In New Mexico, where the economy recently tanked because of an 80% decrease in oil and gas production in the last 10 years, state support for higher education continues to decrease while the government is prohibiting tuition increases for public institutions.
So institutions like San Juan College are pressured to enroll more students to meet budget demands, and what would be seen as good news generally — indicators like a 143% increase in graduation rates over the next five years — mean every learner graduated is a student who is not returning the next semester. When coupled with San Juan being named the nation’s fastest shrinking city in population, there is tremendous pressure for the college to get creative about maximizing the populations that are available.
For San Juan’s leadership, this meant re-examining the 940 students who had expressed interest in attending but never made it to campus and reaching out to those students to bring them to campus. Two thirds (615) applied but had not completed financial aid forms, and another 325 completed financial aid forms but had not enrolled. The college spent roughly $5,000 to outsource calls and yielded a 17% success rate — 156 of the 940 students enrolled the next semester, which translated to an additional $161,000 in revenue that semester. The following semester, roughly $6,500 was spent to reach 2,075 students, of which 948 (or 46%) converted, representing an additional $978,000 in revenue.
The $978,000 represented a lot of faculty member contracts and overall improvements for an institution that had recently gone through layoffs, had heard the words financial exigency tossed around, and that had seen a moratorium on travel and equipment replacements, said Edward DesPlas, executive vice president for the Office of Administrative Services, during a presentation at the American Association of Community Colleges Annual Meeting this week in Dallas.
“Students don’t read their email. Robo calls are impersonal and can be annoying; a phone call is a personal touch, even if it’s only a voicemail left by a real human. I know text messages are really popular in the sales world, but it’s just not for our institution, we just don’t want to go there,” said DesPlas, who quickly realized, “Your employees don’t really have time, and if they take time to do it, sometimes they’re not as cheerful as someone who is paid to do just that.”
A combined approach
At Hillsborough Community College in Florida, administrators thought a combination of all of the above — outsourcing calls and having internal staff take some of the call load, sending text messages and using automated robo calls — would be effective. Hillsborough Vice President of Student Services and Enrollment Management Kenneth Ray said outsourcing back office processes helped the institution to improve operational efficiency and focus more on customer service and student retention, leading to an overall improvement in student satisfaction.
In Florida, there’s an added incentive for someone to zero in on continuing students who don’t enroll: In addition to just revenue challenges associated with state cuts, institutions are funded on a performance model, meaning every student not retained through to graduation means more dollars lost.
At the AACC meeting, an attendee asked about who reaches out to continuing students who don’t re-enroll the following semester, and the room was silent. But Ray and his team “started looking at different departments to say there’s $1,000 here, $2,000 there,” to find the funding for an outsourced initiative.
Kayla Charles, Hillsborough’s director of enrollment management technology and resources, said during the meeting that with 7,000 students to call, “Do your best. We need you to stop and make these calls while we still have students coming on campus, trying to get enrolled,” wasn’t going to cut it. So the college targeted 2,500 students who were considered the “low-hanging fruit,” with few barriers to enrollment, she said.
Hillsborough split the list, outsourcing half and giving the other half to staff. The project yielded a 28% enrollment boost (988 students) for a $1,058,723 revenue increase that semester for students who had been admitted but hadn’t enrolled or completed their financial aid paperwork, and $900,834 from 915 of 1,477 (62%) of students who had already been awarded financial aid but who had not completed the enrollment process.
Outreach to a third group of students, 2,959 who were missing some verification documents in the financial aid process, saw 42% of students enroll for an additional $1,051,781 in revenue, bringing the semester total to $3,011,338, for an enrollment difference of 745 students year-over-year.
There was an 11-point difference in students converted favoring the outside call center, versus those handled internally. But Charles said the amount of tracking data from the outside company was more thorough, because the company was paid per contact.
The following spring semester, Charles inadvertently reached out to students who not only had not yet enrolled for the spring semester, but also who had not enrolled since the previous spring. While targeting students who had skipped a semester was not the original plan, it did help the school’s retention numbers by adding a 419 student boost. And because retention statistics used to determine funding in Florida are measured by fall enrollment, the error paid off.