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"We don't have the budget to implement anything new for our admissions"

We've heard this from a number of institutions who are struggling with declining enrollment....

Last week Mechelle Aitson-Roessler, AVP of Enrollment Management and Registrar at Rose State College (RSC), presented her institution's journey to addressing their admissions challenges.

In our prior blog entry, we mapped out the journey that candidates follow from an unknown person to a student.  We also described that inbound marketing focuses on optimizing each of the transition points so that more people successfully navigate that journey.

This article will now discuss how to engage the candidate, which is the mechanism by which you move a candidate from one stage to the next in the admissions journey.

Lead.  Yield.  Call it what you will.  Attracting candidates is important to every university.  Most organizations are looking for ways to improve admissions results.  Whether you’re trying to improve enrollment for the institution as a whole or for specific groups of students, it all starts with leads or yield.

If you work in the higher education industry, you probably don't need a report to tell you that 2020 was a challenge for colleges and universities.  However, the most recent report put together by the National Student Clearinghouse (link here) gives insight into how COVID has affected enrollment in each type of school and demographic -- and it's not all doom and gloom.

We are pleased to announce that following a short 5 month implementation, Rose State College deployed Mutara's Admissions Candidate Application SaaS product on February 3, 2020.  

This week Mutara had the opportunity to exhibit and present at the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) Virtual conference.  This was a first time I participated with this community and found it extremely informative.  As expected, the overall theme was COVID-19 and how institutions are coping and planning.

Today, Business Insider had an opinion piece about Google's Career Certificates program, which allows non-degree learning to help people (especially people in IT) gain critical skills that can help them advance their careers.  In our blog, we've previously discussed how the higher education market is has recognized the opportunity growth of lifetime learning and the nontraditional student.  

Virtual Alliance 2020 is in the books.  Over the course of the week, we learned how to attend sessions from our homes, got to see where friends and colleagues worked, and was photobombed by toddlers and pets.  As expected, the overall theme was COVID-19 and how institutions are coping and planning.