Building a Better Admissions Road Runner

Newport, R.I.—The dynamics of recruitment are changing. Old strategies for attracting applicants no longer work as well as they once did. And in an era of tightened budgets, understanding the return-on-investment for each enrollment expense is crucial.

So said attendees here at the New England Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference. On Thursday, admissions officials discussed how admissions representatives could plan their recruitment trips more efficiently—and effectively.

“We have a tendency to keep traveling the way we’ve always been traveling, and if it has worked, we figure it must be working,” said Cheri Hurtubise, assistant director of admission at Simmons College, in Boston. “We need to travel smarter, not harder.”

Among the factors complicating questions about the effectiveness of admissions travel: a weak economy, the changing demographics of college-bound students, and the rise of social networking as a primary means of communicating with today’s wired teenagers. Officials from some colleges described how these factors had led them to scale back on high-school visits and college fairs recently.

Ms. Hurtubise wrote her master’s thesis on “territory management”—the strategies admissions offices use to recruit in a given area. At half of the institutions she surveyed, admissions officials did not train their employees how to plan their travel in order to maximize its value.

So how do admissions officials know if all those long flights and car trips are worth it?

For one thing, they need numbers. Ms. Hurtubise urged her colleagues to use data—the more sophisticated, the better—to evaluate their travel strategies. Some colleges might find that high-school visits help them enroll a significant number of students; others might find that they’re a waste of time.

Ms. Hurtubise also recommended that admissions staffs hold an end-of-cycle meeting to discuss travel, where representatives can share what they learned from their trips to different regions; seek ways of bringing more alumni into the recruitment fold; make sure they know about scheduling conflicts, like PSAT testing days and religious holidays, before visiting high schools; consider posting their travel schedules online, so counselors and prospective students can see them; and keep in touch with counselors at high schools that they don’t visit regularly.

“Just because you can’t physically travel there doesn’t mean your relationship doesn’t exist,” Ms. Hurtubise said.

Kristin Lamontagne, assistant director of admission at Northeastern University, suggested other ways that roadrunning admissions reps could think more creatively about how they spend time away from the campus. One idea was to do more outreach to independent college counselors. Another was to coordinate events—such as essay-writing workshops for underrepresented minority high-school students—that go beyond traditional recruitment programming.

“Although you may not get many of those students,” she said, “at least you’re getting the name of your college out there.”