Written by Chris Potts, Senior Assistant Director Of Admission

By now most people know (or should know!) of the impending nationwide crisis for the higher education profession: a sharp decline in the number of students graduating from high school and attending college. Because of this it will become much more difficult for colleges to recruit students, or at least students who they are used to recruiting. New strategies must be developed, new methods put in place, and as a profession we must begin to think more like the students we want to recruit - we must enter their world on their timeline and in their preferred manner. As if it isn’t already, it will become even more of a “buyer’s market” for college bound students, who will have numerous colleges almost begging for them to attend their “prestigious” institution. Both students and parents alike will eventually catch on to this, and as a result will be able to command much greater attention and respect from colleges and universities (respect as in greater scholarship packages and newer, nicer, and bigger facilities, among other things).

Ah yes, our field of work is changing rapidly and being forced to adapt to the changing world around us. Wait a minute - did I just say being forced to “adapt” to the changing world around us? Silly me. I know better. Even though, in my opinion, our survival as institutions depends on us realizing the sober realities that students are no longer choosing where they attend school based solely on the quality of the academics, the “scholarly reputations” of the faculty, or the overall academic reputation, we are still marred in the details of what were issues years ago. We are debating issues that are no longer of any concern to students looking to attend college and this shows in our archaic publications, our methods of communication, and our awkward attempts to remain “scholarly” while simultaneously entering the student’s worlds.

Enter new ways of communication. Facebook. MySpace. Zinch. Twitter. Text messaging. Instant Messaging…and on and on. Ask most people on any college campus about any of these and it’ll be like you’re speaking Greek. And yet, it seems that very few people in higher education care to educate themselves on these things let alone even entertain the idea that it will make a difference in their recruitment efforts as a university or will impact how they will have to adapt their teaching strategies, building strategies, social strategies, etc.

Here at Butler, for example, we have admittedly done a very good job in keeping up with these new trends and ways of communication with students. We have jumped head first into the realm of “the eighteen year old.” What a concept! But when I say “we,” I am mainly talking about a few people, almost all of whom work in enrollment. For example, we now have a fairly large presence on Facebook. Yet oddly, the same decision makers tell our admission counselors to “stay away” from sites such as these, including MySpace as well, and that we should never be looking at or even visiting such sites when making admission decisions - or even to just learn more about our students. Heaven forbid we’d want to actually forge authentic relationships with our prospective students. So even though “we” are advertising on Facebook, utilizing blogs and forums, capitalizing on the newness of Zinch, that’s all peripheral. We still must do the nitty gritty recruitment of students through writing notecards, sending plain text e-mails that seemingly nobody reads anyone (minus perhaps some parents), and making even more awkward “congratulations on your admission” phone calls; because everyone knows that a personal call means more to a student than sending them a note on Facebook, right??

My point in all of this is that a continental divide is developing at many colleges and universities, between the “old media” types and the “new media” types. A large percentage of us in higher education, for some valid reasons, are terrified of venturing totally into the world and mind of an eighteen year old student, and yet every year we ask the same questions as to why our recruitment strategies don’t seem to be working and what we can do to improve them. If as a profession we don’t quickly realize this and make legitimate efforts to better balance our communication strategies, then students will toss us aside, rightly or wrongly making the conclusion that we don’t care enough about them to actually want to communicate with them on their level. And with fewer number of prospective students to go after - well, this will naturally mean that some institutions just may actually be “forced” to think like that of an eighteen year old - whether they want to or not.