Enhance First Year Onboarding and Success at Community Colleges
Despite efforts to improve customer service and create more welcoming environments, community colleges still require students to navigate complex processes and policies when it comes to admissions and onboarding. Some colleges report losing over half of their applicants before the first day of class as mazes of offices, forms, and new terms discourage students and delay their progress toward enrollment, and the pandemic only accentuated those issues.
Take a student-centered approach to onboarding
While administrators view onboarding as a linear, step-by-step process, the reality that prospects encounter on campus is often quite different. The result? Community colleges remain stuck in their institutional norms while attrition rates continue to rise. To streamline onboarding, administrators should take a student-centered approach when revamping their policies and procedures. Step one of this task is to audit each onboarding and enrollment step.
Encourage efficient progress throughout onboarding
All too often students visiting campus for the first time find themselves lost and with little assistance to guide them through each discrete onboarding step. To encourage efficient progress, ensure that physical environment, in-person support, and available resources are optimized with student needs in-mind.
Now students are completing many more onboarding steps virtually. Use the 12 best practices below to ensure students can successfully onboard both in-person and remotely.
Quick wins for student onboarding
In-person onboarding
-
External signage points to enrollment starting point
-
Students encouraged to complete multiple steps during time on campus
-
Internal offices well-marked and easy to find
-
Online information matches what students get in-person
-
Student-facing employees offer consistent advice
-
Follow-up communication propels students to next steps
Virtual onboarding
-
All webpages advertise calls-to-action to apply and request information
-
The application is quick and easy, requiring no passwords or account creation
-
Follow-up communications. provide an enrollment guide and nudges for next steps
-
Prospects receive a student ID and acceptance immediately after submitting an application
-
FAFSA guidance and costs are clearly accessible from the home page and program pages
-
The website speaks directly to student needs by advertising career and transfer opportunities
Revamp your advising function to meet students where they are
Without proper advising, all students risk making poor-fit choices that can derail their progress toward graduation. Yet for many prospective students advising is difficult to access.
Institutions often limit walk-in advising hours, opting to only allow students who have completed other onboarding steps, including placement testing, to access in-depth advising. Worse—when students do access advising, conversations are often quick, rudimentary, and do not take into account students’ life circumstance and career goals. To meet students where they are, make advising easily accessible. Then, ensure that advisors are centering conversations around student goals rather than institutional priorities.
Now that you've read the practice
Encourage optimal financial decision making
Community college leaders overwhelmingly identify financial aid as the single greatest pain point in the enrollment process for incoming students. Research confirms that finances are a top reason that students struggle during the intake process and a barrier to persistence, and this has only been exacerbated during the pandemic.
Much of this hinges on uninformed and unsupported financial decision making during the early enrollment process, as students fail to complete FAFSA, make poor assumptions about the size of their aid packages, overlook alternative sources of support, and accept aid without consideration of the repayment schedule. To reduce this critical barrier, leaders must help students make optimal financial aid decisions from the moment they step on campus.
Minimize first semester dropout
After onboarding, students still face a variety of barriers inside and outside of the college that can lead to poor performance or worse, dropout. It is imperative that colleges proactively connect students to the right supports should they be facing difficulties as well as re-engage those students who already intend to leave the institution. Use the practices that follow to ensure students stay enrolled in the first year and beyond.
This resource requires EAB partnership access to view.
Access the roadmap
Learn how you can get access to this resource as well as hands-on support from our experts through Strategic Advisory Services for Community Colleges.
Learn More