Important Advice To Get Students Talking Earlier

I’ve explained in previous articles that casual questions lead to better responses.

Here’s another piece of advice that will help you increase the amount of early engagement you receive from this next class of students. It’s also a strategy that I continue to see very few admissions counselors and enrollment communication teams utilize.

Ask your students what they don’t want, what they don’t like, and what kinds of colleges they think are wrong for them.

Negative questions are smart because as humans it’s much easier for us to talk about what we don’t want or why we don’t like something.

Even though a lot of inquiries and prospects aren’t 100% sure what their ideal college experience looks like, many have thoughts on what the wrong kind of school or experience looks like.

If you can get a student to define that for you and have a discussion around it, you’ll better understand their mindset when it comes to important things like the size of their future school, the location, the vibe on campus, and the kind of classroom environment that’s best for them.

So, instead of asking, “What are you looking for in a college?”, ask, “As you’ve been looking at different colleges, what’s something you’ve realized you definitely don’t want?” Or, “What kind of campus environment do you think you’d get tired of pretty quickly?”

Implement this strategy and you’ll find it adds a whole new dimension to your recruiting conversations.

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