If your recruitment and marketing team are tied up for the next couple of months with open days, expos and school visits, then you haven’t evolved to the Clare era.
Regulation of international and domestic student enrolments and a dogged disinterest in any discussion of increasing research revenue have established clear impediments to traditional revenue sources for universities, while a focus on Fee-Free TAFE has profoundly re-shaped demand across the VET sector.
While maintenance activities are required in recruitment and marketing divisions to keep working within the new market ceilings established by Minister Clare, the spotlight of every good tertiary leader must shift to retention – where millions of dollars of extra revenue can be made, and thousands of lives changed, if students are engaged and supported to pass.
Let’s not spend long pondering the arguments of the craggy rump of academics who suggest any attempt to improve pass rates must equate to a lowering of standards, wistfully pining for the glories of days past when only a tiny fraction of society was allowed into university.
Accepting that some have life issues that prevent them from engaging as fully with their studies as they would wish is a start. The next step is finding ways to engage and more effectively support students with relevant interventions that are aligned with their individual learning needs should be easier through technology including AI – but must also benefit from the expertise of the institution’s engagement, marketing and communication experts.
That’s why it’s exciting to see institutions like Western Sydney focus explicitly on the main game. A 3% rise in market share for student acquisition is pretty modest, but reflects the growing competition in Western Sydney – meaning that the University is effectively battling to defend and retain at least 5% of its market share before it even starts to think about growth. Regardless, the recognition that growth in market share will be modest is paired with a much more aggressive target for retention – reducing the drop out rate from 30% to 17%.
The focus on retention is just as critical in VET where Fee-Free TAFE is suffering horrendous attrition rates in some courses, and demand for many other private RTO offerings has been stifled.
Retention has traditionally been left to overburdened academic staff at the teaching coalface and under-resourced student support services that don’t know how to run a campaign that will engage enough of the students that matter. The results have been largely ignored for the past couple of decades, with a focus on filling up enrolments faster to compensate for the minor flood of broken academic dreams exiting the system at the other end.
Now a new approach is required, with improved resourcing, but also an acknowledgement of the value of specialist skills in engaging and tailoring solutions to students. AI tools can have a powerful impact in helping tailor support, but fresh human brains from the marketing and comms dept need to be empowered with a role in the process and direct responsibility for metrics that directly drive retention and success outcomes.
Tim Winkler is Director of Twig Marketing and Publisher of Future Campus.