Re-Freeze Your Summer Melt
By Aaron Basko, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, University of Lynchburg
We’ve arrived at that tough time of year, when a whole cycle’s worth of recruitment work can be undercut by that sinister phenomenon – summer melt. Students who have sent their deposit and committed to your university suddenly begin to disappear. Not only can high melt make the difference between success and failure in reaching your institutional goals, it can be incredibly discouraging for your team. The worst part is that so many factors in summer melt seem beyond your control. What can you do to put your summer melt in deep freeze?
The On-Ramp
Start by identifying and removing potential barriers to the new student journey. This is the time of year when many institutions talk about the “handoff” between admissions and other areas of campus. It would be a better approach to think of this transition as an “on-ramp.” It is less about onboarding – a mostly transactional term – and more about integrating. Here are a few critical steps to making that integration smoother.
Start early – The window between May 1 and the start of classes goes quickly for both colleges and families and there is a lot to do. Your team needs to be ready. Have your admissions staff prepare notes on your deposited students, so that they can pass on key concerns or likely needs to other areas of campus. Identify those students you suspect are least committed and give them that extra touch – an early advising appointment with a faculty member, a phone call from a current student or orientation leader, or a note from an alum in their area. Have a checklist prepared for students to easily chart their progress towards the first day of class.
You also have students who deposited well before May 1. Why make them wait? Push your room assignment timeline up, give them a change to fill out surveys about their academic interest, start engaging them with clubs and activities from a distance. The more connected they are early on, the less likely they will melt away.
Collect and Communicate – Your new students and parents are going to need a lot of communication during this period. They have many items on their checklist to complete, some of which they will have never done before. So often colleges allow all the different areas of campus send their own communication. This produces fractured or conflicting messages that can confuse your audience.
It can be jarring for families who have been used to being wooed by admissions to suddenly receive very direct and business-like communications. Whoever is coordinating the new student integration effort should collect and catalog all of the information sent to new students between deposit and the first week of classes to make sure that the tone matches and the information fits. This proactive approach will save your students a lot of frustration and you a lot of unnecessary phone calls.
Assess before orienting – For the last 20 years, early, in-person orientation sessions have been considered the gold standard for positively impacting melt. They were backed by research and study, but how old is that research at this point, and how much have students changed in those 20 years? Are you conducting your early orientation program the same way you were 10 years ago? If so it needs to be closely examined.
The last two years have demonstrated that we can do a lot more remotely, and that for certain things, families prefer it. Your program also needs options and alternatives for students who may be coming a long distance. Chances are your classes are becoming more diversity – ethnically, socio-economically, and maybe geographically. Has your program adjusted to recognize this? Get real feedback from students and parents. Also, keep in mind that not everyone likes ice-breakers and rah-rah. A significant percentage of your incoming students will be more introverted and will thank you for a calmer, more organized environment.
Use the “My Family” Test – Policies are very important. We couldn’t do our work without them, but they can also be a real turnoff for families if they seem “one-size-fits-all.” Let’s face it, every college has some policies that help its staff manage workload, but that make very little sense to newcomers. Before you get to the “integration” phase, review all of the policies that your new students and their parents are likely to encounter.
Ask yourself, “If I was a parent and I was paying a large amount of money and handing over my child, how would I feel about this policy? Could I respect it? Would I at least understand it?” If the answer would be a clear negative, consider whether than policy makes sense. Is it possible to change the workflow instead so that this psychological barrier could be eliminated? Policies often grow accidentally or from a temporary solution. Make sure that they are still the best way of doing business.
Make the hard part easy – The most painful part of this transition for most families is financial. This is a huge investment for many, and it is worse because the process is complicated at the same time. We pour salt in the wound when we make it difficult for people to pay us. We can make it easier by training our admissions counselors to also have expertise in financial aid. By creating “enrollment counselors” who can take families through most of the process, we maintain that relationship of trust, rather than passing them off to other offices, where they need to start from scratch.
We should also make our websites as user friendly and step-by-step as possible to make it easier for families to serve themselves. In particular, I’m a little shocked at the degree to which we don’t use video. When I want to learn how to fix something or complete a process I’ve never done before, I almost always search for a simple tutorial video. Why do we not use this universal format more often to explain our financial aid, billing, and housing processes? All it takes is a phone to make the hardest parts of the transition more digestible.
Build your team across campus – The foundation of all of these improvements is good communication across many areas of campus. There is no way that the admissions or orientation teams can put a hard freeze on student melt without a lot of assistance from other areas of campus. You need everyone at the table, focused on the common goal of integrating students into your campus community. Start this conversation early and make it a regular occurrence. New students and their families should experience a unified campus, with a single purpose, and the same commitment to the student experience.
Taking these steps will help remove many of the barriers that block new students from making a successful transition, and will help to cool down any runaway melt.
