 Photo by Matt Hagen
Colleges and universities are spending thousands to recruit
students like Julia. According to one recent survey, public schools
spend about $75 per student recruited. Private schools pay in the
range of $2,000 per student.
They send out reams of material, personalized letters, and
weekly e-mails. They call the student at home, they work with the
counselors at school, they even throw get-togethers at the homes of
wealthy alumni.
It’s a fierce new world of college recruiting, one with
enrollment managers, target marketing campaigns, and admissions
counselors who spend hours guiding individual students to apply.
The schools are all seeking the same things: students with high
grades and high test scores, who will enrich the cultural mix of
the student body, and who will graduate in a reasonable amount of
time. In short, students like Julia.
Six years ago at WSU, student recruitment was all about making
the numbers. The admissions office focused on getting enough
enrollees to fill the freshman and transfer openings and enough to
get the full state allotment for educating them.
Back then only one student recruiter worked on the west side of
the state. Admission was based solely on an index that factored
together GPA and SAT scores.
At that time, WSU was underenrolled. The school had received
money from the state for students who didn’t end up attending,
money that had to go back to the state coffers. Though Washington’s
second largest school, WSU was second or third choice for most
applicants.
It was time to rethink how WSU was attracting students.
A new admissions director was hired, counselors like Kris Baier
were recruited, and representatives of WSU visited every high
school and community college in the state, as well as some in
Oregon and Idaho. At the same time, WSU’s marketing department was
recasting the University’s image from a party school to one that
was strong on research and high on academic standards. Under the
tag line, “World Class. Face to Face,” glossy images of educators
and ethnically diverse students as well as information about WSU’s
academic programs and campus life went to every high school student
and every counseling office in Washington. Along with a series of
television commercials, a strong team of admissions recruiters, and
a few good football seasons, the fresh campaign helped the
University change its reputation.
Now WSU targets its recruitment efforts at 250 Washington high
schools with the goal of bringing in an ethnically and economically
diverse, high-ability student body. The schools have high SAT
scores, first-generation college students, and good ethnic mixes.
Among them are Julia’s Mariner High, Burlington-Edison, Snohomish,
Seattle’s Ballard, Garfield, and Franklin, and Tacoma’s Curtis.
These efforts have paid off with a surge in applications, helped
in part by an increase in the population of graduating high school
seniors. By 2005, the average GPA for incoming freshmen had risen
to 3.45—and the University was turning away qualified students to
avoid overcrowding.
The “World Class, Face to Face” campaign has changed what people
think about WSU, imparting a reputation that it’s no longer an easy
school to get into. Today the school is targeting students with
GPAs of 3.60 or higher, SAT scores of at least 1,200 and ACT scores
of 26. It does this with special programs and marketing materials
directed specifically at the top student and his or her field of
interest. It also uses carrots like the Regents Scholars program,
for which students with high GPAs have to be nominated by their
high school principal.
"WSU now targets
its recruitment efforts at 250 Washington high schools with the
goal of bringing in an ethnically and economically diverse,
high-ability student body."
While 2005 was a banner year, the fall of 2006 was another
story. By mid-summer it looked as if WSU’s enrollment would be
lower than the previous year’s. A look around the state reveals
that WSU’s biggest competitor for Washington students, the
University of Washington, tacked on several hundred new slots for
freshmen. The move may have affected not only WSU, but several
other state schools.
While there is a greater pool of students looking for colleges,
the competition for the good ones has grown more heated, especially
in this new era of enrollment management. The practice of
recruiting and enrolling students who meet a school’s goals and
standards started with exclusive, private colleges and universities
decades ago. Seeking to expand their student population beyond the
well-heeled East Coast, the Ivy Leagues sought bright students like
Julia from the far corners of the country. In the past 10 years
nearly every college and university has adopted some kind of
enrollment management program. The reasons are many, including the
fact that higher GPAs and test scores of incoming students mean
higher rankings.
“I don’t even know if I’d be able to get in, this day and age,”
says Lindsay Fiker, a career counselor at Burlington-Edison High
School. Fiker earned her bachelor’s from WSU in 1975 and a master’s
degree in education in 1977. She says her grades would have met
WSU’s rising standards, but she thinks her math SAT scores would
not.
She had her great awakening to the business of target recruiting
a few years ago at a conference for high school counselors. There
she and one other counselor from a public high school found
themselves swamped by private and boarding school advisors hungry
for tips on how to groom students for elite colleges and
universities like Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. “It was big
business for those selective schools,” she says.
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