We had a blast at this year’s NACAC Conference in Baltimore. Stein sported a new look at the booth as well as some new faces.

New booth design

Here I am getting into the spirit with our NY representative, Carolina.

Sales team at NACAC

And a special congratulations to the winner of a new iPod touch, Mariah Lane from Binghamton University!

Adaptive Path President Peter Merholz recently started blogging at Harvard Business about the customer experience-driven business. In addition to being credited with coining the term “blog,” Merholz has worked with a wide range of clients in the areas of user experience, strategy, and design.

In his first post, Merholz writes: “…this isn’t about money — in my work, the biggest impact I’ve seen a customer experience mindset have is to help companies understand how they can better orchestrate existing elements to realize new value….This is about choreographing what you already have (technologies, people, offerings) to better respond to your customers’ needs and wants.”

Adapative Path’s clients are much more likely to be companies and corporations, but it occurred to me that you could substitute “students” for “customers” in the above. And in these economic times, who wouldn’t be on board with taking what you already have and better aligning it with your students’ goals and needs?

In his most recent post, Merholz examines how businesses see their customers and, unfortunately, how little they often understand them.

About working on a project with a large bank, Merholtz writes: “Buying financial products is challenging, because unlike physical goods, it’s hard to define what you want ahead of time….

“We realized that customers must satisfy three sets of requirements — functional (does the product meet my basic needs); intellectual (through comparison, am I confident I’m getting the best deal); and, crucially, emotional (could I have a relationship with this bank?).”

Again, drawing a parallel with the challenge of college selection: Does the college meet my basic needs (functional)? Through comparison, am I confident I’m getting the best university for me (intellectual)? Could I have a relationship with this college (emotional)?

The bank wanted to drive all applications for new products online, according to Merholz, but researching and listening to the customers revealed that they still wanted to be able to have a human relationship, either in person or on the phone. Continuing to provide that contact opportunity was a better strategy.

The bottom line here is that it’s not just who your customers/students are, but how they behave. And have you aligned your institutional processes with actual behaviors, not with labels and preconceived notions about your customers/students? Is your admissions strategy meeting the functional, intellectual, and emotional concerns of potential students?

A recent article in the Chronicle’s blog highlights a missed opportunity in college recruiting.

The piece focuses on a study by a Stanford economist who found that high-achieving, low-income high school students are less likely to apply to selective colleges, despite having the qualifications to be accepted. These students do attend college, but usually at institutions that are below their abilities.

Ms. [Caroline M.] Hoxby and Christopher N. Avery, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, obtained a huge cache of data from the College Board, which allowed them to analyze the entire population of students who took the SAT in five recent years. The data included test scores, high-school grades, and the names of the colleges where the students asked the College Board to send their scores (which is a close proxy for where the students actually applied).

The two scholars used a variety of methods, including block-level census data, to estimate each student’s household income. In their paper they define a family as “low income” if its income is below the 30th percentile, which is around $28,000. They define a student as high-achieving if the student had combined SAT scores above 1200, a high-school grade point average of B-plus or better, and at least one Advanced Placement score of 4 or 5 (or an equivalently high score on an SAT subject-area test).

In one typical recent year, Ms. Hoxby said, there were roughly 21,000 high-achieving students from low-income families. But more than 60 percent of those students did not make any “ambitious applications,” the study found.

Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery regarded an application as ambitious if the college’s median combined SAT score was no more than five percentiles below the student’s own score. “Notice that that’s a very broad definition,” Ms. Hoxby said. “I’m not saying that you’re applying to a school where you would be below the median.”

But even under that generous definition, Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery found that a large majority of those students did not make any ambitious applications. Instead, they typically applied to nonselective (or only slightly selective) public institutions close to their homes.

One of the crucial factors the study found was geography: low-income students from rural areas are less likely to apply to ambitious schools. Students in these areas lack guidance from teachers, counselors, and parents in determining what schools to consider.

This isn’t an audience that’s plugged in to traditional college marketing–they require a targeted and sustained communication effort that educates them (and their families) about financial aid and about the possibilities that are out there.  But it’s a sizable group of smart, highly motivated, hard working students who just need someone to help them recognize their options.

Carol Phillips at Millenial Marketing observes that

“Gen Y says their biggest challenge is ‘busy-ness’, the sheer volume of things they want and need to do. There simply isn’t enough time to do it all. As a result, they see their lives as ‘hectic’, ‘exciting’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘fun’. However, busy-ness also is the main barrier to achieving things that are really important to them, like staying in touch with old friends, making new friends and finding time to lead a ‘balanced’ life.”

When marketing universities and colleges to high school students, there’s a tendency to hype up the high-energy, never-stand-still aspects of life on campus.  (At least, I know I’m guilty of it.)  Think of how many “24/7″ or timeline-themed viewbook concepts you’ve seen.  The point, of course, is to convey a sense of how and to what degree prospects will be engaged once they’re on campus.  “Come to our school!  Bored is the only thing that’s hard to be!”

It’s all meant to appeal to an audience that expects continual activity.  But it’s very easy to forget that this busy-ness is also a stressor.  And it’s taking a toll: anecdotal evidence and hard data indicate that the use of on-campus mental health and counseling services is climbing; we’re also seeing the growing practice of a gap year as students declare that they just need a break.

As Phillips reminds us, what students crave and what’s in short supply is balance.  Emphasizing the ways your students step off the busy-ness treadmill, how they find balance between competing demands, also has its appeal.

This appeared in the Boston Globe on Christmas Day, so in case you missed it: Facing rising tuition here at home and more purchasing power in Canada, greater numbers of New England students are heading north of the border for college.

Colleges in eastern Canada report mounting interest this fall among high school seniors from the Northeast, with a recently stronger US dollar making already low tuition costs even more of a bargain for Americans.

Although applications for next academic year are not due for at least a month, schools from Toronto to Halifax say many students in the Boston area and throughout the region are drawn by the allure of an international college experience relatively close to home.

…

The number of Americans studying abroad has more than doubled in the past decade, and high school counselors say the influx to Canada reflects a broader trend of students attending foreign universities full time.

Since 2001, the number of American attending college in Canada has risen by 50 percent to about 9,000, according to Canadian Embassy in Washington.

Now, 9,000 students isn’t a huge number, and the recruiting efforts appear to be confined to New England, but it’s a trend worth watching. US schools appear to be behind the 8-ball on this one: Canadian colleges are heavily subsidized, making them less expensive than private schools in the US and in some cases comparable to public institutions. Add to that a simplified admissions process, schools with outstanding reputations, and (at least in the case of Toronto) fabulous urban experiences. Oh, and while they don’t qualify for financial aid, US students can receive loans from the federal government (that is, our federal government) to study in Canada.

I’m curious, though: Does anyone know the number of Canadian students studying in the US?

The full story is here.

By now everyone in higher ed with an internet connection has posted about the misrepresentation in Facebook groups. (Inside Higher Ed’s summary here.)  At the Stein HQ we’ve been commenting that this is a great opportunity to explore the benefits of an institution building their own social network for admitted students.

Exclusive access to the community. If you can invite your admitted student pool with a unique identifier required to register, there’s no chance of any College Prowler interns posing and getting in. At the same time, the students know all their peers have been invited in, vs. facebook where only the over eager beaver types search out groups and join on their own initiative.

Insights and oversights.  Look for a product where you can see the discussions and address them appropriately. I’m not advocating that admission officers lead the discussions and that every staff member should have their own profile. But in a worst case scenario, you have the contact information on every member to handle any situation confidentially.

You might be wondering if the “official” presence would hinder the freeflowing conversation we have all seen on institution’s facebook groups and other online forums.  Stein has a social networking tool that has been on the market for five years (which actually predates facebook) and in that time, we have seen students discussing everything from their scholarship offers at other schools to what dorm they said they wouldn’t want to live in. Clearly it has not been our experience to see any reluctance from students to talk about whatever they wish.

Boosts yield. We have all seen that the extra excitement built around the school in online forums does help students along in their enrollment decision process. For one of our clients, 75% of the students who used the site ended up enrolling.

Now, this is not to say there isn’t tangible value to participating actively on existing sites like facebook. But to do so effectively, it is important to dedicate resources to maintaining your school’s presence. (See mStoner’s recommendations.)