How To Increase Private College Enrollment

Every private academic institution aims to expand its educational services to the people. However, when enrollment rates are not as high as in previous years, you must take immediate action to remedy this situation. Perhaps no new students find your university through traditional promotional methods because they are no longer relevant in the new normal. As such, you must adjust accordingly. Here are six strategies you can consider to increase private college enrollment.

Adopt Digital Strategies

As the ongoing global pandemic keeps people indoors, your private college or university would do well to implement distance learning options for interested students. Students worry about their risk of infection just as much as completing their degree. By setting up digital strategies for your campus, you are telling potential students that you prioritize their health and safety amid the world health crisis.

We discuss the effectiveness of digital strategies in a college’s success with higher education professionals in this webinar. Our team explores how these solutions serve as ways to establish emotional connections with students with face-to-face classes not allowed. Consider streaming the 30-minute video for insights into various virtual strategies designed for maintaining quality education amid a global situation.

Create a Video Viewbook

One digital strategy that your university can adopt is a video viewbook. With this plan, you can highlight your school’s story, faculty, and student body in an easily accessible platform. As such, potential enrollees can get immersed in your school’s rich culture as soon as they find you online. You want to make a good impression since your website is most likely the first thing students engage with.

Wayne State is one private college that benefited from a video viewbook feature. This institution tapped StudentBridge to oversee the implementation of this strategy so that it could offer immersive, virtual experiences. Discover how creating a video viewbook helped it obtain a 20% growth in enrollment over four years.

Establish Interactive Campus Maps

Another digital strategy to consider is providing an interactive campus map. This strategy also contributed to Wayne State’s improved enrollment rates. Campus maps that potential students can access online give others a feel of what to expect in your school. They also promote the values and stories attached to your school’s architecture.

Successful interactive campus maps are 3D and feature 360° images. As potential students walk through your campus through these features, you can offer detailed descriptions and embed links to promote related content. Any comprehensive platform will look attractive to anyone who expects the best from the school they intend to enter.

Based on our findings, we discovered that 72% of seniors would rely on virtual tours to make an enrollment decision. Thus, these maps give your private college a better chance of securing new students by simply giving them the option to walk through your campus virtually.

Offer Virtual Tour Guides

Institutions that want to improve their interactive campus map strategies can implement StudentBridge’s VisiTOUR™ platform. This personalized campus tour app is a solution that expands the use of interactive campus guides.

VisiTOUR showcases your campus when actual tours are over-booked or unavailable. This means that potential students can still browse your halls even when they have no officials beside them to show them around and explain things.

This app features 360° images, audio, and text guides at each tour stop, highlighting your campus’s assets. It is a web-based application that visitors don’t need to download, making it a convenient way to see your campus.

You can also collect analytics from your visitors to determine who is likely to enroll. It automatically converts stealth visitors into prospects so that you can add them to the next stage of your marketing strategies.

Organize Virtual Events

Like tours promote your building and culture, you can attract potential students by adopting virtual event solutions. Organizing virtual events extends your traditional on-campus and in-person events to those who might not have immediate access to your school.

Virtual events are great options for students who prefer distraction-free environments over the authenticity of a campus event. Perhaps they have conditions that affect their in-person engagement, are immunocompromised, or live too far from your private college.

You also get to review your school’s culture when organizing virtual events. You can determine what works and adjust as necessary by assessing your events. This way, you have complete control over how you can promote your values to potential students.

At StudentBridge, we found that organizing virtual events increased the average visit duration to 24 minutes. Attendance over in-person events also increased by 35%. It gives them a taste of what your private college offers through online platforms that attract potential students.

Empower Student Connectivity

Assuring potential students that they can engage with other students easily is likely a deciding factor in enrolling. Students may value the opinion of fellow students over the promotions of school administration.

Following that logic, StudentBridge developed CampusBubble to connect students. Setting up this platform helps your private college establish a way for your students to interact through public or private social chat groups.

Faculty and administration can also utilize this feature to help students find their place on campus. CampusBubble is a medium of connection and involvement between students and the institution.

Boost Your Private College Enrollment Rate With StudentBridge

Digital strategies are the leading solutions to increase private college enrollment. As more incoming students are from the digital era, you can expect these potential enrollees to be tech-savvy. So, they will likely look up all university options before settling for one.

Whether you implement a video viewbook of your campus, host virtual tours, or offer student connectivity channels, you must keep up with your strategies efficiently. Consider keeping track of your strategies with the StudentBridge Tech Platform.

We developed this technology to simplify personalization, edits, and analytics. With all the data accessible in a single platform, you can determine what works for an institution’s enrollment rate and what needs improvement. Request a demo to learn more about our platform and how it can help you.