On Access and Affordability
According to an article in the Washington Post this weekend, the Regents of the University of California decided to increase student fees for residents next year by 32%, which will result in undergraduate students paying $10K annually – “triple what students paid a decade ago.”
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Thankfully, we’ve survived another conference season
Thanksgiving is the best holiday on the calendar. And with my favorite holiday only days away, we’re now getting inundated with Thanksgiving-related stories in the media. One perennial Thanksgiving storyline is the requisite report on the road-choking, airport-swelling glut in holiday travel. I typically avoid this scene altogether and stay home for the holiday, which may be one of the big reasons I like Thanksgiving so much. For those of you who do plan on traveling this Thanksgiving, I feel for you and hope these tips help.
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How to tell when the turkey is done
For the past few years my housemates and I have hosted a pre-Thanksgiving potluck dinner on the weekend before actual Thanksgiving. Each year I roast the turkey, which has usually been quite easy, until last year when the turkey I bought didn’t include a pop-up thermometer. I did some quick googling to estimate the approximate cooking time, but other than that I had little to rely on the gauge its done-ness. It turned out okay, but was perhaps a a degree or two underdone in certain parts. This year, we wound up inviting 25+ people over, necessitating the biggest turkey Safeway had. Not wanting to risk giving my closest friends botulism, I also invested in a meat thermometer. Obviously this made things much easier- I tested the turkey at least 4 times before finally it reached a perfect 165 degrees.
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Beware of “SaaS” in Sheep’s Clothing
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is hot. And why not? In a downturn economy, true SaaS and Cloud Computing solutions offer low-risk, low-cost access to powerful software solutions, such as CRM. Earlier in the year, we wrote about some of the advantages of SaaS here. We noted how true SaaS architecture enables economies of scale that are much more difficult to achieve with on-premise or hosted solutions, plus configuration and implementation is considerably easier in a true SaaS environment.
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Enrollment Funnel or Bottleneck
We’re all familiar with the image of an enrollment funnel. Many individuals enter as “leads” and hopefully a few make it all the way through to become enrolled students. Traditionally, you’d want as many leads at the top of your funnel so that you can have your pick of hot prospects to convert into enrolled students. Ideally, you’d want your funnel to look something like this. But in today’s recruitment environment, more leads may not necessarily be such a good thing. In fact, too many leads (especially bad leads) could turn your enrollment funnel into an enrollment bottleneck.
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Finding Signal in the Recruitment Noise
Recently, Intelliworks had the pleasure of sponsoring the Stamats Integrated Marketing: Graduate Student Marketing Conference in Boston. Among the attendees were deans and directors of marketing, admissions and enrollment from graduate programs around the country. For many, the challenge was clear, there’s a lot of noise out there with respect to recruiting graduate students in today’s environment.
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How to win fans and influence people
One of the discussions on Washington Post’s forums is about a Susquehanna University survey which determined that 64% of respondents claimed that Facebook helped shape their opinion about the university- roughly equal to the number of people that claimed the school’s website was influential. The moderator, Post reporter, Jay Adams wonders if that influence come from peer interaction via Facebook (students publish on Facebook the schools they’re looking into and peers comment) or if schools are courting students through Facebook.
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Blurring Generational Lines
Most people who follow social networks know the latest demographic trends: more older people are adopting Facebook, Twitter attracts mostly Gen Xers, and mySpace is quickly becoming a graveyard of neglected profiles. And now another shift is starting to occur- Twitter users are becoming younger, attracting more Gen Yers. As someone who would be considered Gen Y, I’ve definitely noticed a slew of my friends and acquaintances moving some of their social networking activity to Twitter. During one conversation, someone commented on how cluttered looking Facebook had become and a Twitter friend replied that clutter was the reason she started using Twitter more.
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