Many parents and students don’t know that colleges employ specific strategies to recruit students. They may wonder “Why did I get this amount of financial aid?” or, “Why did one college give a larger scholarship than another?”

There’s a little-known strategy that plays a major role in the amount of scholarship and financial aid that colleges award to families. It’s called “Strategic Enrollment Management” or SEM. This is a powerful tool that colleges use to recruit students. It involves regression analysis to predict enrollment results. It’s like running an experiment and assigning a value to an independent variable and watching the effects on the dependent variable. Which students will enroll when given a specific amount of incentive? What amount of financial aid will be sufficient to persuade parents to enroll their student? What ’s the average Expected Family Contribution (EFC) of families who can afford our college? Which high schools, zip codes, and residents’ average income brackets yield the results colleges want? By analyzing decades of this data, colleges can target specific market segments. Such statistical analysis is similar to what private and corporate businesses do to attract customers and position themselves for success.

The “Enrollment Management” term was coined by Jack McGuire, who was the dean of admission in the early 1970s at Boston College. He realized that the college couldn’t take all students who needed financial aid. By examining the Expected Family Contribution in addition to grades and test scores the college could predict who would enroll, who would persist, and who would graduate. Jack went on to found McGuire and Associates to help colleges improve their recruitment practices. These SEM strategies analyze students’ and their parents’ behavior, the prevailing forces in the marketplace, and where to invest funds to maximize the recruitment efforts. Which high schools are good targets to visit, and which online and in-person events will yield the larger returns? The more sophisticated programs will leverage financial aid to build and shape the class the college wants.

SEM has come a long way since the ’70s. There are many SEM companies that compete with one another to provide colleges with services. Today’s enrollment management programs enable college professionals to connect with students in much more effective ways. The software for aggregating and refining data has become easier to use, is sophisticated, and more flexible and accurate. The hub of the process enables colleges to better target where to spend their money to recruit students.

In this way, SEM helps colleges and universities meet their budget each year and achieve their overall goals. SEM includes marketing (which accounts for some of the mail and emails students are getting), looking at what services or amenities students want or need (like upgraded dorms), and/or offering good financial aid packages to more students whom they want to attract (which may mean increasing the number of merit scholarships.) For example, a school may want to improve their national name recognition. They might want to start an Honors program and thus expend effort in recruiting high-performing students. They may have a goal to increase the number of students that return after their first year, and may, to that end, invest in first-year classes that provide a better “first-year experience” as students adjust to college. Some strategies help the college improve student services and retention.

However, there’s something that doesn’t feel right when SEM is used to leverage financial aid. This is an established practice to award merit aid to entice families who can pay rather than to award need-based aid. Over the last few decades, merit aid has supplanted need-based aid. For example, a SEM strategy might be to award a $15,000 scholarship to five students whose parents can pay the remainder of the $75,000 a year tuition than to award one single scholarship to one student who needs the entire amount. By rewarding students whose parents are able and willing to pay the balance, the college fills the dorms with students who have parental support and will likely persist until graduation.

When SEM is used in this way it starts to feel like students are products rather than young people who seek an education. These young people don’t have a yardstick as sophisticated as SEM to assess what’s in their best interest. Parents don’t have the advantage of making data-driven decisions. They go through this process only once, or a couple of times depending on how many children they have, whereas colleges evaluate families’ financial situation day in and out. Although I realize that colleges need to bring in revenues to stay in business, institutional interest is not the same as student interest.

Another detrimental effect of SEM is when students become susceptible to recruitment practices and are lured to the wrong college. When lower-income students fall for expensive colleges that don’t meet their financial need, they end up at the wrong colleges. For example, I remember when one or two of my most financially needy students would come into my office with new colleges they discovered, after attending a college fair and talking with the reps from Auburn and Alabama. Those reps picked up many students in Charleston, South Carolina, even when the Clemson Tigers won two NCAA Division I football national championships in two years. Of course, recruiters don’t know the financial situation of students. The danger is that high-need students who pursue out-of-state universities end up with massive amounts of loans. They will miss out on their own in-state, equally valuable universities, along with the state aid for residents.

SEM is an institutionally driven policy. While this is a logical business decision, I believe it could also be unfair from a humanist point of view. It is my hope that Colleges can enact aid policies not based purely on their “Profit and Loss” and can clearly demonstrate that their students are not just commodities. If colleges open their doors only to those who can pay, higher education will be like it was in the past, when only the wealthy went to college. This is a terrible waste of human potential.

For this reason, students and parents need to establish their Affordable Family Contribution (AFC), based on their budget, their family values, and their student’s academic and social needs (see Chapter One, and take the surveys). Stick to your AFC! Be mindful of costs and don’t be swayed by the panache. It’s marketing!

During this Covid-10 pandemic, I would advise students to continue to hedge their bets and keep the “financially safe” colleges in their pockets. One piece of information they may not know is that this is a buyers’ market for students. There are fewer students in the applicant pool, (as there were fewer births after the 9/11 tragedy in New York City.) Colleges aren’t likely to raise selectivity at this time They have to fish in a pond with fewer fish while pivoting to teach online, keep students safe if they’re on campus, and adjust to the changing Covid-19 challenges. At the same time, students and parents who are reading this book are becoming more savvy about college costs. Whereas before the pandemic they may have looked for colleges far away from home, now they are more likely to attend colleges in their backyard.

The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown a monkey wrench into SEM strategies. No doubt the predictive models will be re-calibrated to test the new waters and meet the new challenges. Students and parents will not go wrong if they stick to their Affordable Family Contribution or AFC!

Copyright C. Claire Law 9/20/2020

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