Guest post from Bob Stewart, Former Senior Vice President, Enrollment Management, Jacksonville University.
It’s no secret right now that among everything else going on, colleges and universities are watching and re-evaluating their methods and strategies for gaining access to and connecting with the prospective student populations they need.
For decades, institutions have relied on a somewhat predictable ability to “acquire names” from a small handful of primary resources to play a major role in their enrollment marketing and communications processes. For many, it’s been both a significant contributor to their enrollment success and a standard practice for how things are always done.
But what happens when the ability to rely on those sources comes into question?
At Jacksonville University, well before a pandemic and before the current testing climate, we have looked at the resources we need to use to connect with prospective students in a more layered way. We saw the importance of mitigating risk by having a diversified portfolio of options that were at the same time reliable.
One of those reliable and consistent sources for Jacksonville University is CollegeXpress. To connect with the right prospective students and ultimately drive enrollment growth, JU has turned to CollegeXpress year after year to build a focused pipeline of high-quality leads. It’s helped us identify the right student population segments for us so we can connect with the millions of prospective students and families who use CollegeXpress as a trusted resource for college and scholarship information.
Over the past three years, CollegeXpress has delivered a powerful impact to JU’s inquiry and enrollment numbers, and it’s now one of our top first-source contributors of matriculants, both in terms of quantity and academic quality. Of our entering 2019 class of 657 students, CollegeXpress was the first source for 79 students—12% of the class. We’ve also seen that CollegeXpress is a consistently strong source of high-quality academic leads.
As other sources come into question more and more, and as we need to ensure JU is set up in the best ways possible for this coming year and years to come, I’m thankful to know we can continue to rely on CollegeXpress to play the critical role it has and we need.