College Board Recruitment & Admissions Solutions Help Saint Joseph’s
University Expand Visibility and Achieve Enrollment Goals While
Slashing Travel Costs by 50%
“College Board recruitment tools help us proactively create changes that support our growth as an institution and allow us to reach academic and fiscal goals. These tools have delivered unbelievable results in a very short period of time.”
-Sundar Kumarasamy, Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management, Saint Joseph’s University Saint Joseph’s University
experienced intense
competition for students due to the large number of colleges and universities in the
Philadelphia area. Faced with discouragingly low freshman enrollment numbers and seeking to expand its visibility beyond the region, as well as attract qualified minority students, the university established an Office of Enrollment Management. Tasked with making strategic
changes in market positioning and recruitment, the new department turned to the College Board’s recruitment services and tools – Student Search Service, Enrollment Planning Service and Descriptor PLUS.
These tools have enabled Saint Joseph’s to cost-effectively target prospective students across the nation, and to analyze the university’s appeal – and that of the competition – to prospects in a given market. These tools have not only enabled Saint Joseph’s to expand its geographic reach and
increase application quantity and quality, but also to cut travel-related costs by $50,000 per year.
Solutions Deployed: Student Search Service® Enrollment Planning Service® Descriptor PLUS™
Solution Summary • Institution
Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA
• Challenges
o Raise quantity and quality of applicants
o Extend reach beyond local market
o Reduce costs and optimize resources
• Benefits
o Significant increases in enrollment numbers and student quality
o Ability to identify and target minorities and other groups o $50,000 reduction in travel
costs per year
o Progress toward institutional goals of greater prestige and renown
The University
One of Pennsylvania's eight most selective colleges and universities, Saint Joseph's is among the most highly regarded of the nation's 28 Jesuit institutions. Saint Joseph's is one of only 270 schools in the country distinguished by a Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most prestigious
national honor society, listed among the top 10 regional universities in the Northeast by U.S. News, included in the Princeton Review's Best Northeastern Colleges, and ranked “Very Competitive” in Barron's Profiles of American Colleges. Saint Joseph’s offers a strong liberal arts curriculum including 40 undergraduate majors, 20 study abroad programs, 52 areas of graduate study and a doctoral program in educational leadership. The university has an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 4,000 students, enabling a student/faculty ratio of 15:1.
The Challenge
As a regional institution, Saint Joseph’s faced strong competition for students from the more than 50 colleges and universities in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. In spite of spending more than $100,000 a year to visit high schools, the university was struggling to recruit and enroll the desired number and quality of students. In the mid-1990s, Saint Joseph’s decided it was time to make a change.
“We received some unpleasant results in the 1992-93 academic year – a high discount rate and high acceptance rate but low freshman enrollment,” explains Sundar Kumarasamy, Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management. “We knew that strategic changes in our marketing, positioning and recruitment approach were needed. The university created an Office of Enrollment Management comprising 10 professional admissions staff and five coordinators. This new department sought technology solutions that could help achieve its goals for quality, number and diversity of students.” Specifically, Saint Joseph’s wanted to expand its applicant pool by reaching out to prospects located outside the region; raise the school’s prestige by attracting high-quality applicants and improving selectivity; increase the number of minority and economically disadvantaged applicants to support its Jesuit principles; and achieve these objectives within a limited budget.
“Our complex and sometimes conflicting enrollment goals could not be achieved by doing more of the same or just expanding the prospect funnel arbitrarily. We needed data-driven market
positioning tools to identify a pool of new target prospects, and a data source to reach out to those prospects with personalized messages,” said Kumarasamy.
The Solution
To facilitate its enrollment management function, Saint Joseph’s chose services from the College Board, including Student Search Service (SSS®
), Enrollment Planning Service (EPS®
) and Descriptor PLUS. SSS is an online service that offers comprehensive, customized mailing lists and student data collected from voluntary questionnaires that students complete in conjunction with participation in College Board examinations. To use this service, Saint Joseph’s staff members simply go to the Web and create standing orders based on a wide choice of criteria. These SSS lists will process
automatically when new data matching its criteria is received. All orders are quickly fulfilled and conveniently and delivered over the Internet. Best of all, SSS allows for multiple orders based on
various criteria helping Saint Joseph’s to personalize and customize communication through segmentation.
“We target the SSS pool of prospects that meet our specific requirements for criteria such as SAT scores and GPA, ethnicity, extracurricular activities and educational aspirations,” said Kumarasamy. “We can also obtain lists of qualified students living outside the region. And Descriptor PLUS allows us to target key groups – such as economically disadvantaged students, minorities from rural areas, and high academic achievers from new market sectors.” Descriptor PLUS, which integrates with SSS, is a stand-alone service that uses geodemographic-based taggings to associate each student with one of 30 clusters of high schools and neighborhoods. Each cluster is comprised of several descriptive attributes that help a college or university to know more about the likely behaviors, performance and needs of a prospective student when very little information is known about the student.
EPS identifies the particular high schools and geographic markets that offer the best prospects for Saint Joseph’s particular requirements. “EPS data shows us not only how we appeal to students in a given market, but also how our competitors are viewed. Using EPS, we were able to fine-tune our SSS criteria to deliver highly targeted prospects, instead of blindly blanketing the market,” said Kumarasamy. EPS integrates with SSS and produces comprehensive reports on markets and market position.
The Benefits
Increasing Applicant Quantity and Quality
With College Board tools, Saint Joseph’s University has achieved impressive gains in both quantity and quality of applicants. Between 1995 and 2005, applications jumped 223 percent, from
approximately 2,800 to more than 9,000. At the same time, the university boosted the academic quality of applicants, both in terms of high school GPA and SAT scores. “By increasing the level of interest in our university and the quality of applicants, College Board tools are helping us raise the prestige of Saint Joseph’s,” explained Kumarasamy. “In turn, greater prestige supports other aspects of becoming a pre-eminent institution, such as recruitment and retention of top faculty, alumni involvement and endowment.”
The university has also leveraged the College Board tools to reach enrollment goals tied to its founding principles as a Jesuit institution, especially preferential treatment for the poor. Saint
Joseph’s has increased the number of minority applicants by 181 percent, from 404 in 1995 to 1136 in 2005. “As a Catholic school, we want to attract academically qualified minority students who are interested in a private university in the northeast Thanks to the data we receive from the College Board, we are able to communicate to these prospects about the multi-cultural atmosphere of our campus that would make them feel at home away from home, and offer more personalized
information about minority scholarships and other funding,” Kumarasamy explained.
Expanding Visibility Nationwide
One of Saint Joseph’s key enrollment objectives was to minimize local competition by expanding its market reach beyond the Philadelphia area. With SSS, the school has increased its out-of-state applicants by 65 percent. “Without having to make a single trip, we received 300 percent more applications from distant states such as California, Florida, Texas, Ohio and Illinois. In the fall of 2005, through the use of Descriptor PLUS along with SSS, we received more than 100 applications from
California – nearly as many as we get from neighboring Delaware. And we enrolled many top students from these far-off locations,” said Kumarasamy.
Reducing Costs
With limited operating funds, Saint Joseph’s is especially appreciative of the major cost savings that the College Board recruitment services have delivered. Before adopting SSS, the university spent more than $100,000 a year in travel-related costs to visit high schools. The university has not only cut that amount in half, but also achieves greater results from its remaining investment.
Said Kumarasamy, “SSS allows us to identify the target prospect pool, and we use the high school information from the prospect records to effectively introduce ourselves to the guidance counselors. Before a student stops by the guidance office to learn more about us, we’ve provided information to the counselors so they can talk knowledgeably about Saint Joseph’s.” Personalized communication with counselors and students has proved far more effective than relying on a single, hour-long visit each year.
The Conclusion
“College Board tools enable us to implement new ideas without any anecdotal guesswork. They provide compelling data for us to use in targeting and persuading key decision-makers. Changes are risky, but not when we have solutions like SSS and EPS.”
-Sundar Kumarasamy, Assistant Vice President, Enrollment Management, Saint Joseph’s University
About SSS
Student Search Service (SSS) customized mailing lists and student data are powerful, economic, easy ways to reach your best student prospects. SSS has been the most trusted and commonly used source for connecting directly to students for over 30 years. Nearly 90% of College Board exam takers opt-in to participate in SSS and no other source can offer more qualified, college-bound student mailing lists.
About EPS
Enrollment Planning Service (EPS) is a web-based tool that helps locate the schools and geomarkets where your best prospects can be found. This popular service also produces comprehensive reports on your markets, your position in those markets, and your competition. Best of all, EPS allows its users the ability to create and save customized queries and reports that help them to analyze, plan, and produce results saving time, money, and resources.
About Descriptor PLUS
Descriptor PLUS provides geodemographic clustering information that describes college-bound students in terms of where they live (Educational Neighborhood clusters) and where they learn (High School clusters).
Each cluster is comprised of several descriptive attributes that help a college or university to know more about the likely behaviors, performance and needs of a prospective student. This information can be used to target new types of students and aids in the segmentation and personalization of
communication. Descriptor PLUS also helps you understand the types of students you are currently attracting when only knowing the student’s address or high school attended.
