Redesign for Growth & Future Self-direction
It would have been cumbersome to unpack the general areas of refinement and re-design in my email. What you see below provides enough detail that we might talk. In considering these ideas, keep in mind that there are no methodological wheels to invent. Implementing a precision managed approach to growth and quality will produce defined outcomes for defined resources and efforts. The only variables of consequence are how well you are able to execute and limitations imposed by your market, and even these constraints can be determined and modified over time. A precision managed approach will allow you to project desired outcomes and thereafter work backwards to achieve them on time, on budget, and on quality.
Marketing & Lead Generation
Few independent colleges get Marketing & Lead Generation right. Those that do profit at the expense of those who don’t. Decisions such as whether to outsource to a third-party or self-manage are best if based on metrics not even gathered by most institutions. Marketing and lead generation shops manage by cost per lead and cost per start, the two worst possible management metrics whether obtaining leads directly or via a third party. Getting it right in Marketing & Lead Generation begins with aligning the institution’s empirically determined brand (not beliefs about one’s brand) with the institution’s vision, resources, passions, and future paths to sustainable growth. The alignment runs both directions. It also involves the correct allocation of resources to the infrastructure required to produce organic and paid leads. Then it gets detailed.
After we help you redesign your Marketing & Lead Generation function, you will manage it with well-defined roles and performance standards and by an algorithm of 8 to 10 critical metrics by which you will secure a least cost path to achieve the highest rates of growth and graduation consistent with the resources in other areas of your production line. Among the secondary benefits are reduced turnover and increased satisfaction among enrollment counselors due to improved lead quality.
Enrollment
With the passing of the build it and they will come era in independent college adult-centered programs, all eyes shifted to enrollment as the path to growth. For those who got it right, it was the right shift . . . in a way. We are now well into the second decade in which independent colleges with better programs and a stronger overall value proposition are losing ground to schools with superior enrollment operations. This troubles me even though I understand why. Most independent colleges gather and pay attention to the wrong enrollment metrics. They tend to manage to and celebrate the number of phone calls, applications, registrations, and/or starts. Tracking these metrics can be helpful in the right hands in very limited ways but having enrollment managers manage to them guarantees substandard enrollment performance. More important, it fails to optimize operations to enrolling high retaining students. Critical management metrics, such as relationship advancing conversations with prospective students and enrollment to break-even are neither tracked nor understood in most units. Often, the CRM system is not configured to track or report the most important metrics.
Our defined roles, business rules, and metrics-rich approach teaches your enrollment staff to initiate a long term relationship with each prospective student that will be carried forward by retention counselors and instructors. The purpose of these relationships is to determine if the school and program are the right fit for the student, that goals will be met, that problems and solutions thereto are identified, and that trust is earned by developing a personal success plan. This student-centered methodology shifts attention away from milestones lacking predictive validity (e.g. applications or registrations) and toward converging points of stakeholder success. In a typical setting, about 10 metrics and a family of business rules deliver performance that can be projected with precision.
Retention
Retention to completion is the sweet spot of convergence among all stakeholders in the enterprise of higher education. It is the only place I know where both the CFO and the student are equally delighted with the outcome. The current fad for improving retention uses historical and current performance data to calculate a risk coefficient for each student. Based on this coefficient, students are then segregated for the service they receive. As a statistician and measurement scientist, I can tell you that this approach does not work well, which is why you do not see sound data on predicative validity from the companies who sell such software. Even when a coefficient correctly predicts a drop, it carries no information as to when the drop will occur. Yet, knowing when is critical. Why? We have 26 years of data proving that drops often accelerate from zero to irreversibly critical in a period of days (less than 10 being typical). This means that the most sound approach to improving student persistence and success is to build a relationship with students such that they will reach out to you – their trusted friend – early in their time of need.
Schools that redesign this function along our precision managed principles increase their retention rates and their financial stability as they increase student success and satisfaction. They reorder needed student services to respond to student rather than institutional timing. They create lasting and individual relationships with their students. They focus on meaningful metrics derived from student actions and responses. The financial return on investment for a precision managed retention system is high but other returns are also gratifying. Everyone enjoys studying and working in a success oriented environment.
Data & Analytics
Higher education may have been late to the table but it no longer suffers from a potential lack of data or analytic tools. Data warehouses and data lakes are now commonplace in leading universities. The most common challenge now lies in transforming a sea (or lake) of data into useful intelligence by transforming the data into indices and derived indicators. The idea is to get useful information in the hands of the right decision makers at the right time. We will help you construct a decision-support system that everyone loves to use rather than looks at once and then ignores.
Content Development & Management
The best higher education content is based on the principles of modern learning, evaluation, and pedagogical sciences. This approach is becoming a differentiator in the marketplace. The most successful independent schools bring a strategic and data-driven approach to content development that produces new programs quickly enough to react to market shifts while delivering the authenticity and the ability to customize content for new consumers. Our support for content development ranges from providing a simple ID/SME development model including sample key role definitions, SME contracting and compensation agreements, and ID/SME ratios, all the way to developing the software templates for a complete Durable Objects (reusable/repurposable) Content Development and Management system that resides on your SQL server.
Instruction
Engaging, authentic instruction with frequent incremental feedback on performance accounts for the greatest proportion of the variance in student satisfaction and in most cases, retention. These generalizations are even more true in the online environment. Ignoring instruction quality by failing to certify, coach, and manage means the students you worked so hard to acquire could end up complainers and leavers rather than delighted graduates. We provide tools for coaching, managing, and tracking for success and retention.
Pricing & Financial Modeling
Pricing is another growing point of differentiation among schools and the pressure to reduce prices will increase in the next five years as some enrollment sources continue to decline. We will help you develop a robust financial model (one that goes far beyond incremental increases in budgets) that delivers higher revenue and margins even with reduced pricing. With an advanced model, you will be able to project the impact of changes in operations, pricing, and enrollment before committing to them.
