September 2009 Lawlor Focus

The Role of Institutional Research in Enrollment Management

With the final census of new and returning students taken, now is a good time for enrollment officers to collect particular data points from the previous admission cycle that will allow them to engage in evidence-based marketing for the next cycle. Higher education institutions have massive amounts of quantitative data at their disposal, but unless that data is sliced and diced to inform strategic decision-making that leads to a better return on investment, its value is underutilized.

Designing successful marketing campaigns is a science as well as an art, so the foundation for adjustments to an enrollment office’s marketing plan can often derive from the work of the institutional research office. Employing a mix of tried-and-true data collection methods plus innovative data mining techniques can yield actionable insights about why prospective students did or did not enroll, whether the discount rate was optimal, the effectiveness of communication tactics and much more.

In general, data mining refers to the practice of sifting through existing data to identify patterns, relationships and trends that have not previously been discovered. Artificial intelligence techniques, neural network modeling, cluster analysis and logistic regression can all come into play as a data miner attempts to discover the hidden gems within the data. In addition to revealing patterns in association, sequencing and classification, data mining enables forecasting as it discovers patterns in data that can lead to reasonable predictions about the future. For example, predictive modeling can aid in decisions about which student characteristics and data fields to purchase for a search campaign because it can prequalify prospects according to their likeliness to enroll based on similar parameters.

Other tools at the institutional researcher’s disposal include the matrix survey, which can ask different questions of different respondents; time series analysis, which can use longitudinal data and event variables to make forecasts; and web analytics, which can examine the enormous amount of information gathered by the institutional web site to identify patterns in user behavior. Among other uses, these tools can assist an enrollment manager in cost-effectively generating prospects from market segments that may have been previously overlooked.

Lawlor Recommends

As you examine your results from the previous admission cycle, ask yourself, “Are these the outcomes we planned for, or are they simply what we got?” Your next marketing plan should be designed to deliver results based on organizational intent.

Paying attention to the science of marketing means analyzing institutional data to guide your strategic decisions.

• Start by finding the people on your campus who can help you mine your recruitment data and other institutional information for actionable insights.

• If possible, tap into the expertise of your institutional researcher not only to identify which previous activities did and did not yield the desired results, but also to discover how your data might hold the answer to which new actions will yield desired results in the future.

• Hire a third-party provider to collect and analyze data if you do not have an institutional researcher, if you seek to establish benchmarks for new measurements, or if you need specialized data collection and analysis.

In the news

Writing at Slate’s “The Big Money” web site, law professor Zephyr Teachout of Fordham University predicts, “Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet.” She argues in “Welcome to Yahoo! U” that the business model that has sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive and that soon “the notion of a set-term, offline, prepackaged education will seem anachronistic.” As entrepreneurs refine the tools of distance learning, “college aggregators will be the hub of the new school experience” and “we will see a structural disintegration in the academy akin to that in newspapers now.”

Did you know?

Approximately 88 percent of U.S. teenagers aged 13 to 17 are active mobile phone users, and they each send or receive an average of 2,899 text messages per month, compared to 191 phone calls per month.

Source: Nielsen (.pdf)