Top reasons teens choose colleges and what you can control

Editor's Notes

1. My name is Chris Hodges. I am the founder of an Internet startup company called uwannadu. We match people to careers colleges and companies for a better life. Thank you for attending this session.
2. There is a student crisis in the United States. The crisis is made up of a combination of financial and vocational challenges. The crisis affects not only students but also their parents colleges and society at large.
3. We all know that the cost of college is gone up dramatically in fact it is gone up over 70% in the last five years.
4. Unfortunately paying for this cost rise has included more than $1 trillion in student debt.
5. And student debt is now the largest single portion of individual debt in the country outside of home mortgages.
6. Another disturbing fact is that 30% of all college students transfer after they start attending their original college. This means after spending quite a bit of money trying to attract the right students to your college you end up losing 30% of them.
7. While the dropout rate is better for some schools than others, the overall average is alarming at 46%. Colleges with the most selective criteria may feel more comfortable with their numbers. But even the best colleges suffer the combination of debt and drop out and transfer challenges.
8. And to put some perspective on this, for a private college it costs $2400 to recruit a new student and roughly $550 to recruit a new student at a public university
9. This chart shows just how alarming the student debt challenges to the country as a whole. And when the students eventually can’t pay off the bills guess who is guaranteeing that debt? Yes you guessed it all of us taxpayers.
10. It is hard to have great thoughts when you have the burden of debt over your shoulders.
11. Let’s take a look at some of the top reasons why students choose to leave or drop out after you’ve spent hours trying to recruit the right people for your school. While some of these reasons have more to do with psychological stability other reason simply have to do with a misfit between the student and the college. Even the financial reasons can be overcome the student is passionate about the school there attending and can see a viable career following college.
12. Like most statistical studies and charts the questions asked and the answers given can be confusing.
13. Take for example the top 10 reasons students choose a college. This list is very interesting starting with a college is a very good academic reputation and moving down through the more holistic reasons like they liked the campus when they visited. What this list does not tell you is the real reason students choose college. That is a holistic combination of reasons. The reason that holistic combination doesn’t make it on the chart is because it’s very difficult to measure. How do you ask a student what’s the real reason you chose this college? The answer comes back “well it felt like it was the right place for me to be.” But that doesn’t make a very good statistical summary or a chart.
14. Another interesting statistic is the number of students focused on employment after college. Unfortunately many academics still don’t understand the importance of the job to the student and focus instead on the value of education for education sake. I like to say it’s wonderful if you understand the best of Roman poetry but it doesn’t help if you’re $100,000 in debt and working at Starbucks.
15. Traditionally many of us believe that students choose colleges for academic rankings in places like US news. Unfortunately 50% of girls and 40% of boys don’t believe the US news rankings or similar list.
16. In the words of W Edwards Deming one of the most important management gurus of the 20th century, you can’t find the truth because it’s very difficult to measure the most important things you need to know.
17. The good news is you can make a difference you actually have elements you can control. You may not be able to control the specific metrics but you are able to control that holistic feeling that the student has about choosing a college
18. I like to call it the je ne sais quoi of choosing a college. And while that’s the only French I know it means that special something about your school.
19. There will be clear winners and losers in the college market over the next 10 to 15 years. A recent article in the economist magazine projects that more than 50% of US colleges will likely go bankrupt. This is due to a combination of market forces. One is the overall cost of school. The second is a different way to deliver material to students.
20. What will make the difference between the schools that have classrooms filled with eager students and the schools that are empty and likely to go bankrupt is understanding that special something in the mind of the student.
21. So what can you do to improve your chances of being in the half of the colleges who succeed over the next 10 to 15 years?
22. The good news is you can control three of the top six reasons why a student chooses a college.
23. This chart shows on the 2 x 2 matrix how hard something is to do and how much ability you have to control it. Items like academic reputation or costs are clearly outside of your control as an admissions officer. Where is getting them to do a campus visit or campus social life or graduate placement are all items you can have direct impact in the mind of a perfect perspective student.
24. Before I make some suggestions let’s look at these two characters. You know them and they both probably work somewhere around your office. Those you might call the Christopher Robbins of the world tend to see the glass half-full what can be done what they can improve and those you may call the Eeyores of the world tend to see things are just going badly and they have no control at all. A big part of your ability to feel good about your job and feel the seats in your school with eager students is whether you see yourself as Christopher Robin or Eeyore.
25. Highlighting to prospective students that you have graduates who get good jobs is one of the top ways to influence their decision about your school. Christopher Robin would tell you that there are definitely students who graduated from your school with great jobs. The alternative view is that graduates took whatever job they could take you don’t have any really great people who are eager to talk to our prospective students. Both of these opinions maybe true but I suspect you can find great graduates and highlight those to your prospective students for almost any school.
26. Campus visits are also one of the major ways to influence a student to positively come to your college. But how did you get the student to come to your college? The key here is to convey to the student that your campus is an appealing place that they should want to visit in the first place. You can do this by using the media students preferred today. Specifically you can use videos online tied directly to the majors and the careers and fields of studies that your students are interested in. This talk is not to specifically sell you on using uwannadu, but this is exactly what we try to help students understand before they make a decision to make a campus visit. They should have a good feel of what a campus looks like and what the people on that campus are like. This is best done with candid, real and short clips of video.
27. Campus social reputation is a key element not just in coming to a school but is staying there. The best way for a student to understand whether or not he or she will fit at your campus is to see what real students are actually like. Not just your best rock star friendly positive student giving the campus tour but also students who were just there doing their regular thing.
28. Finally it’s very important to deliver the information to students not just by answering the question what they want to know but answering it how do they want to know? Students prefer content in video, graphics, and text. Students also are highly mobile then they use a laptop and then they like to get information and paper, but that is a distant third place. So all those brochures mailed to students all over the country who only have a vague interest in your campus may be a significant waste of money.
29. So in this brief 30 minute. What can you actually take away from the session? The answer I believe are in these four points. First, bee true to your college tell the story that accurately reflects what your school your graduates your students and your faculty are like. Second, work on what you can control. This means avoiding the major question of can you improve your mathematics department? Students consistently indicate that questions like the quality of your mathematics department are not as important as how they’ll feel at your school. Third, leverage the right tools and that means using the media that students of this age consume most readily. Fourth, most importantly, in your office, in your college be Christopher Robin. Nobody likes to be around someone who is negative and everybody likes to be around people who are positive.