Decision Day: Top Factors That Sway College Applicants

0:00:12.4 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we examine new data from a team of EAB researchers who apply hardcore analytics to find out which institutional factors or attributes correlate most strongly with students actual application and enrollment behaviors. The answers may surprise you, so give these folks a listen and enjoy.

0:00:40.6 Michael Koppenheffer: Hello and welcome to office hours with EAB. I’m Michael Koppenheffer, Vice President for Marketing, analytics and AI Strategy for our Enroll360 group here at EAB. And today we’re going to tackle a subject that, that a lot of our listeners probably think they already know quite a bit about. And that is what motivates students to apply to certain colleges and what makes them choose one college over other ones that they have explored, and they’ve been accepted to when Decision Day arrives. When you examine the decision-making processes of teenagers and their anxious family members, one of the first things that you find is that the decisions they make are not always based on pure logic or rational self-interest. Anyone who has spent time with teenagers recently, would be reminded of this. And that’s why even though we are big believers in primary research things like surveys and focus groups, we don’t place all of our stock in the findings that we get there from. Because surveys can and do tell us a lot. But often we will find, because we have access to behavioral data, that survey answers don’t always match what people do in the real world.

0:02:09.5 MK: Which is why we complement some of our survey research with observational studies of large data sets. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to dig into some brand new research from a team here at EAB who decided to apply some hardcore analytics to figure out which institutional characteristics, which factor attribute correlate most strongly with application and enrollment behaviors by students. And it was a fascinating study. The answers might surprise you a little bit, but don’t take it from me because to help explore this topic, I have called in reinforcements. I’ve enlisted the help of someone who’s not only familiar with this research, but who’s also spent many years in the trenches working alongside leading teams of admissions experts. I am talking of course, about my friend and colleague, Madeleine Rhyneer. Madeleine, welcome.

0:03:13.2 Madeleine Rhyneer: Michael, thank you so much. And as you were just leading into my intro, I was thinking, yes, so many years. So hello to my enrollment friends who will listen to this podcast and hello to my new friends because we are very excited to dive into this research because we want to give you some actionable insights that will help you in what is a competitive and tough market. So thank you, Michael, for having me on the show today.

0:03:43.9 MK: I get to be here, so let’s dive in. Okay, Madeleine. So EAB recently published a new white paper. It’s called why students pick the schools they do and how to boost your odds of making the cut. You and I have both spent many hours reviewing it, both prepared republication and afterwards. But you’ve been also sharing key findings research with our college and university partners over the past couple weeks. Do you mind telling us just a little bit about the research, about the paper, and about what some of your conversations have led to?

0:04:23.3 MR: Perfect. Thanks, Michael. I’d be happy to. First of all, I want to be quite transparent and say that I am not the genius researcher nor part of the team that actually conducted the project. I am the person who is here to explain it to our friends, as I have been doing with many of our university friends around the country. And I’m also applying my enrollment leader mindset on the results so that they can be actionable for you. It’s like, so there’s this incredible body of work. What do I do with it? How is this applicable to me and my college or university? So to sort of follow up on some of what Michael was saying we have a lot of survey results at EAB where students tell us what they’re going to do. But as Michael noted, we also can observe their behavioral data about what they actually do do. And so the power of a very data driven research project like this is it sort of strips away some of the feelings and emotions around choosing a college. And because we see students vote with their feet, they apply where they apply, they get admitted and then they go where they.

0:05:30.1 MR: And the whole point of this research was to sort of correlate that to are there things that we can tie student behaviors to that then colleges and universities can become aware of and it can inform their strategy and their tactics moving forward. So I’m going to give you a quick description of that methodology so you can just, you can go through this and if you’re reading the inside paper, it’s going to explain this in much better detail than I will. But here’s the top line. Here’s what you need to know to move into the stuff that could get you moving forward. So we analyzed application and yield data for every four year college and university in the United States to create what we called an attractor score. And your attractor score is literally multiplying your application volume by yield rate. So app volume times yield rate equals your attractor score. So app volume is about brand awareness, and then yield rate is about whether or not you emerge favorably in this pantheon of schools where a student’s been admitted to become the place where they actually enroll. So once you have an attractor score, it’s like, but wait, there’s more.

0:06:39.4 MR: We then correlated each institution’s attractor score with more than 80 institutional characteristics. This is like size, location, enrollment, where they’re located in the… Whether small town or a rural area or a big city, what is the climate, the safety, the average age of people in that area. So more than 80 characteristics that are either yours as an institution or are in the place where you’re located to try and determine which of those characteristics, which of all those 80 are the ones that are actually most closely tied to that play the biggest role in attracting students. So you do this, you correlate them, and then you do a cluster analysis. See, I sound like a researcher, but I’m not. You do a cluster analysis where we actually grouped colleges and universities into segments of, like, institutions. And this cluster analysis identified nine distinct segments that we’re calling institutional Personas. Now, as you might imagine, more than 2,000 undergraduate colleges and universities in the country. Nine clusters. There’s a lot of grouping, and there are places who would look at their Persona and go, but wait, there are parts of that that, yes, are me, and then there are other parts that aren’t me.

0:07:55.9 MR: So remember, these are big buckets, but you’re trying to figure out where you fit in. And so the main goal of this research, again, was to better understand what it is about schools that either attract or may be detractors for students who are thinking about applying to them or thinking about enrolling. So, in a nutshell, that’s the survey work, the research.

0:08:18.0 MK: It sounds fascinating. I think our listeners might also be forgiven if they believe they already know the answer to the questions the research is asking, because we know, both from our experience and also from many surveys, including EAB surveys, that when you ask students what drew them to a particular institution, they say things like academic reputation, distance from home, and, of course, cost. So when we did that analysis of all of these institutional characteristics, doing all this clustering, did the research bear out what students say that they are interested in when we do surveys, or were there some surprises?

0:09:07.3 MR: So, Michael, I have to tell you, research of this kind, there’s always surprises for me. And it could just be me where I’m like, It’s a surprise. You know, there’s always something in here that I think, huh, well, that was unexpected. So there are a number of surprises. And let me just share with you the top attributes that are tied with student behavior, student enrollment. So one is number of majors. That’s probably not surprising. Two is campus safety. And we’re going to dig into that a little bit later, maybe. Three is the number of student organizations. Four is favorable weather, a good climate, however the student is defining. Good climate could be Montana, if you’re a skier. Affordability, and then immediately below that, HBCU status. And all of these are clustered pretty close together. So interestingly enough, affordability is there because we know everyone’s primary concern is cost and everyone’s very worried about loan debt and will I make enough money when I get out of college to pay my loans and successfully launch. But some of the things that in our heart, we believe are absolute drivers are actually less correlated than some of these factors that our research identified.

0:10:26.5 MR: So the institutional size, selectivity and student demographics, so like who goes there? Are all of those play a substantial role in an institution’s ability to attract students. But these were actually not attributes we measured against. They used them as a moderating factor. So all of these other things being equal then was your size, was your selectivity, and was the sort of relative composition of the student body if that’s first-generation students, Pell eligible students not how do those then impact these other attributes that were identified? And what I thought was really interesting was when you added the two together, it accounted for over 90% of student behaviors in terms of the colleges that they applied to and then where they actually enrolled. So that’s kind of a long way of saying you actually can sort of bank on this research. It’s not totally apocryphal or definitive, but you’ve got a pretty good line of sight based on some of these attributes. When you look at what your institutional Persona is, how you stack up versus other schools in that institutional Persona, and then your proximal competitors who may not be, who may be an entirely different Persona, to figure out what is it the students are actually going to be looking for when they make a decision.

0:11:46.7 MK: So you’re beginning to answer some questions that were forming in my mind as you describe this research because some of the attributes you talked about, some of these characteristics are things that a institution can control. Like theoretically, you can have some influence on the number of student organizations on your campus. Other things more difficult to control, like the weather. So you are where you are. You’re going to get the weather you get. And so what are our enrollment leaders supposed to do with this information? So understanding the relative importance of some of these different factors, how do you use that to make decisions? How do you use that to help you position yourself more effectively to potential students?

0:12:41.8 MR: Well, that is a really great question because obviously it’s like the research is great, but then what are you gonna do with it? How do you operationalize it? But let me dig into a couple of factors that people also who might be listening may be wondering about. So I know that we probably have listeners who either wonder about or have thoughts about, let’s say, the power of state, political leanings, conservative, liberal, middle of the road, or maybe something like Greek life. Or what NCAA division you’re in or are you in the NAIA? I mean, where things like that. And what’s interesting is that these actually in turned out to be much less correlated to student enrollment behaviors than our anecdotal sense would have us believe. And so again, you’re in the state that you’re in, whether it’s political or liberal. Now, Greek organizations, that may be a tradition on your campus, that may not. Intercollegiate Athletics Div, 1, 2 or 3.

0:13:38.2 MR: Again, those can either be impossible or very hard lifts to change. But some of these things in our head, we believe, oh, yes, those must be highly correlated with the decisions students make. They’re actually not. Other things are, and you can totally dig into it in the research. But size of the institution, much more correlated than some of these others, whether it’s public or private. And I think that because of this, what you’re really trying to figure out is I think students are driven and their family supporters in some measure, by practicality. There’s my wants and desires, but then I’m also kind of a practical shopper. And they know it’s a buyer’s market, not a seller’s market. So what do they really want to know? Do you have my major? Is your campus safe? The number two choice is campus life, desirable. However I’m defining desirable. And then do graduates get good jobs? So if you… Everything in some ways for me kind of ties back to a little bit of that pragmatism that people have because they’re not going to college in the same way that I did to learn a bunch of stuff and read a bunch of big books and write really hard papers. They’re going because they want to get preparation that will enable them to successfully launch. So when you get to the part about what should people actually do about this, I think that the true power of this research is figuring out where your institution sits relative to your true.

0:15:00.1 MR: And in my head, I’m thinking versus aspirational in parens because all of our boards, boards of regents, chancellors, trustees, they all have a competitor set. Usually your faculty members have a competitor set, and then there’s the real competitor set. And it’s okay to have three. I think it is. But this research is designed to tease out where you sit vis a vis your real competitors so that you can determine, do we have any competitive advantages? And then if we have any competitive less advantages, is it something we want to do about or is it something we can’t do anything about? And then you’re looking for schools like you. So and whether they’re in or out of your region, because schools that are further away from you, it will be harder to attract people, but they also will be attractive to students who would be attracted to you. So then once you know that, you can kind of figure out where your school fits at, fits in in the continuum of your overlap group. So where you’re leading and maybe where you’re not. And if there are places where you see a competitive disadvantage, you can make a decision about, is this a place where everybody has limited bets, limited financial capital, limited human capital? So is this a bet that would make sense for us? Like, here’s an example.

0:16:10.2 MR: The number of student organizations is tied to perceptions of student life. You know, is this going to be a great campus life for me? So maybe in your Persona, the average is 68 and you have 52. So are you going to get enough of an incremental lift by exhorting your students to create more student orgs and I think it’s an open question, is that a good fit for your mission? Is it a good fit for the students you’re serving? Is it a good fit for your value proposition? So it isn’t that you can identify, are there deficits? But then you get to decide, does this actually matter to me? Off campus study options are also very attractive in the attractor score. And so thinking about if we have fewer options than others, is that something we want to do something about? And so what I think is the power of the work is it allows you to determine where you are, assess your own strengths and opportunities in that group with your real competitors and your friends, and then People that are not like you. Because in almost every state, you’re competing against your state flagship, regardless, public, private big, regional, it doesn’t matter.

0:17:21.2 MR: Are these bets that you think your institution would like to make, are these things you’d want to talk about at a Cabinet meeting? So that’s where I would be encouraging people to do it. And it can be a great summer retreat opportunity. It could be at the Cabinet level. It could be for the recruitment team to really dig into this and think about it, because then you can start to create your value case based on this data.

0:17:46.3 MK: It sounds like, as you’re describing it, it’s almost more powerful for the questions that it makes you ask rather than for the answers it gives you, whether it’s a cabinet or a board or a counselor team. It’s about making it ask some of the questions about where you really have an advantage for prospective students and how you articulate that the best and how you build on that, which is something that feels like it could be really impactful at multiple levels, both strategic and very tactical. Something I was wondering, as you were describing the comparison sets, is I’m wondering if the research had anything to say about regional differences. So are students in New Jersey looking for something different than students in Montana, or is it really these factors seem to hold true irrespective of where the students are coming from or what sort of institutional comparison sets we’re talking about?

0:18:56.0 MR: That is a really interesting question. And strangely enough, regional differences do not really emerge in this research. And I was thinking about that really carefully as I was reading the insight paper again in preparation for our conversation today, and I was thinking about, okay, where does regional really fit in? And what it takes me back to is we have to remember every one of these students is a unique individual, and they have particular wants and needs and desires. And then there’s the reality of there’s what I want. And then there’s also the reality of, like, what’s really possible. Like, your family can’t afford for you to go far away, or you don’t want to go far away because you got so close to your family during COVID that going too far away feels… It feels uncomfortable for you.

0:19:41.2 MR: It doesn’t feel like a good fit. And so what I think about is that in this work, it’s much less about regional differences than it is about student demographic differences. Because, and I’m going to use kind of your example about, let’s say you’ve got a student in New Jersey, and you’ve got a student in Montana. Are they thinking about college the same way? Well, probably not, but it’s not because of where they live. It’s because of who they are and their family and their family upbringing and expectations about education and how that fits into their future. So if I’m up, let’s say I’m a Pell eligible student in both of those states. If I’m a Pell eligible student in New Jersey, cost is obviously going to be much on my mind, just like it is on everybody else’s. And I might really think, wow, I would love to be in a warmer climate, but the chances are pretty good that my family’s gonna think we actually can’t afford to send you to South Carolina or to Texas or to Florida, where the weather will be a bit warmer or a lot warmer, depending on the time of year. Because it doesn’t quite fit with where we are financially. So I think the thing to take away from this is to think about. So you’re gonna put your institution in a big bucket, but I would encourage you to think about students as unique individuals with wants and desires.

0:20:56.6 MR: And so as they using their own screen to determine, we have this whole list of what are likely drivers. You know, once you figure out where you fit in the Personas, you can see where you skew positive where you might be at a little bit less than some others. But you can also decide in the students that we’re actually reaching out to and the students we serve best, what are the things that really matter to them. And you can overlay this research with the students and families you know, you’re serving, and then what’s going to be, what are your best opportunities? And so I think the power there is figuring out where are we? And then where do we stand? Are there opportunities we might want to capitalize on? But then really, who are we serving and what’s going to matter most to them as they’re making their decision within this pantheon of attractors?

0:21:44.5 MK: Yeah, what a great reminder that students really are individuals. And students make their decisions one by one and have a diverse set of interests, needs, preferences, context, then you really have to recognize that as you’re thinking about crafting your value propositions for each of them. One last thing that I had caught as you were recapping some of the most powerful factors from the survey, and that was the idea of campus safety. You mentioned that in the analysis of Characteristics. Campus safety was one of the most important factors that seem to drive student behavior. Do we have any insights about what students mean by that or what they’re thinking in terms of safety? Because I’m guessing that it’s not just physical safety as they walk around on campus.

0:22:41.6 MR: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, Michael. So many colleges and universities over time have thought about campus safety because no one wants to send their son or daughter to a school and have to worry about them if they’re walking home from the library at midnight. Maybe their parents are praying they’re walking home from the library at midnight because that would mean that they were studying. But everyone wants to feel like this is going to be a safe physical space. But I think the definition of safety for students today, especially in the post COVID years, has really evolved way beyond physical safety. So let’s take that as table stakes. I think what people are really looking for is emotional and psychological safety. A place where they can truly be themselves, whoever they are. And we know from all kinds of research done by people outside of EAB how emotionally fragile students are in the post COVID years. And they were fragile before, but they’re now more fragile because of the disruption, sense of isolation, dislocation that they experienced in their sort of in their formative, intellectual and developmental lives. And so I think what. What students want to know is safety to me means if I need help, I know where to get it and I can get it, and it will be good help, the kind of help that I need, the kind of help that’s high empathy.

0:23:57.9 MR: And that it’s not just walking across the campus safely. And it could be that I’m around other people who have experienced some of the same senses of disruption and dislocation that I have. So I feel at home. For me, I’ve often thought about this in terms of, is this a school for someone like me? And I think that safety piece is now physical and psychological safety so that I can absolutely express who I am without fear that someone will go, well, what do you mean you were depressed? Or what do you mean you’re so anxious you can hardly write your paper that no one’s going to say that. What they’re going to say is, oh, my God, that sucks. Well, hey I had that last semester, and here’s where I went. And they were super helpful and I could talk to my professor about it. And I felt accepted for who I was. So I’m thinking that that’s a lot of campus safety. So parents probably have their spin on it, but I bet they’re really concerned about the emotional well being of their students as well.

0:24:51.8 MK: It’s like a much broader definition of safety than many people were thinking years ago. And my bet is that that concern for emotional and psychological safety is something that is going to be continue to be important for many years to come, given how we’ve seen COVID and its aftermath affect this generation of kids.

0:25:11.9 MR: I agree, you’re spot on.

0:25:16.4 MK: So I feel like I could talk about this for hours because this is just so fascinating. But I’m curious, as you’ve been talking to leaders on campus, as you’ve been sharing this research, what kind of changes, broadly speaking, might you expect to see from someone who really engages in these understanding their Personas, understanding their comparison set, thinking deeply about the drivers of student behavior? What kind of changes do you think that might spur?

0:25:49.8 MR: Yeah. Well, I think that that’s a really good question because Michael, you and I have talked about this. There have been marketing Personas in recruitment where you create Personas of a couple of sort of archetypes of students that you serve. Could be the local student, could be a commuter student, could be a first gen student, it could be an adult learner in various institutions. They can create some Personas because it allows the recruiters to actually connect with who those students are and the kinds of things that might be top of mind for them that they might want more information about and sometimes without even maybe necessarily knowing how to ask for it. And that said, with no judgment we just people often, they don’t even know what. They don’t even know what it is. They don’t know. And so they don’t know what to ask. But the whole point of creating Personas is how do you actually operationalize that? How do you make it work? And so as you and I have discussed, as we’ve thought about this research, okay, so it’s great. There are nine broad categories of institutional Personas. I figure out what my Persona is, what do I do with it? And so this sort of gets back to that thing that I mentioned earlier.

0:26:55.5 MR: I think this can be a great like retreat topic because it’s not like a one-hour conversation. I think it just takes longer. And so the groups that I’ve been speaking with, I’ve sort of advised. Here’s kind of an outline of how you might think about this and then adapt as is appropriate for your situation. So I think first of all, you have to figure out what your institutional Persona is. And so you look at all the descriptors and again, it’s not going to be a perfect fit. You might have to stuff your foot in the shoe, but you’re going to find the place where you fit the most. And so once you figure out what that Persona is, you want to actually take a look at all of these things that are part of that Persona because it’s in the Insight paper and kind of figure out where you stack out. So you’re evaluating your relative strengths and your opportunities vis a vis your competitors, the schools that are similar to yours, even if they’re not your direct competitor. So that’s like step one, who are we? And like, where do we fit? Second of all, you want to understand on a deeper level what is attractive or less attractive to students who are choosing schools in your category and schools that are similar to you, even if they’re not in the same category.

0:28:00.5 MR: Kind of what are the particular drivers? And again, it’s not perfect because as we’ve said, all students are individuals. But you can make a few assumptions. If you’re talking about a general strategy, then you want to know, do we have meaningful opportunities? Do we see an opportunity here that we think we might want to go after, or do we not? We just want to craft our messages better and be really clear about the places where we lead and just not worry so much about the places where we only have 52 student clubs and organizations. And then if you see something where you think you’d like to go to be really careful about. Do you believe this is the right, “opportunity” for you, given your mission, the students you serve, if you can only make a few bets in any year, is this a bet you would want to make? Because you’re going to have to keep going after that bet. It isn’t like a one-time deal. And then finally just decide what’s our plan of action, if any, and then, and then go after it. And it would be, let’s evaluate in six months, do we feel like this is making any difference? Let’s revisit it again in a year. So that’s the way that I would hope that people were thinking about using it as opposed to, well, this is super interesting. Let’s move on. So that’s what I would do.

0:29:09.2 MK: Well, thank you, Madeleine. You really made that sound like a very practical and useful document. Again, the white paper is entitled why Students Pick the Schools they do. And how to boost your odds. Making the cut. Per Battle’s recommendation, I recommend it to all of you as fodder for a discussion at a leadership meeting, a board meeting, an enrollment team meeting. And we’re also eager to talk to you all about it. So encourage you to reach out directly to Madeleine or myself if you have thoughts, questions, comments about the research. As Madeleine shared, neither of us were the primary authors of the research, and so if there’s something you don’t like about the methodology, it’s other people’s fault. However, if you want to talk about the implications and how you might actually make strategic or tactical use of some of these findings, we are eager to connect. So, Madeleine, thank you for your time today.

0:30:10.2 MR: Michael, thank you so much for having me. It’s actually this work is a little bit like an onion. Every time you look at it again, there’s another bit of a layer or sort of an opportunity that you see. And both Michael and I, we’re really excited about the potential, we think, but also to help our friends, because, as we all acknowledge, it’s a tough market, and we want everybody to have all the competitive advantages that they have and to be true to who they are and the students that they serve. So I’m very grateful to our research team who conducted this work and pulled together the paper, and so thankful to you, Michael, for giving me the chance to talk about it a little bit more today.

0:30:48.8 MK: Likewise, Madeleine. I’m looking forward to doing this again sometime very soon.