Did you know there are approximately 30 million people who started but did not complete a college degree? According to 2021 NCES data, the retention rate for part-time bachelor’s students is 45 percent. That presents a huge opportunity for universities! There are individuals who have indicated they are interested in higher education, but they’ve taken a break. It’s time to re-engage!
Our view is that, ultimately, these stop-outs will return to school. The major question is will they return to their original school? Likewise, will your stop-outs return to your school? Too often, schools have the right intention, but have resource constraints or “priority” fatigue, to fully execute a holistic strategy that yields 10 to 15 percent of new annual enrollments. Sure, life happens; work, financial and family challenges exist, but too frequently the stop-outs have not been nurtured or they don’t have a strong relationship with the institution. That means when they are ready to return, they choose a competitor.
We help institutions create a scalable strategy that includes integrated messaging, measures engagement, and improves re-enrollment and completion.
Here are seven steps to recover and re-enroll stop-outs:
- Target: Focus on those individuals that have the highest probability of completing. Go back six years in your record and prioritize your target audience by drop date, degree level and credits completed. Establish a measurement for success. How many re-admits would you like to acquire? What is the remediation offer or specific solution for each person to re-enroll? Our solution identifies those most likely to re-enroll!
- Locate: You know who they are, it’s been a while since they dropped, do you know where they are? We use a wide variety of tools to locate current phone, email, and social media to locate and determine the best way to communicate.
- Engage: Engagement requires a combination of technology, integrated messaging, and professional personal success coaching. Once contact is made, it’s about re-establishing the relationship!
- Capture Data and Insight: It can’t be understated how important it is to capture actionable data. We score and model the data to provide powerful insight across the entire initiative to identify key pressure points that lead students to stop out. All of this gives your university the insight you need to retain students, enhance marketing and operations, and measure ongoing improvement.
- Inspire: You’ve listened and discovered their challenges, what are their motivations for completing? What were those motivations when they originally enrolled? Have those changed? Help them create a new vision for academic success!
- Partner: Students desire clarity and a clear path to completion. Quickly provide a clear academic plan and a single point of contact who can be both a cheerleader and a one-stop source.
- Support: Ongoing, consistent personal support that helps students cross the finish line is required. Sure, having an academic game plan is great, but they need to be applauded and congratulated for small steps by a real human — not just with automated marketing. It is imperative that frequent outreach discussing their progress and challenges is completed.
These students are ready to come back to school, let us help with a win-back strategy! At Education Connex, we’ve built a customized solution to reconnect, re-engage and re-enroll former students. Let us help you!
