Are you ready to support your high-intent Explorers in January? - A post from Enrollment Resources

Typically this time of year, schools would start to see declines in leads through paid search advertising and inquiries from prospective students through their website as folks get busy preparing for the holidays.

But, as we have all witnessed, 2020 has been anything but typical.

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The Enrollment Builder Best-Practice Virtual Conference

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The Enrollment Builder Best-Practice Virtual ConferenceWe’re wrapping this year up with what we think will be the most useful and comprehensive Enrollment Management conference you’ve ever attended.

What: The Enrollment Builder Best-Practice Virtual Conference
When: December 15th from from 10 am to 1:30 pm PST
Cost: Free
Register Here

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