Tips for Boosting Graduate Enrollment Strategies for Higher Ed

Overview

Graduate students, unlike their undergraduate counterparts, are not new to the idea of higher ed – nor are they worried about what to expect. In fact, consisting of a mixed group of mature students, professionals, and budding specialists, we could go as far as to say graduate students are more worried they won’t get what they expect. They want career advancement. They want networking opportunities. They want to take a deeper dive into what interests them. They want to know they’re going to get something out of studying at your higher ed institution. 

For your team of graduate school admissions, recruitment, and marketing professionals, we begin to see a list of unique challenges bubble through the woodwork. Despite increased demand from prospective grad students for personalized enrollment journeys, in tandem with severe competition, you’re being asked to do more with less .

To help you stand out from the noise – and reach your audiences effectively – we’ve compiled a list of considerations to help your team fine tune your graduate enrollment strategy to attract, nurture, and convert your right fit higher ed audiences.  

Graduate enrollment is tougher than ever

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are around 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. Of this figure, about 1,000 offer graduate -level programs, reports Education USA – enrolling over 3 million graduate students across the US. So, assuming there are multiple grad schools at most of these institutions, we can conclude that there are A LOT of programs out there – each with higher ed admissions, recruitment, and marketing teams responsible for filling them (including yours). 

That’s a lot of competition!

As far as your tech stack goes, according a recent Unibuddy pulse survey report, ‘A Radical Rethink: The Future of Admissions, Recruitment, and Marketing*,’ about half of grad schools are using five or more edtech tools, of which 67% offer little to no visibility into who the students are you’re marketing to. Combined with clunky CRM systems, you might have a whole lot of expensive steam but little to show for it. As a result, 73% of grad enrollment teams report feeling overstretched, with 15% saying they are close to burnout. 

*Note: Data used from this report has been filtered specifically to solely reflect respondents from graduate schools 

Graduate students are a discerning audience

Graduate students present a different audience entirely, with different goals, situations, and motivations, than their undergraduate counterparts. This student cohort is often either already enrolled in, and close to completing, an undergraduate program or is currently in the workforce looking for ways to jumpstart their career. 

These students come from various financial backgrounds and might be already saddled with debt from their undergraduate education. According to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), financial barriers serve both as a barrier and motivator for prospective students to pursue graduate degrees – with about a third of surveyed grad students reporting they have families to support, for example. 

Top motivators for graduate students to complete their degree are also tied into career advancement outside school. They want a degree that helps them progress their careers and unlocks higher earning potential. To this end, grad student expectations of their school experience are drastically different from undergrads and are largely tied into networking, star faculty, and alumni opportunities post-graduation. 

And they’re not just sold on one graduate program either – or graduate school as a sole option. According to Unibuddy data, grad students shop around considerably – a quarter of whom go as far as to put down deposits at multiple schools. Outside the higher ed loop, grad students are also weighing non-academic options against their choice to return to school – options 61% of graduate enrollment teams say are their biggest challenge to initial nurturing of this group. 

This is why effective nurturing of grad audiences needs to shine a light on expected program outcomes – helping to hammer home the real advantages and ROI of studying at your school. To this end, according to Unibuddy data, it is absolutely essential any messaging your team sends to them is personalized and features various human touchpoints to vet program claims. Over three-quarters of prospective grad students surveyed by Unibuddy, for example, say just speaking with one of your current enrolled students is helpful for their decision making process.

Spurring engagement through digital solutions

A combination of increased competition, reduced budgets, bloated tech stacks, and increasing grad student expectations are causing many grad school admissions, recruitment, and marketing teams to rethink their strategies for attracting, nurturing, and converting prospective student audiences. Relying on traditional higher ed recruitment and admissions marketing tactics is no longer going to work as targets and competition levels increase to new highs. 

Consider the University at Buffalo, for example. In particular, Ryan Taughrin, Buffalo’s Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management at the Graduate School of Education, recognized the power and potential of nurturing prospective grad students by connecting them with student ambassadors. But his team needed help nurturing high volumes of traffic arriving via their website, and integrating this traffic to their CRM. By integrating Unibuddy Chat into their enrollment strategy, enabling digital student-to-student conversations and providing the funnel data they needed to identify so-called “stealth candidates,” his team enjoyed a 75% conversion rate to application for candidates engaged through Unibuddy.

In other words, to help scale your messaging, to appear authentic to your grad audiences without putting more work on your team, it’s about working smarter not harder. This comes down to having the right available data to see what your students want, what they’re asking, and, most importantly, who they are and what their motivations are for pursuing a graduate degree at your school. 

And our data shows graduate students notice these subtle nods towards authenticity. Did you know, for example, that 71% of graduate students expect every single piece of outreach messaging you send to be personalized to them? And 41% say grad schools are falling short of this expectation – with 81% reporting being put off by resulting marketing they view as “cringey” attempts at personalization. 

Higher ed data helps identify initial program interests

Perhaps the most important first step to understanding grad school audiences is understanding their motivations for pursuing a graduate degree. In addition to being very specific about what they want to study, prospective grad students are extremely driven by specific motivations for enrolling. Are they an existing professional looking to add to their credentials? Are they a current student enrolled in an undergraduate program looking to continue their education? Are they a first generation student looking to improve outcomes and income for their family? Are they looking to attend physical classes or are they looking for hybrid options enabling them to complete their grad degree outside work hours online?

Effective edtech Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms can help your team gather and glean data which can help you know your students inside out. Unibuddy Chat, for example, is not just a student-to-student chat platform – it’s a goldmine of higher ed data you can use to position your nurture strategies. Meanwhile, Unibuddy Community, our higher ed community-building solution, provides branded digital space for your graduate students to begin networking, getting their questions answered, and get exposure to other interested members of their peer group before enrolling.  

Related: How to Map Students to Your Higher Ed Funnel 

Leveraging AI, your team can gather valuable conversational insights to paint a better picture of who your students are and what you might consider asking them next. And, ultimately, this type of data can help your team reliably predict student enrollment numbers as funnel insights provide clear visibility into which students have potential to move along towards conversions (something not a single grad school professional we surveyed reported being able to do with their current technology).

Student ambassadors help scale authentic messaging to graduate students

Once you know who your prospective grad student audiences are, the next step is to nurture them through enabling connections to people they trust. And, as the ultimate endorsements of your grad school’s brand, student ambassadors provide a second opinion into whether the claims you make about your program are true. 

While third-party sites and social media can also help verify this information, even short conversations with student ambassadors offer the two-pronged advantage of meeting grad student expectations of authenticity while living directly under your brand. As an added advantage, conversations with student ambassadors help reduce workload for your team by their ability to field all inquiries which come in an authentic manner.

You might also consider approaching graduate school faculty to inquire whether they are willing to speak with prospective students. Serving as the instructors of your grad programs, professors can field questions of grad students to help them determine fit. Whether one-on-one or as a group event, these short meetings show grad students that their potential instructors are engaged and are empathetic to their educational goals. 

Look for ways to incorporate conversations between prospective grad students and your student ambassadors or faculty into your digital experiences – from providing initial ways for them to connect to encouraging user-generated content, for example. While there are no replacements for offline conversations, effective peer-to-peer (P2P), student-to-student, messaging platforms, can help facilitate and scale these conversations. And the data gathered from these conversations can help tailor the next touchpoints for more personalized messaging.

Positioning data helps to segment graduate student audiences 

While the right data can help you understand who your students are and which graduate programs they’re targeting, there’s also valuable positioning insights to extract. You might, for example, know that ‘John Smith,’ from Los Angeles, is interested in pursuing a graduate business degree because they want to advance their career in business consulting. How do you take this information and apply it to your graduate program positioning? And how does this help you scale your messaging to students like John?

Related: Mapping Student Personas to Higher Ed Funnels

By grouping like-audiences together, your team can start to see specific patterns emerge which can help you determine what’s important in their decision-making process. Let’s return to John Smith: If we group John with other students from Los Angeles, you might see a common conversational theme concerning distance from your campus, which, for the sake of this example, might be located in New York. When you group John with other students coming to you from business consulting, you might see they also share common interests centred on accounting and finance. Meanwhile, John’s fellow graduate business applicants might be all asking questions about a desire to study under a specific faculty member – or looking at specific apprenticeships offered.  

The positioning takeaway for your team out of the above data-fueled scenario? In order to engage further with John Smith, you might consider sending them messaging about the real career benefits of studying under your star faculty member, who happens to be an expert on accounting and finance, from the comfort of their own home via a hybrid or virtual graduate program. This messaging can be adapted for other members of their demographic groupings. And, in tandem with the raw specific data gathered via conversations with your team, you can create a more multi-dimensional approach to engaging with John on a personalized authentic level they trust.

Leveraging data for authenticity in graduate enrollment 

We’ve talked about how your graduate students are different. We’ve discussed how your graduate school team is different. We know your competition is at a fever-pitch – and rising year-over-year. You’re operating with a smaller budget – but your enrollment targets keep rising. Your tech stack is bloated and you’re not getting the data you need. Your team is overstretched with some members on the verge of total burnout. 

Something’s got to give – or does it? 

With the right edtech SaaS tools, you can engage more students and gather more data, without increasing workloads for your staff. With more actionable data insights, your team can create more personalized, more informed, and more surgical strategies for moving graduate students through your higher ed funnel. You won’t need to react to your competition, or keep up with the ever-creeping costs seemingly required for success, to gain a better rapport with your audience – because you’ll know exactly who they are, what they want, and why.  

On the front-end, the right solutions can help facilitate more connections between prospective graduates and the voices they trust – your faculty and student ambassadors. These conversations offer light-touch outlets for students to filter the information and claims you send their way – for ultimate levels of trust and visibility. 

At Unibuddy, we take all these factors into consideration for our best-in-class platform. With Unibuddy Chat, you get the power of P2P messaging, easily integrated across your entire higher ed enrollment framework, blended with valuable data insights made available behind the scenes. With Unibuddy Community, you provide prospective graduate students with new ways to connect with their incoming class and find their people. Combined with a powerful one-two punch of data and engagement options, Unibuddy helps your team know prospective graduate students inside out with the tools you need to lead to conversion. 

Learn more about Unibuddy.

Image Sources:

Figure 1: US National Center for Education Statistics 

Figure 2: Graduate Management Admission Council