How Universities Can Reach College-Bound Students At Home

Few aspects of the American high school experience have survived the pandemic unchanged. School went virtual. Extracurricular activities were either canceled or altered to comply with social distancing measures. And when it comes to the SAT and ACT, two-thirds of all U.S. 4-year colleges and universities either aren’t requiring or considering standardized test scores for 2021 applicants.

This last development has made life challenging inside higher education, not simply because admissions officers have lost a tool for evaluating students, but because testing data is at the center of how colleges and universities identify prospects. Here’s how admissions offices can find college-bound students.

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Buying lists still work, but onboarding is a family affair

While higher education has deprioritized standardized testing and many high school students have decided not to sit for those exams, the lists of those who do take the SAT and ACT remain valuable. But to turn those lists into prospects, admissions offices need to recognize the role the household plays in the process.

Lists help identify a particular student, but onboarding those lists to a data management platform is how schools can target the household-level. The reason for focusing on the household is simple. Parents often shoulder the financial costs of higher education, making them active players in the decision-making process. But even when parents don’t plan on footing the bill, they likely have a lot of influence over a college-bound student’s choice of schools. Speaking to the household—via direct mail, digital, and mobile—matters a lot.

Admissions offices must focus on quick and accurate match rates for onboarding. Accuracy matters and the match rate is arguably just as important. If the match rate is low (less than 85%), admissions offices are missing out on a valuable opportunity to engage with potential students and their families in an ever-expanding digital environment. Onboarding speed is also crucial, especially during the yield period when students weigh multiple offers. If a list can’t be onboarded or matched within a day or less, then its value will quickly diminish.

Current students are a window unto future students

For a variety of reasons, some schools choose not to use lists of standardized test-takers to find prospective students. In other instances, such as addressing a drop-off in test-taking during the pandemic, schools that use those lists need to augment them to fine-tune the audience. Regardless, admissions offices can build look-a-like audience models based on the households of current students.

Look-a-like audience models are a common digital marketing practice, but they can be especially useful for identifying households with college-bound students because admissions offices have a lot of historic data to leverage. That is, from an audience modeling perspective, the households of current students share a significant number of attributes with the households of future classes. By using factors like geography, affluence, and household education level, admissions offices can replicate historic prospect pools.

Leverage third-party data

For some schools, using first-party data to build look-a-like models isn’t an option. In those cases, admissions offices can leverage third-party data to find prospective students. Typically, the level of household education is a key qualifying characteristic of a household with a college-bound student. That kind of information, along with affluence, geography, and other factors, are commonly available from third-party data providers.

But one way admissions offices can improve the use of third-party data is by modeling their first-party data. Schools don’t have to onboard those models or share that data with any providers, but those models can give them useful directional insight when working with third-party data providers.

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Location, location, location

One truism in the college admissions world is the concept of a “feeder” high school. Year after year, a given college tends to engage with prospective students at the same group of high schools. By identifying those feeder schools, admissions offices can create their prospect pool. (By the way, this tactic works especially well for finding transfer students and graduate school admissions, where prospect pools are typically much smaller).

The key here is to leverage device IDs that are associated with a feeder school location and then link that data back to relevant households. A location-based approach has its limits during a pandemic because many schools have closed their physical locations. But the pandemic headwinds aren’t permanent, and so college admissions offices should consider this tactic in the future.

That said, admissions offices need to understand two things about leveraging device IDs. First, the goal isn’t to serve ads to the device. As with all the other tactics discussed, the target is the household, not an individual. Second, and even more important, it’s critical that colleges only work with permission-based location data. That is, the device ID should only come from a device where the owner has granted an app permission to share their data. By working only with permission-based apps and targeting at the household-level, colleges can be certain that they’re complying with the letter of privacy laws as well as honoring the wishes of students and parents.

A final word

Admissions offices have a long track record when it comes to building pools of prospective students. In some ways, the fundamentals of that mission haven’t changed in decades—nor should they. It’s still appropriate to do direct mail and leverage alumni networks and other offline recruiting channels. But it’s also important to use digital to enhance operations. The way to think about each of these four tactics is to ask yourself if it’s additive to your existing process? Admissions offices don’t need to reinvent the wheel here, but they should deploy technology wherever they can to make that wheel better.

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