December 2006

Recruitment & Retention - December 2006 - Full Issue PDF
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Assessing Consumer Demand for Adult Education
Four key consumer groups make up the adult continuing and professional education market. Each group has distinct motivators, program preferences, and enrollment behavior, which has implications for higher education marketing.

The Positive and Negative Effects of First-Year Learning Communities
Even successful student programs have drawbacks. The sense of community students get in a residential freshman interest group, for example, can help them adjust to college life, but it can also create cliques and peer pressure.

Seven Parent Populations Your Institution May Be Alienating
When working with parents of students, your between-the-lines messages matter. If, for example, you assume that all students begin as freshmen and live on campus, your opening comments at parent orientation are likely to ignore or even alienate parents of transfer and commuter students.

Parent Video Shares Immigrants’ Experiences
Given that the Twin Cities are home to a large Hmong population, the College of St. Catherine in Minnesota has developed a Hmong-language recruitment and orientation video. The result has been so successful that the college has created a second video for Somali families and is in the process of completing a third for Latino families.

Ten Retention Tools for Academic Advisors
By Joan Marques, Ed. D.
In my time as an academic advisor in higher education, and currently as a faculty advisor, I have come to experience the following strategies as successful ones in approaching students and, consequentially, increasing their retention rates.

Parents as a Target Market in College Admissions
By Brian A. Vander Schee, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh-Bradford
Much of the work in the field of marketing higher education is focused on institutional marketing geared towards high school students. But are these efforts targeting the right market? Are high school students actually making the decision regarding their college choice, or are there other significant players involved in the process?

Newswire
Admission counseling association launches crisis website; Survey suggests there’s an audience for admission podcasts