Two Things You May Need To Stop Doing

As you continue to communicate with both undecided admitted students and rising high school seniors, I thought it would be helpful to highlight two common mistakes I continue to see a lot of admissions counselors and enrollment marketers make.

#1 Checking in, over and over again

Last week I was talking with an Admissions Counselor at a university I partner with, and when she pulled up her recent emails to undecided seniors, each one was essentially the same. She asked questions like:

“How are you doing?”

“How’s summer break going?”

“Are you close to making a decision?”

Essentially she was asking surface-level, “check in” questions over and over again.

For most students, this type of outreach doesn’t get them excited and isn’t allowing the counselor to move the conversation forward. 

As I explained to her, there has to be more intentionality and purpose to each conversation. I reminded her of the questions we came up with during a recent training workshop that would help her better understand where they stood with a student, what concerns were still lingering, what was delaying the decision, and what (if anything) she could do to make the decision-making process easier and less stressful for the student.

#2 Pushing the campus visit, over and over again

This is the most frequent call to action right now that almost every school is utilizing with rising high school seniors. Here’s this event or here are all the daily visit options we offer, now go pick one and sign up.

In order to get more students to visit campus, they need reasons why they should visit. Giving them a "because" should be the focus right now, rather than simply asking them to visit.

Explain how visiting campus will help them evaluate and determine the size of school, the type of atmosphere, and the kind of location that fits them best. In turn those insights will help the student determine which schools they should apply to.

HAVE YOU HEARD?

Leadership, confidence, being adaptable, failure, managing stress, and time management are just some of the recent topics that I’ve covered on my Mission Admissions podcast. All 91 episodes are free and can be found on Apple and Spotify.