Well, here we are coming down the home stretch. May 1st will arrive this week. This is undoubtedly a time of tense anticipation at many colleges, with the economy still in slow recovery mode. It may also be a time of intense negotiation, as financially strapped parents try to find every last financial aid dollar available.
Requests for additional financial aid
Despite our being in the “eleventh hour,” a couple of points may still be worth noting about yield. One has to do with financial aid negotiations by parents. A 30-year sales career taught me a few things about price negotiations. The first is that not all requests by buyers (in this case, parents) are the same. In many cases, students may truly want to attend your institution, and parents may be at the end of their financial rope trying to make it happen. In those cases, finding some extra financial aid or a way to help them avoid anticipated costs could make all the difference.
Honest request or questionable negotiation tactics?
The vast majority of parents are honorable people. And while nearly all may give the impression that they are the financially-strapped parents of a student who truly wants to enroll at your institution, that may not always reflect reality. In a 2004 presentation entitled, “Practical Negotiation Skills” given to an organization of business executives, a purchasing negotiation expert’s handout recommended tactics like:
- Deliberate deception/phony facts
- Nibbling (asking for a little more, and when you get it, still more)
- Add-ons (which he calls the Columbo Technique –“Oh, just one more thing…”)
- Escalating demands
- Threats
- Take-it-or-leave-it
Parents who employ some or all of these negotiation tactics can make life very difficult for admissions officials who are honestly trying to enroll students in programs that can truly benefit their lives. In some cases, parents may request that your institution match another college’s financial aid award because their child truly wants to be on your campus and they’re trying to find a way to make that happen. In other cases, parents may want you to give a larger award so that they’ll have a bargaining chip to use with the institution that’s the real first choice.
When I was in sales, the purchasing agent for a manufacturer who was a regular client invited me into their purchasing office. Posted there was a memo I wasn’t supposed to see. It read:
Purchasing Procedure
- Get three quotes for all major projects.
- After receiving pricing, approach the company with the highest price and tell them that you’ve been offered a price that’s 15% lower than your lowest price. Tell them that you really want to do business with them, as long as they can match that price.
- If they match it, give them the order. If they can’t, give the order to the company that gave you the lowest price.
One would like to think that such duplicity would not find its way into the field of education, but it may be reflected in the requests of a few parents. Naturally, you’ll give all parents the benefit of the doubt, since the vast majority is honorable. But how can you tell the parents who are sincerely negotiating on behalf of a student who wants to attend from those who are just looking for a bargaining chip to use on a competing institution?
Knowledge is power.
One thing that could help in determining which students merit extra help and attention would be having a way to know which students are more likely to enroll at your institution. As enrollment managers undoubtedly know, students who participate are more likely to enroll. Yield websites have been designed to fully engage accepted students. These can be effective, but expensive.
In contrast, a simple, inexpensive website provided one university a way to both learn which students were more likely to attend and to increase the odds that they’d enroll. In a recent marketing test, this university set up a contest to drive accepted students to that website. There they were asked merely to verify or update their contact information and answer a simple question. This sounds quite pedestrian, but the question was one that research by social psychologists had shown to have considerable motivating power.
Increasing knowledge, participation and yield
The results were quite interesting. While this private university as a whole suffered through a yield rate below 16% during the height of the recession, the approximately 500 students who visited the website yielded at 44.75%. Records showed that a significantly higher percentage of these students had attended Accepted Student Day programs. That’s the kind of result social psychology research would have predicted.
Now, the contest was not as well publicized as enrollment managers had planned, so it’s possible that only those students already committed to enrolling visited the site. But hundreds of scientific studies have demonstrated that securing commitments as this website did increases prospects’ feeling of commitment. In fact, a few years before Proctor & Gamble used the same tactic to achieve their most successful product launch in company history.
In either event, the fact is that visiting the website and answering the question provided in itself an effective way to predict with about 50% certainty which students would attend Accepted Student Day programs and which students would actually send in deposits. Armed with the knowledge of whether or not a certain student was in the group more likely to enroll, an admissions official could address parents’ requests from a position of strength. This could make help make springtime the enjoyable season it was meant to be!
To learn more about commitment-securing yield websites, please email me at lrondeau@thealliedgrp.com.
