An Admin's Stance on the 2022 Admin Report

The higher ed community is a melting pot. Between regions, countries, institution types, and departments, practitioners have a wide range of insights and perspectives that inform their strategies to recruit their best-fit students.

You know what your college or university’s methods and goals are, but what about your neighbor’s?

Unibuddy recently commissioned a survey of nearly 800 higher ed admissions, recruitment, and marketing professionals to get a pulse on what they’re thinking, doing, and planning in 2022—all to provide you with that intel. And it’s about to get meta.

“Why stop there?” we thought. To gauge the relevance of the report, we asked one of our UK partners, Recruitment Events Manager Andy Jackson at the University of South Wales, to share his thoughts and learnings.

Jackson’s take

My main takeaway was that the student recruitment landscape is continually changing and evolving, and there will always be disruption. To make sure that universities are well prepared to deal with the never-ending change, we as recruiters need to avoid over-generalising and make sure that we are treating every potential student as an individual.

The report also reinforced the need to listen to prospects and follow what their behaviour and the data is telling us. But, at the same time, we shouldn’t dismiss or lose sight of the importance of anecdotal feedback, which can give crucial context to the data.

Authentic, peer-to-peer connection is clearly very important to prospective students, and universities need to find ways to facilitate this. 

Allowing and supporting prospective students to explore and connect on their own terms is increasingly vital, both in the online and physical spaces. We’ve really seen this reflected in our engagement data, and it’s reassuring to know this is a wider trend.

It was also very interesting to see the range of engagement methods prospective students want to use, so I’ll definitely be looking at providing a range of options at different journey stages that prospective students can choose from.

Real hybridisation of recruitment events remains a challenge, and no one has really figured this out, including prospective students. It was interesting to see the changes in how these methods are perceived by them—how they still see value in them.

Overall, this report gave me additional insight as to how prospective students are researching and making decisions about their future, and it certainly gave me a lot to think about.

Haven’t read the report and want to form your own opinion?

Give it a download and watch this space for our forthcoming student edition to get the full picture of student recruitment in 2022.