Enrollment Marketing for Higher Education

Cathy Donovan [00:00:00]

The college search process can feel overwhelming for young students. We ask teenagers to sift through thousands of options to find the one that will set them up for success.  No pressure, right? But what if there were a tool to ease this process, cut through the stress and pinpoint the ideal match? Well, there is.

Welcome to the Innovating Enrollment Success podcast. I’m Cathy Donovan, Agency Marketing Director at Paskill. And today we’re diving into how new tech is changing the college search. Joining us is Sam Bernstein, co-founder of Loper, an app that helps students discover their best educational path, a bit like Tinder for higher ed.

More than just a matchmaker, Loper offers a web portal for guidance counselors to support students’ interests and help schools focus marketing efforts on individuals. Sam, a Georgetown graduate, went from finance to education with a vision to simplify the college journey. Welcome, Sam.

Sam Bernstein:

Thanks, Cathy.  Thanks so much for having me and for the very kind intro.

Cathy Donovan:

Well, let’s start by having you give us just a quick overview of Loper, how it got started and why it’s important in today’s changing higher ed marketing landscape.

Sam Bernstein:

Yeah, so just the quick overview on Loper. We’re a free mobile app that really serves as a copilot for students navigating that transition from high school into higher education and ultimately, we hope as we grow as a company into their early career.

The difference for us really is that clean, mobile interface for students and a more accessible and interactive user experience. And I think that’s what comes to that question on why we started it. You mentioned in the intro I was before starting Loper working in finance and I can tell you after a couple of years working on a trading desk I learned a lot, worked with really smart people.

My passion is not trading stocks. And in a weird way, the pandemic was a nice chance for me to take a step back and connect with one of my closest friends from Georgetown who was working consulting at the time. And I think for all of the issues and all the challenges around higher education, one thing really rings true.

Still the number one way to increase your earnings potential. It’s the number one way to promote social mobility. And it’s just too hard for students. And I think that’s what we kept coming back to. I think the pandemic was certainly a time of change. I think those changes for higher ed were not confined to 2020 and have continued on until now.

But it just kept coming back to this is about serving students, knowing that that is the point of education, is to educate our students. And students don’t even know where to start to figure out where and how they want to be educated. And I think that gets to that point of why Loper is so important.

We just want to make this more accessible, more fun, and not leave search feeling like this ultimate black box for students of I can’t even wrap my head around or express what might be important to me, let alone actually feel really confident in this decision around something that’s truly an experiential good when we think about college and higher education.

And I think on the flip side, we started really with that, it started and remains with that really student-focused mission as a company. But we engage, as you mentioned, with many other stakeholders and certainly higher ed institutions themselves. I think where it keeps coming back to is harder and harder to know who your students are and what they care about.

It’s competitive right now in that landscape. And you need to pitch your value prop and find those students who want to hear it. And I think first-party data and dedicated marketing channel through mobile app where students are actually spending time coming back to and turning to again and again as they navigate this multi-year-long journey.

That’s what’s important for higher ed – so a lot of different pieces there. It comes back to us for the students, but we’ve been so excited to work with people across the landscape.

Cathy Donovan:

Great. We talked about several different audiences that Loper works with. What do you hear from your clients as to why they like the product?

Sam Bernstein:

Yeah, well, first I will give a big hats off to my co-founder who, as I mentioned, he has a background in consulting. I do like to tease him, that, you know, when you get a Bain consultant in the room who is hands on working with you, from start to finish. We get very often from our customers, Wow, you are the easiest vendor that we’ve ever had a chance to work with.

And I think we move fast. We want to take care of the lift. There’s not a lot of red tape in engaging with us. Just by nature of being a smaller company, sub ten employees, and I think our college partners really appreciate that.

And a great example is actually, we just released a web-based version of personality quizzes that we host on our app and sponsor for different schools, and we’ve been pitching colleges on from idea to implementation, and that includes a CRM integration this is going to take five days. We got some skepticism on that number. And now that we’ve, I think, onboarded four new partners in the past month and hit five days, it’s starting to become a little bit easier to say, well, if you still have questions, talk to blank school.

So that on the college, I’d really that ease of use and just recognizing there are a million things on their plate. We don’t want to be another, we want to be, again, the easiest partner that they have to work with. That’s been appreciated.

And I think what also applies to colleges, but as I start to talk more about students and especially counselors, it comes down to that ease of use and accessibility on the mobile app side that I mentioned in the first question, and we have a ton of data.

I think if you go on a lot of college search websites, if you want to go through, if you want to spend the time combing through government data, you can get lost, you can spend days going through all of these different stats, information, individual schools.

But we want to make sure that swiping on a phone app, setting reminders, getting that core content that really matters for you it’s just a couple clicks. It doesn’t feel like work, so much as having something presented in front of you, moment in time when you’re looking for it. And that’s where I think our students come back to us relative to other products is it just doesn’t feel like that big of a burden. Um, and it’s not just the, oh, it’s on my phone, I can take out my phone, but great if I want to find something or I want to spend 5-10 minutes doing a little research or my counselor assign it to students 5 10 minutes.

There isn’t this much pit in your stomach of oh my gosh, this 5 to 10 minutes could be 50 to 60 minutes to find what I actually want.

Cathy Donovan:

Just to follow up, you mentioned this personality test, can you talk through what that is and why that would be beneficial to colleges?

Sam Bernstein:

Yeah so the personality quiz we continue to play with these for the audience that is familiar with BuzzFeed style quizzes, if you ever have taken those four panel, a little bit more lighthearted quizzes, very much motivated from those and looking for another way. The core of the mobile experience is really built around swiping right and left on your interests.

So we’re capturing hundreds of data points around who students are and what they care about. That powers are matching algorithm, that powers are tailored content. To come back to those personality quizzes, we allow colleges to brand these quizzes around any specific experience they want. So I like to bring up Purdue’s Business School, the Daniel School of Business, their quizzes around what type of Boilermaker are you? Are you a Changemaker? Are you a Moneymaker?

And students can earn badges. And it’s about asking, they’re using it to say, hey, what aspects of our campus experience align with who you are? And some of those is by directly asking, you know, what a student is interested in. But sometimes just who are you, what’s important to you, what are your values and using that to inform what I’ll call a really mini matching experience that’s much more closed-ended.

Those quizzes, we have general quizzes that aren’t branded by a college, but within the college-specific content, it helps our partners better understand, in some ways, what communication flow to put a student down. But it also just gives them all these little granular insights for our partners who, especially further down their funnel, are able to engage more one-to-one with the student.

It’s not, okay, I know this student at a high level is interested in business and we’re going to give them all the different types of information. They can actually be much more targeted in, okay, how do I want to handle this conversation and nurture at this point, this student inquiry and get them to the point, if not of application, all the way up until enrollment.

Cathy Donovan:

So are you hearing back from students that they like the app and you know, how do you handle it? I guess evolve your product to keep being serviced for students.

Sam Bernstein:

I’d say my favorite stat to lead in with is we just think qualitative or quantitative, excuse me, 4.8 stars that we have on the app store. I think we’re four and a half, 4.6 stars in Google Play. So we’ve got to boost that back up a little bit. But top line numbers, thousands of reviews, students like the app.

And so that is something that we do really track and take seriously. That’s going to be the biggest indication that something is going wrong. We also maintain a student advisory board, which gives us access to a group of about 20 current high school, as well as there’s a few college underclassmen who are part of that who will walk through new features with them.

We’ll ask them on a consistent basis to review the app. Look for bugs, look for pain points, anything that confuses them, and that ties into not just how we’re hearing that students are enjoying the app, but also how do we make sure that we continue to improve the app and continue to serve students? You hear it in a lot of industries, in a lot of places, you just need to talk to your users, and it is no different for Loper.

It shocks me just how much we have a young team, I think it’s one of our differentiators. I’m the oldest team member and still pushing my late 20s here. We have a young team and the college has changed for us. I’ll sometimes catch myself and say, oh wow, I am, as a 17-year-old, of course, I don’t know what this means, or of course I think this question is raised in a certain way.

We’ll all totally miss it. And so, keeping that constant engagement with users is so important for us. And then I think it’s a place where counselors have also been incredibly helpful. And it’s especially as we start to branch into what I’ll call more content depth in certain areas. We’ve introduced some readiness challenges specifically around financial aid that I think there’s a big gap for just helping students understand key terms with FAFSA, better understand deadlines and inputs.

And making sure that we’re engaging with the experts who are working with students every day. That’s how I think we can get to better content depth or ensure accuracy as we pursue greater content depth. So counselors have been a great sounding board for us as well. And of course, they have great access to students. They have students coming in their office every single day, more students in many cases they can handle. So keeping those close counselor relationships have been very, very important.

Cathy Donovan:

So how about institutions? How do they benefit from the Loper app?

Sam Bernstein:

I think I glanced over this in one of my earlier answers, but there’s a couple of different ways.

One is that first-party data of students actually just expressing on their opt in first party data, saying, yep, I consent to share this, educational institutions, I consent this, I want to share this with you as a specific institution. We have a new contact, the school flow, we’re really, really excited. I think leverages AI in a very thoughtful way as well and better helping students frame that outreach.

And we have hand raisers on our app who are saying, I’m interested in your school. I want to hear out from you. I want to share all of these different aspects of who I am as a student so that you as an institution can better recruit me. So that, that plain and simple up front, we never preach quantity.

We’re always going to be high quality channel. Hopefully we reach quantity of some other lead generation providers out there as we grow. Our pitch is, hey, we have students who are really, really actively engaging and specifically with your school. Don’t focus on breath. Focus on that high quality engagement and that transitions into Loper is a marketing channel.

All of this data that we’re capturing on students, it helps us better target content from our college partners. So our college colleges aren’t paying to affect our matching algorithm. And I’ll pick on here, Spring Hill College down in Mobile, Alabama. It’s not like Spring Hill, uh, which is smaller Jesuit college, it’s not like they’re showing up as a match for every single student who says they’re interested in studying at a small school in the Southeast. That’s not what Spring Hill pays us to engage with, but for that segment of students whose interested in studying at a small school now at Southeast, maybe they swipe right to, and say that they’re interested in studying nursing, or that they’re interested in getting a master’s degree as well.

And especially if they’re looking at healthcare and they’re looking at getting an advanced degree, Spring Hill can run a campaign in the app around their free grad tuition, as well as their accelerated four year nursing degree. And it’s meeting students moment in time with that targeted segment who actually wants to hear that information.

That’s where I think Spring Hill really leveraged us as a channel. Sure, for those opt in students, they can engage off platform.  They’re actually able to reach students on this dedicated channel. It’s not like TikTok or Instagram where, you know, it could be viewed as a distraction, that type of paid content.

Students are coming onto our app to research colleges. So I think that’s where we really differ as a marketing channel relative to general digital marketing. And then the last piece I’ll add in here, which we’re continuing to grow on I know a couple of our partners are really excited is around market intelligence and market insights where we just have thousands of students downloading and using our app each week.

We want to leverage at a high level, hey, we see that students who are interested in these three or four characteristics are on average more likely to engage with your school, more likely to engage with your partner schools of students who are matching saving with your partner schools, here is their breakdown, here’s how it differs from you as an individual university. Getting that in live time from our current high school audience and one that actually skews a little bit younger relative to other search platforms in terms of our freshman and sophomore user base, really interesting because I know so much of the work colleges are left to do today is retroactive and are looking at data on their enrolled class of students or surveying students who did not attend their school.

That while very valuable, it still is in some cases, a couple years behind current trends when they’re actually trying to reach out to the upcoming class of schools, of students. Excuse me.

Cathy Donovan:

Good point. So bigger picture. How do you see the enrollment funnel changing? And is that a good thing?

Sam Bernstein:

It’s a very good question here. I think a good thing, a good thing will depend on who you ask, because is it a good thing in the sense of I think the funnel’s changing and becoming easier for schools to meet their needs? No, unfortunately. So, in that sense, I think if it’s for describing good things as what as higher education, what is marketers allow us to have a high degree of confidence in recruiting, not just students to fill seats, but students to shape a class we’re looking for.

I think a changing enrollment funnel will not necessarily check that box, but in terms of, I think I’ll try and put in a more optimistic spin on a changing enrollment funnel in that I think there is a positive in that I won’t spend as much time talking about, sure, there’s demographic cliff, sure, there’s a search cliff, sure, quote, unquote, nontraditional students who actually make up the majority of higher education takers are going to continue to be a more dominant force, where I think you have is holding aside some of those top line metrics.

I think I’ve been talking about it extensively over the last few years. I think you’re going to have an enrollment funnel that is a little bit more aware of what they want a little bit more, and we see a lot of data just on how career focused our students are, and that’s what I think is really good thing.

I think not just from your, again adult quote unquote nontraditional learners who are looking for micro credentials, really work-based learning. We’re seeing that from high school students, and I can’t tell you if it’s coming from parents or counselors or what sources, but you’re seeing students who know, like, help me understand how my education, whether that’s a four-year degree ties to my future job or within a four-year degree, or instead of a four-year degree, this certification or credentialing program show me that direct path to the workforce.

And I think, and the reason why I think that’s such a good thing is that more thoughtful audience is easier to recruit, because ideally, and this where an app like Loper comes in, if you have access to those preferences that are a little bit more fleshed out, a little bit more stated, you have an opportunity to actually respond to those needs versus what I think traditionally has been a little bit more of a volume game.

And hey, we know en masse that these are the couple aspects of our institution that stick out. These are maybe some high-level information around our core user and we’re going to leverage analytics. Think about, great, if we hit sort of X benchmarks throughout stages of our enrollment funnel, we should result in the class we’re looking for. Now, I think it’s just a little bit different in that okay, we can really try and get more one-to-one with students. I’m not going to say it’s going to be a bottoms up recruitment. I never think that it’s going to really flip from that traditional thought of a funnel.  I do think it’s really, really good for institutions that are data-driven. Institutions that really know their value offering and their core student and then those institutions that are looking for creative ways to get that data on student preferences. And I think Loper is just one channel. There’s a bunch of people working in the space doing really, really cool things, but more thoughtful students, I think, is a positive for marketers.

So there’s my admittedly long-winded spin on how fewer students and you know, more competition can actually be a good thing for marketers. I think it’s just going to be a thoughtful student base that really drives it.

Cathy Donovan:

Fantastic. Well, the name of this podcast and Paskill’s tagline is Innovating Enrollment Success. Do you have any thoughts of what’s innovative right now? Obviously what you’re doing is certainly innovative, but can you even see down the road as to even more innovations based on younger demographics and their preferences in the marketplace?

Sam Bernstein:

I think there’s a couple trends that trends may even be the wrong word. Here’s two areas that I think about a lot. One, I would say is more fleshed out right now. You’re seeing other people in space.  The second is more abstract, but I think is more fleshed out is like, how can we increase efficiency from our staff and actually make, enable staff at our institutions to be able to work smarter, not harder.

Their burnout is so high, staff turnover is high. It feels like we’ve been to more conferences than I can count over the past few years since starting Loper. It feels like there’s always at least one, probably three or four different presentations around staff retention, keeping staff happy. I think solutions, though, that really allow counselors spend their time doing what they’re best at, which is talking to students about their institution who I would say are actually really in that decision-making and evaluation process. Not just great, I want to talk to any student who will potentially swing by my table, whether or not they’re a good fit.

I think it’s, it’s going to be different technology solutions that help really focus counselors’ time. Eight hours for a 23-year-old graduate of a university to spend just talking to students who are interested, students, parents, families. You can get a lot of good done. So, I think any solutions that are focusing, how can I take everything else out of an admission counselor’s job and just focus there are really interesting to me.

Well, a lot of different pieces of machine learning, leveraging data within a college’s CRM that’s pre-existing, predictive enrollment models. Some cool stuff there. The second piece where it’s a bit more abstract for me is pricing transparency. And it is the number one piece that comes up, I’d say, regardless of stakeholder that we talk to is paying for college, understanding how much it’s going to cost.

And I think that there’s a potential for really, really what feels really out of the box right solutions right now. But tossing things out, which I want to be clear are not company ideas, are not things that I’m saying Loper is doing or Loper is trying to do, but the idea of, hey, we’ll lock in a price to a 15-year-old to a 16-year-old in your family.

We’ll actually show you what if we sat down and said, great, as a school, we know when you had a certain point in your enrollment funnel, we’re going to have a one-on-one meeting with the family and walk through exactly what your costs are going to be. Have a conversation about it. Maybe it’s going to be more of a negotiation with families.

I don’t know what that’s going to look like, but I think those pieces. Right, and I’d say this is where parents, especially I just think the parents I talked to in the way they’ve described their college search experience, whether it’s current high schoolers or current college students. The idea of a university actually going on their way to sit down and have a conversation around price and what a financial aid package looks like in a scholarship package.

I think that gesture alone would do wonders for families. I think there’s some cool tech that could fit in there, but I think it’s in some ways going to be a mentality shift where if that’s really the deciding issue. Something there and it could even just come from program offerings and really splitting out and saying, great, it’s almost like you pay to get this far.

You pay to get that far. I don’t know what it’s going to look like that. It’s why there’s a reason it’s more abstract for me.  I would be very, very excited to see a college or university take a swing on something really out of a box like that, market it well, it’s just such a, I understand it’s such a big risk calculation for a school, but I have a pretty high degree of confidence that it would be received extremely well at the very least in the market.

Cathy Donovan:

Very good. Before we close up, I’m curious about the origin of the name Loper. I notice it’s not your last name or your co-founder’s last name. So a little bit about what that means, where it came from.

Sam Bernstein:

Yes, well, I think I, uh, have to start with admitting that if you saw the list of 100 name ideas that I had, the other 99 were not so good. You would, you would probably be laughing at the things that were on that list. But where I think we struck, uh, or we feel that in some ways we struck gold with, with Loper is the idea of college being so stressful. Students not knowing where to start. Dogs, they have, and we have, you notice our dog mascot,  very intentional in that dogs have that relaxed job.

Dogs lope around.  We want to help students find their stride, go at their own pace, and really lope around this educational search process. And it’s not about freshmen, sophomores, all of high school, college, college, college. And we want to help students not fall in the trap of showing up first day of senior year and saying, oh my gosh, I haven’t even given a second of thought of where I want to go. So, helping students go at their own pace, trying to de-stress the process, that’s really our mission, what we wanted to capture with both our logo and mascot as well as the name itself and Loper.

Cathy Donovan:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Clearly any innovation that contributes to a more perfect match between students and colleges is a valuable tool, and it’s especially one that provides institutions with the data they need to more effectively personalize your messaging. To learn more about Sam, please see our show notes or follow him on LinkedIn. And if you’d like to discuss other ways Paskill could help you stay on the leading edge of marketing innovation, let’s connect. Thanks so much, Sam. I appreciate it.

Sam Bernstein:

Thanks for having me, Cathy.