Navigating Yield Season: Turning Admits into Enrollees

Cathy Donovan [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the Innovating Enrollment Success podcast. In this episode, we’ll be talking about that crucial time of yield season, and what recruiting strategies and marketing tactics are working best right now. I’m Cathy Donovan, Agency Marketing Director at Paskill. Today we’re joined by Brennan Nokelby, Assistant Director of Admissions at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Brennan is having success in building connections with students and families during the college selection process. There are about 2,000 small, private higher ed institutions in the U.S. so there are hundreds of admissions counselors who could benefit from what Brennan has to share with us today.

Also, joining us is Paskill’s Vice President of Consulting and Research Dave Black. Dave is very familiar with Hillsdale College and hundreds of other institutions where he has led admissions training workshops and consulted in enrollment marketing to improve not only enrollment but growing the right class for that campus.

Welcome, Brennan and Dave.

Dave Black:

Afternoon.

Brennan Nokelby:

Thanks for having me.

Cathy Donovan:

Great to have you both. Let’s get started. So just want to start off with, what’s that one thing about yield season that surprises you?

Dave Black:

I don’t know if this is a surprise anymore, but it’s interesting how different it is from year to year. It seems like each class has its own personality, nuances of how they interact with different schools, and the process.

While you have yield every spring, the group that you’re dealing with makes it very different and exciting, but challenging at the same time.

Cathy Donovan:

How about you, Brennan? Do you agree?

Brennan Nokelby:

Yeah, I mean, I would a hundred percent agree. This is my third year doing this kind of recruiting students and it’s really interesting, the crop of students that I have this year versus my first. There definitely is a change in personality and interests.

I work a lot with students one-on-one, and I think the yield season, it’s really interesting how I’ll talk to a student in September and maybe they’re not as interested in a place like Hillsdale or they’re very interested. And then how that shifts over time based on what happens senior year for a student.

It doesn’t seem like a lot of time to us, but in high school, the difference fall semester and the spring semester can be a big one. So that shift is always very surprising.

Cathy Donovan:

Good to know. So Brennan, let’s talk about some of the challenges you’re facing in converting admits this year.

Brennan Nokelby:

Yeah, I think we have a few. The main one that I think pretty consistently comes up across the board is finances. How do students make college work for them and their families? I think there’s a big concern of if even college itself is worth the cost rather than this college versus that college.

I think people want to graduate with as little debt as possible. Totally understandable. So a lot of my conversations in the spring have to do with how can I make Hillsdale more affordable for a student? How can I work with them and their families? I think another challenge during the yield season is for us at least, competition with other top institutions, places that are recruiting students, bringing them onto campus for admitted students events, or, other admissions counselors trying to court them.

And, you know, we definitely have some good competition. So I love the competition, but losing a student to another school is always a heartbreak. Then I think maybe a misunderstanding of Hillsdale or kind of having to correct presuppositions that students have about a liberal arts college or a small college or a private college.

So those are the three things that immediately come to mind when I think about the challenges that admissions counselors, me and my team have faced this fall or spring.

Cathy Donovan:

Understood. How about, Dave, from a marketing perspective, what trends are making yield more difficult, especially for private institutions?

Dave Black:

Well, I think building off of what Brennan said that the sense of competition, you know, we know that students on average are applying to more than six colleges. And you always hear that horror story of the student who applied to 20-plus colleges or something like that. And what we’ve got is a lot more applications out there, but we don’t really have a lot more students.

And we’ve got a lot of institutions that, of course, are trying to build their enrollments. So it’s just like Hillsdale and hundreds and hundreds of others. So what we’ve got is a whole bunch of noise in the marketplace from the student’s perspective. In the sense that they’ve got a whole bunch of people chasing them, sharing messages with them, trying to get their ear, trying to build a relationship with the family and like that.

So I think that level of competition really makes it challenging for the colleges and for the individual counselors. To kind of break through all that noise, to really have that heartfelt, meaningful, but informed decision about cost so that you’re not just working off the website, but how do you, with all that other activity going on, how do the counselors find that opportunity to have that conversation?

Cause the website, other resources are great sources of information. They’re very seldom specific to an individual. That’s where the decision is being made. So I think that level of competition really casts a very dark and long shadow on all the things that they’re trying to do with their yield, whether it be around cost, would it be programmatic, campus life, whatever it would be. I think competition is the biggest factor in this.

Cathy Donovan:

Dave, I heard you mention that the website may not be personalized to that individual student. So Brennan, how are you personalizing outreach to admitted students, and what seems to be working?

Brennan Nokelby:

Yeah, I think I was, as I was preparing for this and kind of thinking through these, uh, these potential questions, I was thinking about our processes.

We bring students from prospective students to admitted students deposited, and then finally deposited students. And, you know, our application process is unique in a way because we offer an interview as a part of that process. And it’s recommended, not required, but with how competitive we’ve become in the last several years, it’s essentially required to get in.

So, you know, for me personally, I’ve done 150 interviews a year. And you really get to know the students in that interview. You learn their story, what they love, why they want to go to Hillsdale. Really, it’s a great way even before the student has finished their application to build a relationship with them.

And so I think that’s a huge advantage for me and my colleagues as we talk to students in the spring. Because, you know, I remember Hannah and I remember where she goes to school and I remember that she runs track and that she’s looking at these other places. And so the fact that we remember those things and build a relationship with a student even before they’ve submitted an application, I think is great for us.

I think when we admit a student, we really want them to know, like through, you know, the classic means, phone calls, emails, texts, that if we admit you, we want you to come. And so working with a student, oftentimes, a lot of my phone calls with students are, Hey, I like you as a human being. I think you’d succeed here. How can I make Hillsdale possible for you? Like, let’s talk through financial aid. Let’s talk through your concerns. Let’s see where you’re coming from with you, with your family background and distance and things like that. So we also try to be very comprehensive in our emails to students.

I think our email stream, we try to cover the student life, the academics, the faculty career placement, all those things that students might be thinking about. I think that we do a really good job of covering our bases there.

Cathy Donovan:

Excellent. Dave, how about marketing? How can marketing, support these efforts with personalized strategies?

Dave Black:

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, the topics that he touched on in the sense of how we connect with the students. And so the marketing is not always is as one-on-one as we would like. That’s the recruiting part. But you know, there’s some things that we’re doing, with some schools. For example, accepted student portals.

That is a level of personalization, customization that you can see on the web. So it’s that bridge between the conversations that they would have with the admissions counselors, the admissions team, and the website. So, you know, the admitted student portals that are out there can pull in very specific information and make it much more personalized.

What it doesn’t do though is investigate who that student is. It doesn’t get at the fit issues that he was just talking about, distance from home, family background and like that it’s a nice bridge, but it doesn’t solve that problem the way that the admissions counselor can.

You know, we’ve got to support our events better. Most all schools have some sort of accepted student day. And we spend a lot of time working on that particular event, which you need to, I mean, it’s got to be special. It’s gotta shine. When they get in the car driving away, we want them saying, you know, it’s gotta be Hillsdale, all the way. But what we sometimes forget is the marketing that leads up to that event and what is the post-event marketing.

So we’ve got to really look at how can marketing support the student success on campus and make the counselor a little bit more effective. So it’s not just looking at the accepted student event, but how do we get them there and what do we do with the follow-up?

They invested a lot of time and energy. The college invested a lot of time and energy for that event. So what’s that follow up look like? So I think there’s some really some key things that we can do. One thing that we haven’t talked a little bit about at all though is the value of some segmentation. In our marketing to support these events, making sure that we’re messaging these audiences.

Brennan had mentioned their comms flow. They’re going out, you know, the ability to not just have a depth of story, which, Hillsdale does. That was part of our project, just with them last month was looking at that. But, you know, how can we adjust those messages to the ear and the interest. Of those students and families with those conflicts. So I think the segmentation can really set all these other components up to be a little bit more successful. It’s an ROI thing.

Cathy Donovan:

We talked about objections, like cost. You know, I’m wondering if we should spend a little bit of time talking about other top concerns or objections you’re hearing from students and families right now? Obviously, to both of your points about every year is different, the personalities of the class coming in, the world that they live in has changed. Just want to examine a little bit closer the objections this year and how a recruiter could do best to navigate or talk through those concerns.

Brennan Nokelby:

I think there are definitely a few that we’ve tackled this year as a team that we’ve talked about. I think for me, I recruit the upper Midwest, so states that are close to Hillsdale and, closer than like Arizona or California and some of our recruiters that are based in states. Far away from Hillside distance has been a big factor.

At least in those conversations we have students from all 50 states, 14 different countries. And I think that especially when a student’s thinking of leaving home for the first time, the idea of being 14 hours away by car or five or six hours away by plane is a bit daunting at first.

And so I think for us, another thing that comes up, and I touched on this earlier, the misunderstandings or presuppositions of a liberal arts college. The cost benefit of going to college at all. You know, can this help me get a job in the future?

What, how does studying the liberal arts get me into medical school? And lucky for a place like Hillsdale, those are really easy questions to answer. But I think that they’re definitely at the forefront of a student’s mind of I’m deciding where I go to college.

What in the world’s gonna happen after that? Those, and that again and again with the funding. I think those are the main three things that I see often. Things that students are pondering as they’re thinking about different options.

Cathy Donovan:

Dave, can you talk us through any marketing strategies for addressing some barriers for students and families?

Dave Black:

You know, just want to build off of one other point from Brennan’s comment and overcoming these objections that are not always just cost-based. I mean, that’s the big one. We all know that’s out there. But, you know, in our Yield Boot Camp Workshop, which we’ve done Hillsdale and hundreds of other colleges, I think one of the things that I try to remind the staff is just to have the courage to go in and have that conversation about objections.

I mean, many of us, we’d rather talk about all the things that they love about Hillsdale ABC State or whatever it’s gonna be. Where the real recruiting work begins is when we’re having that conversation about where the things aren’t in alignment. Having the courage, when we hear a hesitation to say, what do you mean by that?

I’m not sure what that, you know, how you’re interpreting that and then exploring that idea with them, knowing that we can’t overcome all these real objections. I mean, they, if they don’t want to go far away to home, they live in Arizona, we can’t move where Hillsdale is we, you know, we can’t.

If we know what the concern is, if we know what the objection is now, we can either, you know, kind of nullify it or begin to focus more on the things that are more important perhaps to that family and raise that value equation because we’re focusing on things that are important to the student, to that family.

In that same line of thinking, helping a student really define what fit is, we kind of use fit as a very generic term. But what does fit mean to that student? Is it that distance from home? Is it is an academic fit, a social fit, a cultural fit, an athletic fit? There’s a whole bunch of different things and they say, I don’t know if I’m gonna fit in at, at this particular college.

And that would be something we hear at community college, private, public, four-year the whole spectrum, that idea of fit. So I think the ability to help students to get a better sense of fit is, is a key agenda item.

If you’re not talking about the counselor, I think it seems like a virtual tour. So you’ve got that student that’s a little bit more distant, it doesn’t give the same sense of culture and personality of the campus, but it’s a step in that direction. I mentioned a few minutes ago about the accepted student portals. That is another way for the students to start to see fit academically, socially, other components.

I think there’s an opportunity to try and create more conversations with other campus partners, and that could be an academic. That could be somebody from res life, from student life. There’s a lot of things that we can do, but what we’ve got to do is figure out how do we get them connected.

Is that through marketing? Is that through social media? Is it through a text, is something as simple as sending out a very clean, simple email. You know, I think there’s a number of ways that we can get the students connected with us. And, Brennan does remember him saying this, I’m sure early in the beginning, but there’s no one step. And that’s what I think is kind of the fun of this. It’s what is that formula? Is it this combination of text and social media and phone calls and outreach to the parent as well as to the student? There’s no one I, you know, right. We wish we could send ’em to a URL that says, these are the four steps and how much time you have to put into each one.

We know that doesn’t exist. It’s so much dictated by the counselor and their experience and their creativity and the student and their level of engagement and participation in the process. So it’s, uh, yeah, it doesn’t get easier. We talk about the value equation, right? If we could just give him the talk with us, we could deliver the value equation.

The value equation for me is gonna be different than for you, Cathy. So while we have institutional value equations that support our mission and like that, the real value equation is between the student and the institution, they just gotta give us a chance to share it.

Cathy Donovan:

Understood. So, maybe you agree or disagree, but are fit and belonging the same thing? My next question is about yield, is about making students feel like they belong and what are the best ways to create that sense of belonging, maybe even before they come to campus. And I know fit is definitely about do they have all the offerings and you know, the cost.

It seems almost more a little bit transactional where belonging is like, I feel safe here. You know, maybe there’s other things. So Brennan, if you wanted to talk through that, I’m talking as a parent as well. I have a high school junior and what I think feels like a fit for my daughter is way different than what registers as belonging for her.

Brennan Nokelby:

Yeah, I think, it’s really interesting that you bring that up. We do these, you know, many of our counselors in April and March, we do these admitted student events that Dave has talked about. And a lot of these, they can really vary based on the counselor. They vary based on the state. They vary based on maybe what the counselor thinks the student population in that city or that area they might be interested in.

So counselors have done things such as more formal dinners where the families are invited along with the students, and so the parents get to know, Hey, what other parents are thinking about sending their kids to Hillsdale and what other kids are thinking about coming and what are they interested in.

I’ve done these admitted student events where it’s just the students and we go and we get ice cream or we play Topgolf or we go to a bowling alley and I think that’s a great way for the students to get to know one another because you know, they’re not taking their parents with them to college. And they’re kind of like, all right, who are these other people that I might be potentially living with talking in class with, playing intramural sports with?

And I think that those have been an excellent way for students to get an idea of belonging. Going back to the kind of relationship that I have with admitted students, I can be the point of connection between two students when they come to an admitted student event. It’s like, Hey Mark, you’d be a great friend with Levi.

Like, you guys should meet each other. And it’s then that is an effective strategy for figuring out if students belong. I think you talked about faculty engagement earlier. Our faculty are excellent and I took many of them when I was a student at Hillsdale and, they’re always willing to have a phone conversation, a Zoom call, an email chain with a student interested in a specific department.

Having very candid conversations of how this department at Hillsdale may be different from the exact same department at another institution. And so a lot of what you’re doing in college is being in the classroom. And so getting to know professors on a one-on-one level, even before you come onto campus, is a great way to see, do I have this sense of belonging even with this individual professor?

And then we also have, something that Dave mentioned, the admitted student visits on campus. Having a chance to have this special track where when you come to campus, you get to select the classes that you get to go to, and talk to your counselor that you interviewed with. We even have an overnight option where students can spend the night in the dorm.

Again living in a dorm is unlike anything you’ve ever done, especially coming out of high school. And so getting a taste of that, like this student, this school has a really good tagline and they seem to be great academically, but what in the world do people do for fun? And just interacting with students who don’t even work with admissions and they’re just hanging out in the lobby and they’re like, Hey, where are you from?

What are you doing? Like, come to Hillsdale. I think that that is a great way for students to get this sense of belonging. So those are a couple things that immediately come to mind when I think about the fit versus belonging question.

Cathy Donovan:

Dave, anything to add to that conversation on belonging through the lens of marketing?

Dave Black:

You know, it’s interesting. He’s, in a few words, described what we’ve all been talking about for a long time, and I think one of the few things that’s not changed in the last couple decades actually is the emotional component of a college selection. We can dot the I’s and cross the T’s. We can have amazing comms flows and websites.

We can have students who are highly engaged and love our majors and see the outcomes and the grad school admittance rates and employment and all that. But, what hasn’t changed is when they come on campus and meet the students and meet the staff. That sense of belonging, like they kind of get me here. I feel comfortable. That’s hard to do on a plus/minus list.

I’m not against that. All four of my daughters, we went through that exercise, for each school. But there’s something about that connectivity that people have on campus, that is just so vital. What we’re trying to figure out in marketing is how can we tell that story in the background that kind of supports the counseling staff.

Supports the rest of the campus that is engaging enough, is relevant enough to them that they’re willing to come over and try us on for size that they’re willing to meet with an admissions counselor. By the way, there’s a couple of reasons Hillsdale is very successful. Brennan would be an example of it.

They have a very advanced, very sophisticated recruiting process and a great marketing program. They are not a huge school. All due respect. They’re just, they’re not Michigan State, right? They’re not bringing in an incoming class of three, four, 5,000. So some of the techniques that they use work very well for them, but for a large, private, large public, we’d have to scale that.

But the methodology, the thought process is the same. You’re not trying to recruit all 8,000 students coming into the institution. Instead, you are looking at segments, important components that you’re trying to do exactly what he’s describing, but at a smaller scale. But I think the idea of having the marketing in tune, in supporting what they’re doing in admissions is really a big part of this.

When I say marketing, the broad spectrum website, emails, socials, all of that are somewhat strategically aligned to support events and outreach. Brennan was talking about meeting with students. That doesn’t just happen because he sent one email out. There’s a whole system behind arranging that student, meeting them over in Lansing and showing up at Topgolf.

Right, so there’s a lot of energy in the way of marketing, but when you are really strategic about it versus just doing things, I think you get better results.

Cathy Donovan:

So this seems like a tough segue, but from belonging and emotional connection is data, but it’s important part of the conversation. So Dave, what data should institutions be tracking in real-time to keep those yield strategies?

Dave Black:

Here’s an interesting conversation. Data. We’re looking at all touch points in the journey. We’re tracking it. We’ve got very sophisticated CRMs out there that allow us to track everything from initial contacts, from digital medias and lead gen, through text rates, email rates, contacts by staff, and like that.

But you know, what we are finding is that things are changing year to year. So we are having simply put a little struggle modeling from one year to the next because there’ve been so many variations. So we had Covid a couple years, what five years ago. We had this financial aid snafu. I mean, all our modeling is kind of up and down because of environmental circumstances, but if we don’t track the basic stuff such as level of engagement, bring that into the CRM.

Also bring in your other KPIs such as enrollments, visits, things that are not tracked digitally through, say your CRM. Like what Google Analytics what are we bringing off of our website? So let’s say that we put out an email campaign around a yield. You know, are they going to the page? Are they hitting that link? Are they spending time on that page? If they hit that page and they jump off a second later, we should recognize the information they were looking for on that page was not there. So we’re tracking all these different touch points and bringing it in and there’s no one single touch point.

It’s how all that stuff is brought together and, looked at. So I’m not trying to dodge a question and give you five things, Cathy, I’m saying you got to track it all. But it can’t just be the basic metrics of email opens and, how many impressions they had oon an ad that was dropped on Insta or something like that.

It really is trying to figure out what can we do with the information that’s available to us. But I think the most important ones are, are these activities moving the needle that counts and that is enrollment, right? We know there’s a trail that backs up on that. But, if you’ve got a digital campaign that has a lot of great impressions, but we’re not generating more visits to campus from that particular campaign. You know, impressions don’t mean anything. It’s really the bottom line.

So I think one of the challenges that schools have is just getting started on that. Now, again, Hillsdale is an exception to this. They have a great data collection, a good CRM, but I think a lot of schools just have to move beyond where they are right now and just start doing it now so that they can build that model out.

One year worth of data is not going to help them build that model. So we’ve really just got to start somewhere and start building on that.

Cathy Donovan:

So we’re late in March and it’s getting close to decision time. I’m curious from Brennan, what are those last-minute strategies that you think really help make that student and the family say yes to your institution?

Brennan Nokelby:

There are a couple of things, but I think probably the most effective in my experience as an admissions counselor is getting that student on the phone one last time, at the beginning of March. I think one of the best things about being on the admissions team at Hillsdale is that all of us are alumni.

We were all students at Hillsdale at one point. We all graduated and we all loved this institution enough to come back and advocate for it and help build this class. And so having that, and I think, again, Dave alluded to this earlier, but the honest conversation with the student of, Hey, what are your final concerns?

I think that you would belong here for XYZ reason because I know you.  Because I’ve gotten to know you.  I’ve met your little brother. I’ve met your mom and dad and, those can be tough conversations on the phone to have with a high school student, but I think that being brutally honest about why you want the student and, and how much you want to help them is excellent.

I had a situation last year where I had a young woman who I thought would be a great fit for a place like Hillsdale, and she ended up choosing another institution in the middle of March. She asked me to withdraw our application, all of that stuff. And, this was after one of those conversations and she then reached out to me a couple weeks later and she said, oh, Brennan, you know, actually after our conversation, I thought that I was for sure going to go to this place. And then I just kept the things that you said were just in my ear and I actually want to come to Hillsdale and want to see if I can flip that around.

And so I think as counselors we see that quite a bit as it comes to be crunch time. It’s in a lot of ways like athletic recruiting season and college football or something like that. It’s a lot of fun. And so I think it’s where a lot of us really enjoy our job.

Cathy Donovan:

So we’re wrapping up here. I’m just looking for both of you to give that one piece of advice to enrollment teams on navigating yield season. Dave, you want to get us started?

Dave Black:

Yeah, Brennan just made it so easy for me to come to the summation and it’s basically, know your student. If you know the student you’ve got a chance of recruiting them.

It’s not how much they know about your college, it’s how much you know about them. That’s the separator. So, the challenge then is really how do you build those connections? And it’s not one effort. It’s not one phone call, it’s not one email. It’s not thousands of emails, but it is a mix of everything.

But if I had to say there was one thing it’s if you know your student, you can have a chance to recruit them. But let’s be fair, there are a lot of families that go, because, they go to, I’ll use Michigan. They go to Michigan State, they go to University of Michigan, the block M because that’s where my family goes.

We’ve been Michigan fans our whole life. So honestly, Brennan could know a student inside and out know not just the brother’s name, but the brother’s fish’s name, right? And that’s not going to change that decision because there’s just a family legacy. That’s what it is. We’ve never gotten those students, and you’re not going to get those students going forward.

It’s all the other ones though, right? Those that are on the fence. When you have that conversation and you put their interest first, you’re going to win a whole bunch of those conversations. But to be fair there are people who want to go to that school and they’ll have great experiences. They’ll have great experiences there.

Brennan Nokelby:

Yeah, I could not agree more with what you said. I had that as one of my notes for the answer to this question. I also think it’s really important that students know who their counselors are, right? Not only does the counselor know their student, but that relationship kind of goes both ways.

I think a big thing for me is I want to inform, as much as I want to sell about Hillsdale. I want students, I don’t want a deposit for a deposit’s sake.  I want the right fit for a student to deposit. And it if at the end of the day that student decides, Hey, my family, they’re a Michigan family, I’m going go to the big house and root for them. That’s awesome. I think you’ll do great there.

And I think that for us and for our team and what I would advise for other teams is trying to pursue the students that are the right fit to deposit, not just deposits for the sake of themselves. I think that’s part of the reason why our freshman retention rate is as good as it is, our office does a great job of identifying the right students and then students know what they get at a place like Hillsdale. So that’s what I would recommend to other teams.

Cathy Donovan:

Awesome. Well, thanks so much to both of you for joining me today.

Brennan Nokelby:
So much fun.

Dave Black:

It was fun. Thank you, Cathy.

Brennan Nokelby:
Thanks, Cathy.

Cathy Donovan:

You’re welcome. If you’d like to connect with Brennan or Dave, please see our show notes or find them on social. If you’d like to learn more about Paskill’s admissions workshops or how our enrollment marketing can help your team problem solve please reach out to us.

At Paskill, we’re dedicated to helping colleges and universities find new ways to build better connections with prospects and families and support all students on their higher ed journeys.