Why Is Enrollment Falling Short When Admissions and Marketing Are Both Doing Their Jobs?:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 324 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Mike McGetrick

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  324 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Mike McGetrick

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:31] Welcome Back Mike

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

Today, I welcome back Mike McGetrick, Vice President at Jenzabar Company, where he heads up Spark451. Spark451 works with colleges and universities for enrollment management and enrollment marketing, and Mike’s been in this area for 25 years, both in higher ed and other corporate entities.

We pick up the conversation when we just finished talking about branding and positioning, and now we’re going to get into enrollment marketing.

Mike, welcome back to the show.

Mike McGetrick: Hey, Drumm, great to be back again. Really appreciate you having me on.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, it just seems like it was yesterday that we were talking about this stuff.

Mike McGetrick: It sure does. But hey, time flies.

Drumm McNaughton: Time does fly. So we had a great conversation about branding. We’re going to conclude a little bit of that with this. Then we’re going to get into enrollment management and how marketing has changed so much with enrollment.

[00:01:32] Mike Background

Drumm McNaughton: Before we jump back into it, please give the guests who weren’t tuned in last week, give us a little bit of your background, if you would, please.

Mike McGetrick: First of all, again, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. As I mentioned, I’m one of the leaders, I’m one of the founders of Spark451. It’s a higher education enrollment marketing firm. I am a creative by training, I’m a marketer by profession, and I’m an educator by passion. So I’ve been working in higher ed for the vast majority of my career.

Last twenty-five years just completely devoted to the space of university marketing, branding, and enrollment marketing. So I help universities connect their institutional mission to the realities of enrollment and bringing in a class sustainably year after year, and how students discover them, evaluate them, choose them, and ultimately succeed in those programs.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. This has been a great conversation on branding, and I really appreciate your giving us the update that you did last week. Things are changing as an industry, especially from an enrollment perspective. We wrapped up last time talking about the life balance college and how that has impacted enrollment there.

This is your specialty, enrollment marketing. When you go in to work with a client, what are some of the key things that you have to think about, and what’s your process?

[00:03:05] Brand Equity Basics

Mike McGetrick: So there’s a lot going on when we’re talking about working with an institution, right? Sometimes a school has a brand, and the work we do doesn’t require that they start over. Right? It’s more about what kind of equity does the brand have. Right? Where are they recognized? What feels true? Is anything outdated? What’s never been fully activated? What should be retained or clarified or retired? The objective with the work we do is never about novelty and always creating something new. It’s about surfacing what’s relevant.

Yes. And any kind of branding should preserve any earned equity that an institution has while removing any accumulated confusion that’s prepared around that. So for us it’s, it’s leaning into strengths and trying to work around any ambiguities, right? And you might ask questions like, “Who needs to be involved in this?”

Who– does everyone need to be on board with this process in order for it to be successful, and I don’t think unanimous enthusiasm is a realistic standard, what you need is broad participation across faculty, enrollment, leadership, the cabinet, student life, all the functions of the university need that participation to get some strategic alignment and really clarify, who the decision makers are, right?

Where the decision rights lie. The sh- shared governance in this process should mean shared insights, everybody sharing and everybody participating. And it shouldn’t mean that every stakeholder, gets final editorial control over every word. And when we worked at that school we were referring to, we had heavy buy-in from the president who was the ultimate decision maker, and that helped to move the process along.

A census is really valuable when defining what the truth is, but it can be destructive when choosing between 15 different synonyms to describe something.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. How many adjectives can you put on the head of a pin?

Mike McGetrick: Precisely. Now you’re talking. Now you’re talking

Drumm McNaughton: So the inclusivity is important. You don’t want to be studying it to death. You want to have a clear process that you’re moving forward. Related to enrollment, you’ve got a message that’s already out there about your school and I think the Life Balance College is a good example. You talked about a number of different things that you did.

How did you go about getting the knowledge of what the perception was of the college external to the college itself? What’s the process that you would use with that college or a generic process to rebrand a college?

[00:06:10] Four Ds Framework

Mike McGetrick: Well, Drumm, in the last episode, we talked about the four Ps, for rebranding. And any creative branding platform work we do, we have something we call the four Ds. And they are discover, define, design, and develop. So the discovery process is really about learning as much as we can about the current branding situation.

Workshops, interviews, and focus groups with the various stakeholders, which would include leadership, current students, prospective students, alumni, staff, parents, any group that we feel, you know, is relevant to that branding discussion.

Drumm McNaughton: Both internal and external, sounds like.

Mike McGetrick: Internal and external, yes. Those are part of the initial discovery.

Then there’s additional survey work that goes external and reaches to larger audiences to really understand, larger perceptions around the institution, how they position relative to the competition in the area, how they rank with others, how they rank certain attributes of the institution.

So all those things move into a full discovery process. And of course, doing market analysis to compare their brand and their strengths and attributes to the competition that is relevant to them.

Drumm McNaughton: Sure.

Mike McGetrick: You know, moving on from there, you tend to see a lot of themes developing, right?

So you’ll develop some conceptual themes around that, get agreement on those and really look at some supporting messaging architecture and the personas that are involved that are important to your institution. Personas being groups of individuals that you can identify that have identified shared attributes.

And then from there you’re building out some strategic communications that can really be tested with some, some groups that would be relevant to you. So you get out of that some stakeholder presentations, a review, get some feedback, and then test again with the audience. And it’s really about, did the audience buy into this messaging?

Did they see it relevant to this institution? And did they find the message valuable? And this, this process of discovery, defining, testing, reviewing, and then testing again is what leads you to a final set of assets so you can roll into deliverables that will eventually wind up in campaigns.

But all that discovery work is critical.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And just to reemphasize, most institutions that I see doing a rebranding campaign, they go to the faculty. What are we known for here? And they completely forget the external, the students, the graduates. What attracted you to this? I think about a university like Florida. You’ve got the Gators logo.

That’s been around forever. People recognize that blue and I guess it’s orange, their colors. No it’s green and orange. I’m sorry. Obviously, I’m not from Florida, so I don’t recognize it. But that’s the thing. When they start digging into the programs they offer, they offer them and they write them up in a way that attracts students who are interested in those areas to look at them as a potential place to go to school.

Mike McGetrick: No doubt about it.

[00:09:49] Programs And Value

Mike McGetrick: The faculty are the chief product officers, if you will, or they’re product managers. I think the better analogy is the faculty are product managers of the institution, and the provost is the chief product officer. So they really have to think about the program’s value in the marketplace, right? Do students find it valuable? Does the job marketplace find value from the students who are being graduated from those majors? And how can they adjust their programs over time to make them more relevant to the demands of the marketplace, and thus what students are going to need to be successful when they come out of them.

So much change is happening and, I think they’re– I’m a student of the liberal arts, and since we’re going down this discussion point, I think it saddens me to think that the value of the liberal arts have, has been diminished over time, right? The perceived value of it.

And I just think that the idea for learning, for learning’s sake, has gone out the window and there’s too much emphasis on the immediacy of the impact of the education. And that, that’s perhaps a sign of a changing world, but it somewhat saddens me. I think that if you are a liberal arts professor, there’s this notion of the liberal arts plus, right?

That you are teaching liberal arts, sciences, and you’re adding some specific skilled components to it, maybe coupling a certificate program along with it in data analysis or AI, et cetera. So it’s really about, developing the product.

Drumm McNaughton: I go back to the example we talked about, that Life Balance college. I went to Annapolis, very specialized school, but our curriculum, we had 80% STEM majors and 20% liberal arts. That doesn’t mean that I was a physics major. That doesn’t mean that as a physics major, I didn’t take English courses, political science courses, literature course.

I didn’t take a number of those. It was a balanced education, and I think people have lost that interpretation of what a balanced education is. Besides that, we’re getting a little off track, and we can talk about this one a lot because it’s a passion for both of us, I can see.

Mike McGetrick: Sure.

Drumm McNaughton: With that, and looking at it from a marketing perspective, what I’ve heard you say more than once is the branding, the marketing, it is about what’s in the eyes. What is it that attracts your potential buyers, your students, that they want to come there? And that’s an external view, but you also have to operationalize that.

Is there a difference in operationalizing it for undergraduate versus graduates and school to college to school versus overall for the university?

Mike McGetrick: Sure.

[00:13:15] Undergrad Vs Grad Marketing

Mike McGetrick: So if you think about the two distinctive platforms for higher education, the main ones are undergraduate and graduate.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Mike McGetrick: The undergraduate side is typically been a coming-of-age experience, where you are marketing the whole university or whole college, and the experience that they will have across that university and its strengths, right?

So you’re looking at mission and history, academic strengths, the culture, the student experience, the beliefs of the faculty and staff, why they do what– their passion, what they do what the institutional ambitions are, right? And that, that promise, that they’re generally equipped to keep. So students look at the whole university and thus you have to tell a full story about that university.

And certainly every student, or at least a portion of them that don’t come in undecided are, really interested in a particular set of majors, and you have to lean on those strengths, of course.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Mike McGetrick: On the graduate side, it’s really about the program. There’s certainly a reputation of the university itself, but they’re particularly interested in the program we’re talking about, and that program may, depending on the size of the institution, may be housed in a specific school, a business school of arts and sciences, you name it.

So the program itself becomes the focal point. And so we drill down on the program strengths, research capabilities, research availability, faculty’s areas of interest, recruiting coming out of it, placement rates, everything related to that specific program. So when you’re doing that type of marketing, if you think about it at scale, Drumm, it’s a much more complicated task, if you will, to market fifty-five graduate programs individually versus marketing to an undergraduate population where the, the set of messages is relatively homogenous, right?

They can be collective about that university, and then certain parts of it may be specific.

Drumm McNaughton: And that’s where I see, and I think you’d agree with me on this, that’s where we see that colleges, not colleges and just undergraduate, but colleges within a university system or a university, schools within that, they all have their own unique messages that align with the overall message of the university.

Mike McGetrick: That’s correct. They’ll align with the overall message of the university, but they’ll have a distinct flavor and take on it.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. Yep

Mike McGetrick: And may very well have, a unique identity. We do a lot of work with New York University, and they have– they’re extremely well-equipped with very talented and wonderful people in their branding department.

And they are very, intentional in saying that, “We have a set of branding messages, and we have a branding look for the university, but we expect each school to have its own voice and its own personality.” And I think that’s a, a strong way to approach it because just the subjects that they cover are so distinct, right?

You’re looking at a school of business that is serving the finance industry and is a main supplier of talent to all those industries. And then you’re looking at, a school of nursing or a school of individualized study that has, some of the most esoteric graduate programs you can imagine, where students are building their own graduate programs.

So there’s no doubt that they are so different from each other that they have to have an adaptation of that university brand, for sure.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:17] Top Enrollment Priorities

Drumm McNaughton: What would you say are the top three, and I- I’m not talking about, the three takeaways, but are the top three things that enrollment managers need to be thinking about nowadays for increasing enrollment or getting, getting more of a mind share and eyeball share of their potential enrollees?

Mike McGetrick: So first and foremost, I think you have to define something unique about your institution. You have to really drill down on what’s, what are your differentiated strengths, right? Every university has strengths, but those unique strengths represent differentiators, and people can key in and remember differentiators I think that whether or not, you’re going against in some cases, depending on who you are, schools that are one-up on college game day, and so they have an enormous advantage over you in many ways.

If you’re not in the SEC or the Big Ten, and not on, national television every Saturday in the fall for college football, you’re at somewhat of a competitive disadvantage in the branding space. So drilling down is in, in, on what is unique for you, that’s job one.

Job two is really demonstrating value, and value can be, what you promise to deliver divided by the cost. And so with that, there’s a lot of tension, a lot of stress and anxiety among the student populations around affordability. And so can you get out early in that process of affordability?

Third, parents are incredibly involved in the enrollment process, way more so than previous generations. Students and their parents like to hang out with each other nowadays. They are, they’re incredibly friendly.

And so parents are heavily involved. And in some cases, parents are handling the entire enrollment process in a stealth way that they’re handling all the recipient of communications, the applications, and the student is along for the ride. So, making sure that you’re finding a way to involve parents in the process is a critical performance to you.

And thirdly, I’ll say that just making sure that you have, in addition to strong lead generation, early top-of-funnel marketing student search and communications that bring you all the way through to the application, a strong application generation process. What is often overlooked is, once a student is admitted, do I have the same level of effort being delivered for yielding the students?

You have a real opportunity to once students are admitted, now that’s when they really start looking at it, and we do focus groups. Parents have told us that “My student didn’t look at a single brochure until they were admitted, and that’s when we started really doing our due diligence and looking at things together.”

What kind of communication plan do you have when students are admitted in what we call the, the yield phase? So drilling down on that is absolutely critical. And then, part of that is making sure once they commit to you, that they aren’t lured away by another institution post-commitment.

So keeping that keeping that flow of communication and value, and I think the way you do that is by telling stories about how other students have succeeded. And the more that those stories can be relevant to that individual student, the more successful you can be. And, doing that with data, doing that with good storytelling.

Drumm McNaughton: Right there is worth the price of admission for this whole conversation.

[00:21:23] Summer Melt Strategy

Drumm McNaughton: You’re the first person I have heard talk about this summer thaw or the melt. In that terms on how to deal with it. So thank you. That’s, that was fabulous

Mike McGetrick: Appreciate that. Yes, and just look, a lot of factors go into summer thaw, and it’s that melt rate is increasing with a lot of institutions because they are facing lots of competition with schools who don’t meet their goals, and now they’re pulling from wait lists and students who might have been admitted and committed to another institution now come off the wait list for a school that m- they may have preferred.

There’s certainly a likelihood that they’ll commit to that other institution and change their commitment. Can you demonstrate enough value in the process that they won’t be swayed back to that original school they had their eye on?

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

[00:22:20] AI And Agentic Admissions

Drumm McNaughton: How is AI changing the process of marketing and enrollment?

Mike McGetrick: Yes. So great question. I just attended the Element Engage Conference. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Element451 is one of the leading AI platforms in higher education. They have built an AI platform on top of a CRM, and Element451 was a platform that we originally built here at Spark51, and we spun out into its own company in 2018.

So it, today is the leading AI platform for higher education marketing and enro- and enrollment management. So I think there are lots of things are happening with AI. There’s, but there’s a lot of trepidation at the university level and a lot of risk management going on. But the big place where AI is going to have a, a sway is the use of agents, right? Agentic AI.

So having agents be capable of doing some of the work that an admissions officer would do, and being able to reach out individually to students and handle interactions that, may have you just didn’t have enough human resources to handle. Phone calls coming into your admissions office at night after 7:00 PM, being able to quickly answer a question for a parent. Having a chatbot at a university that can authenticate and give a student an answer to their what documents that they’re missing. Being able to answer specific questions about the university’s financial aid process. Sending reminders out to students about what documents they’re missing to complete their application packet.

All of these agentic jobs are things that are being handled by humans right now, and they miss the opportunity to spend more time interacting directly with the students, which is what, we all came into this business for, is to help students individually. So I think AI agents taking over those jobs.

Furthermore, beyond the enrollment management, Drumm, as is not just bringing in new students, but helping retain the ones you have. So in student retention, I think that’s where the biggest lift is going to be. Just the bandwidth that AI does and the capability to analyze data, just looking at students’ signals in classes in the university, the grading, attendance And looking, you know, finding at-risk students or maybe their financial aid situation has changed.

Bringing in that data to find at-risk students who are at risk of not re-enrolling and helping to intervene on their behalf to, find a solution for them. I think agents, AI agents have lots of value to deliver there. But I’ve seen the technology is there, but the adoption at most universities is very, very minimal.

There’s a lot of trepidation about moving forward, and certainly a lot of sort of compliance concerns will have to be ironed out before we get to really where we want to go.

Drumm McNaughton: We are getting there. It’s going to take a little while, but as budgets get tighter, as there aren’t the people to deal with all the issues, we’re going to see more and more AI in the process, and frankly, it’s going to work better because we all want that human contact in this process. Why not be able to give the human contact when it’s really needed versus just counting documents to make sure they’re there?

Mike McGetrick: Absolutely.

Drumm McNaughton: So, well, Mike, this has been a fabulous conversation. I’m glad we’ve been able to do this. Thank you.

Mike McGetrick: Drumm, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[00:26:37] Three Takeaways for Higher Education Boards

Drumm McNaughton: As we always do, we wrap up with our two takeaway questions. First one, three takeaways for presidents of boards. What do they need to be aware of right now with how enrollment marketing is changing and what they need to do to, I hate to use this word, but I’m going to position their university to make sure that they stay relevant in the next few years?

Mike McGetrick: All right, three takeaways. Here’s my hot take. First, I think, boards and presidents really need to treat enrollment as an institutional strategy. Enrollment can’t be assigned solely to admissions or marketing. I think you have to look at it holistically. Academic portfolio, pricing, student experience, retention, and reputation, all those things shape the demand for your college, and so need to be managed as part of the full institutional strategy.

Number two, I think value is where it’s at, so defining and proving your value, and I’ll underscore the word proving. Just really take the time to know precisely whom you serve, what is it that you enable them to accomplish in their lives, and what evidence can you deliver that’s going to demonstrate that outcome?

And I know all of you, that’s, this is your passion but it takes a lot of rigor and effort to build and maintain that evidence over time. But certainly, I believe it’s worth the effort.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Mike McGetrick: And finally, we talked about lots of topics for branding but I think that the one that re-bubbles up to the top all the time is that promise and personality. So if you’re going to make a promise to deliver, build an operating system around that promise or an operating machine, if you will. So align the brand, let’s say your website, media, advertising, the CRM, communications that come out of that, your data strategy, student advising, student experience, all those things should become part of one operating system.

Students experience one institution, even when the institution operates as 20 different departments. They don’t see that. You see that. Let them see it as one holistic operating system, and remove that confusion for them.

Drumm McNaughton: Great takeaways.

Mike McGetrick: So in conclusion, I’ll just say know your market, prove your value, and organize your institution around keeping your promises.

Drumm McNaughton: Beautiful. Thank you.

[00:29:19] What’s Next and Wrapping Up

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you?

Mike McGetrick: So, lots of great things are happening. Lots of things are interesting me now in helping institutions connect areas that have historically been treated separately. Brand, program strategy, digital experience, CRM, analytics, and particularly AI. As I mentioned, I presented at the Element Engage conference last week.

I’ll be at the Engineering Communicators Conference, and a lot of the topics that they’re all interested in are AI related. So it’s, I teach a course in generative AI, and my students are both excited and frightened about its possibilities.

Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.

Mike McGetrick: I think, in order to remove the fear, you have to understand it.

I’m really focused on looking at AI’s capabilities and aligning it to the needs of the institutions that I serve and making sure that we can stay human in the process and make the humans be the decision makers, the directors, and the AIs to be the augmenters and extenders.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, Mike, thank you so much for being on the program. I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

Mike McGetrick: It’s been a pleasure, Drumm. Thank you so much.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you.

Thanks for listening, and a special thank you to my guest, Mike McGetrick. Mike, I’ve enjoyed spending this last few days with you, and I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.