Summer may seem like a time to relax, but for higher education enrollment managers, it’s a season of critical evaluation and strategic planning. The summer months offer a vital window for assessing past performance and setting the stage for future success.
It’s a time to dive deep into data from the previous academic year, scrutinize trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement in order to set ambitious goals and launch new initiatives to attract and retain students.
If you’re a VP, Dean, or Director, make sure these six focus areas make it onto your to-do list this summer:
- Summer melt
- Campus visits
- Setting realistic enrollment goals
- Strategy and operational evaluation
- Financial aid modeling and scholarships
- Updating your Slate instance
1. Summer melt
To ensure that deposited students show up in the fall, staff and other campus partners should continue to pay close attention to students and families throughout the summer months.
For summer orientation and registration dates, make sure events are well staffed and your campus facilities are looking their best. Never stop rolling out the red carpet and always be sure these particular days are filled with high energy activity and attention to every last detail!
You should also ramp up communication with deposited students throughout the summer. Have faculty members send personalized notes following summer advising appointments and ensure your admission and financial staff are connecting with students.
Check out our blog post for more tips to beat summer melt.
2. Campus visits
Many campuses offer robust summer visit opportunities ranging from open houses and cookouts to individual visits and athletic recruitment meetings with coaches. An exceptional campus visit is one of the best predictors for enrollment, so pull out all the stops to yield more students.
To impress prospective students and families, make sure to keep those flower beds weeded, grass clippings maintained, and buildings clean. Despite the reduced campus activity, summer visit can still provide prospective students with a great chance to explore the setting in a relaxed atmosphere, interact personally with staff and faculty, and envision their future within the community.
3. Setting enrollment goals
As an enrollment leader, establishing realistic recruitment goals involves working closely with the board to align strategic objectives with institutional capacities and industry needs.
Goals must reflect achievable head count and produce revenue that sustains the institution. It’s an excellent time to review programmatic opportunities that can draw additional students including new sports, academic programs that meet market demand, and sourcing new extracurricular opportunities like a marching band.
4. Strategic evaluation
Evaluation of your enrollment strategy includes assessment of overall territory management, the campus visit experience, and the role of strategic partners and platforms with the end goal being to streamline internal processes and make admission more accessible to students.
When evaluating campus visit activity, utilize conversion reports by event or source to determine effectiveness or opportunities for improvement. For territory management, assess the effectiveness of regional strategies, resource allocation, and outreach efforts to optimize student engagement. This may include adjusting staffing and budget to better support high-potential areas or implementing more sophisticated data tracking and analysis to better understand trends and outcomes.
Improving your applicant and admit portal experience can also increase engagement by students and parents leading to higher yield. In short, use any data points stored in your CRM along with the qualitative evaluations given along the way and set a pathway to future success.
5. Financial aid modeling and scholarships
One aspect of setting realistic enrollment goals is evaluating your financial aid model and maintaining or revising merit based scholarships. Pay close attention to underperforming sections of your model and set a strategy to improve yield while maintaining any growth areas.
Increases in tuition and fees will dictate any changes to your merit scholarships as well as any enrollment growth in underperforming markets or desired secondary or tertiary markets. Consider other goals like boosting underperforming majors while reducing financial aid to those with wait lists. Finally, set your tuition and fees for the 2025-26 academic year no later than your board meeting in the fall of 2024.
6. Updating your Slate instance
It’s important to make critical updates to your Slate instance before the start of a new admissions cycle to ensure the best user experience for your next wave of students. Do an audit of your content, processes, and rules and make the necessary updates to your periods and rounds, queries and reports, population rules, etc.
Review our blog post for a complete guide on how to cycle prep in Slate!
Prepare for your next cycle—and enjoy your summer—with the help of Waybetter
It goes without saying that everyone needs a break including the enrollment staff and their respective leaders. Take time for yourself, enjoy time with family and friends and come back to campus refreshed, ready for another year of grinding out a class.
If you need help with cycle prep and summer melt, get in touch with the team at Waybetter!