Attracting Undecided Majors to Your School
By Aaron Basko, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, University of Lynchburg
For most colleges, undecided students are a mostly untapped market. “Undecided is one of our largest majors,” is an old admissions joke that has been used so frequently that people have forgotten it is supposed to be humorous. Asking students their intended major is one of the fastest ways for us to categorize them, and to figure out what information they need to make a college choice, but over-reliance on that question leads to a lot of missed opportunities. When we look at the data, we typically find that undecided students have lower yield rates and are less likely to retain than their peers who have a major in mind. As we market to those students, it feels like something is missing in our ability to connect them to campus.
I have always found it baffling that more high schools do not offer any serious career development opportunities as part of their curriculum. It is one of those things, like financial literacy, that would serve students so well in navigating their futures. However, many new students often arrive at the doorstep of college without the tools to make good career decisions.
How can we as institutions, and in enrollment marketing in particular, not only assist students to figure out how to create an academic and career path, but also step into the undecided student space to make our institutions attractive to those students who don’t have a plan?
In the past, we might have simply shared a list of career services we have to offer or offered a lukewarm explanation that there is nothing wrong with being undecided. But there are concrete ways we can be proactive in reaching out to undecided students to attract them to our institutions, and help them forward in their career planning. Here are a few:
Create a communications flow for undecided students as part of your enrollment marketing plan. We often create major-based content, so we should make sure that we also thoughtfully and intentionally engage students without a major in mind.
Provide value, not just promotion, to students in your communications. The best kind of “nurture campaign” is one in which you are not just nurturing the student’s interest, but actually helping them personally to have a better transition to college. This creates a relationship of trust.
Establish your expertise by providing tips that prospective students can use no matter where they choose to attend college. Reach out to career advisors, faculty, and alumni and ask them to provide nuggets of wisdom that are actionable for prospective students, either now or once they start college.
Demonstrate that the career decision process is not one large, overwhelming step, but a series of small decisions that they can begin to take now before they arrive on campus. Show them how. For example, as part of the undecided communication flow, send prospective students an infographic with the different categories of majors you offer, such as health care, business, education, the social sciences, etc. Send links to the kinds of classes students take in each area and ask them to eliminate any categories that don’t appeal to them. By eliminating these, encourage them that they have taken one step closer to a career path.
Ask students to reflect on what they know about themselves. Ask them to think about times when they made important decisions that they were happy with. How did they make the decision? Did they use logic and a list of pro’s and con’s, or did they rely on a gut instinct of what fit with their values? Is there a way they can apply that decision making style to their career decision?
In your communication flow and social media, share stories of other students who started out undecided, but who your institution helped to find a great career. Ask your alumni for stories of faculty or staff that helped them gain insight or to get their first job opportunity. Give lots of evidence that you can help students get from undecided to success in stories like this one (Exploratory/Undecided Student Finds Economics Program Complements His Strengths) from the University of Hartford.
Besides sending more proactive communication, you can also engage prospective students by connecting them early to career services resources they would usually not get until they arrive on campus. Many career services offices have one or more career inventories that have unlimited usage, like this great example from Goshen College. If yours does, send prospective undecided students a link to a free assessment, and offer to have the career services office follow up to help them interpret the results. If your career advisors have the bandwidth, you could offer a virtual career advising appointment after undecided applicants are admitted.
Keep your undecided audience in mind as you plan your on-campus events as well. If you break visitors into groups by major at your open houses or admitted student programs, make sure you have an option for students who have not yet picked a major, rather than forcing them to choose. Identify current students who started out undecided and ask them to share their experiences with prospective families, or invite academic programs that would like more majors to address them and make the case for how undecided students can thrive in their departments. Include fliers of information in visitor packets that introduce students to the resources and staff of your career services center, along with a welcome note and invitation for them to connect with the staff there.
You may also want to use your communication efforts to help take the pressure off of the decision. We seldom say it, but for many students, the major doesn’t matter as much as they think it does. Yes, there are some professional or licensing fields like nursing, teaching, or accounting where a certain major is needed. But in so many fields, employers care much less about the student’s major than their abilities and experiences. Through our messaging, we can encourage students to worry less about making a wrong choice of major, and to instead focus on what skills they want to use every day. Skills are much easier for students to identify. Providing statistics or examples of how many highly successful people end up working in fields unrelated to their majors can also help lower student anxiety.
Lastly, you may want to consider scrapping the term “undecided” altogether. “Undecided” suggests a negative or lack in students, when we could embrace it as a moment of opportunity. The relatively weak outreach that often happens to students in this category allows institutions to rebrand what they have to offer as a competitive advantage. As Dr. Sabita Manian, the Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of Lynchburg says, “I continue to believe that calling them "the Explorers" captures best their openness to probe and seek what it is that tickles their academic and professional interests. Let's banish the term "undecided" from our application forms.”
Whether you label them undecided students or explorers, these students should be an enrollment marketing office’s dream. They are a large demographic in our applicant pools that have been underserved by our outreach. Adjusting our communication strategy to treat them as a highly desired, prized group of students, rather than an afterthought, offers the possibility of increasing student yield and driving enrollment results, even as we attract an open-minded group of students, introducing them to a wide variety of majors that could change their life trajectories.
