Here’s a compilation of this week’s tweets:
January 12 – Can the state of Kentucky acquire a new public university in the midst of statewide budget cuts? The rocky road from public to private institution
January 12 – 15th Annual Marketing to Adult Students Seminar, hosted by Aslanian Market Research. We’re looking forward to speaking at this wonderful event in February, and hope you’ll join us for it in San Francisco.
Here’s a compilation of this week’s tweets:
January 5 – Private colleges fear net tuition revenue slump.
January 6 – College rankings proliferate in recent years… and many don’t make much sense.
January 6 – University merger news in Georgia. 8 institutions consolidate into 4.
2011 brought good news on the MBA job front, with unconventional careers more popular than ever while reports of plagiarism and cheating marred an otherwise-upbeat year, according to Businessweek in a recent article on their top college and university business school headlines in 2011.
In the BW Insider, Businessweek’s email newsletter, writers Alison Damast and Erin Zlomek note the B-school job market recovery, a reduction in applications to full-time programs, and how both schools and students continued to struggle with financial problems that include higher tuition costs and reductions in state aid.
At the same time, students who might have considered careers in the B-school staples of consulting or investment banking began gravitating toward jobs in the nonprofit and education fields. Many more took matters into their own hands by launching startups.
The following is a summary of their top 10 business school headlines:
1. MBA Pay: The $3.6 Million Degree
The top B-school for career earning? Harvard Business School, whose grads earned about $3.6 million over the 20-year period.
2. MBA Students Give Career Services a New Assignment
Finance and consulting are no longer the careers synonymous with MBAs. Sure, both industries still grab large chunks of students, but their grip is lessening as jobs at start-ups, nonprofits, government agencies, and social-enterprise ventures rally in popularity.
The past year may rank as one of the easiest in recent memory for getting into business programs, as many would-be applicants held off submitting applications because of lingering economic uncertainty.
4. Better Days Ahead for MBA Job Seekers
Many schools reported that after a mild uptick in hiring in 2010, MBA job placement was finally approaching pre-recession hiring levels and that salaries had increased for the first time since the crisis struck.
5. Business School Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship remained a hot topic in B-schools this year, with more schools offering courses and concentrations in the area.
6. MBA Admissions Directors Tackle Plagiarism
For business students, 2011 may be remembered as the year of the academic short cut, with students at several schools embroiled in cheating and plagiarism controversies.
7. Foreign Enrollment Surges at U.S. B-Schools
The international landscape for graduate education continued to shift in 2011. Applications from foreign applicants to U.S. business schools—particularly from China and the Middle East—reached levels not seen since before the economic crisis triggered visa and financing issues that made it difficult for many foreign students to study in the U.S.
8. Best Part-Time Business Schools 2011
The top spot was claimed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, whose grads experienced an average salary increase of nearly $50,000 upon completing the program, compared to an average of $40,000 for graduates of all executive programs.
9. Curriculum Changes Bring MBA Core Front and Center
The curriculum at a handful of B-schools was altered in order to cram a variety of courses on business fundamentals into the fall semester. The schools referred to the trend as “front-loading;” faculty members expect the change will better prepare students for internship interviews.
10. Tuition Shock Hits Business Majors
The cost of a public college education is up more than 8 percent this year as public institutions run out of ways to slash costs and state governments are pressed to balance budgets. Some states have been hit harder than others: California, Washington, and Arizona all posted double-digit percentage increases in tuition this fall.
Here’s a compilation of this week’s tweets:
December 28 – What makes an application? The Naval Academy and other schools under examination for how they define an application.
December 29 – Tim Copeland recaps the most highly-trafficked blog posts of 2011 on EnrollmentMarketing.org.
Here is a compilation of this week’s tweets:
December 19 – Emphasis on productivity shifting policy discussions to college affordability and accountability.
December 22 – As the higher education accountability drumbeat continues in legal education, what schools/programs are next?
Two-thirds of online adults (66%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. These internet users say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools, according to Aaron Smith, Senior Research Specialist at Pew Research Center.
In Why Americans Use Social Media, roughly two thirds of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members is a major reason they use these sites, while half say that connecting with old friends they’ve lost touch with is a major reason behind their use of these technologies.
This report is based on the findings of a survey on Americans’ use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from April 26 to May 22, 2011, among a sample of 2,277 adults, age 18 and older.
Middle-aged and older adults place a relatively high value on social media as a tool to connect with others around a hobby and interest. Sixteen percent of 30-49 year olds and 18% of 50-64 year olds cite connecting with others with common hobbies or interests as a major reason they use social networking sites, compared with 10% of 18-29 year olds.
Despite the increase in celebrities, athletes, and politicians connecting with the public through social media, less than 11% of the respondents cited reading comments from these groups as a major reason for their use of these tools.
The study does not investigate how respondents use social media to connect with brands and institutions.
While there are no ground-breaking findings in this report, its a good reminder that social media works best when you think about goals – your audiences, not yours.
Download Why Americans Use Social Media (764.8K)
Here is a compilation of this week’s tweets:
December 13 – Higher education technology consolidation is in the air: Hobsons acquires Intelliworks.
Here is a compilation of this week’s tweets:
November 7 – A warning about acting without a social media governance plan… “communities” don’t take kindly to not being able to express their opinions.
November 9 – In response to economic climate, University of Charleston to enact 22% tuition decrease. Will a tuition price war be next?
Here is a compilation of this week’s tweets:
November 2 – DOD will maintain tuition reimbursement for active duty military.
November 2 – Northeastern University expands well beyond their monicker.
November 3 – As reluctance to borrow for education grows, so does the rate of affluent students enrolling in community colleges.
November 4- Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary to eliminate tuition for masters program by 2015.
Earlier this fall, Hotmail declared war on graymail with a new set of filtering features and enrollment marketers need to take notice.
What Hotmail is categorizing as graymail are the messages that technically recipients have subscribed to (think Facebook alerts, Groupon notices, etc), but aren’t engaging with. Perhaps the message content isn’t compelling or their inboxes are being flooded. Whatever the reason, the reality is that they are not engaging with the message.
Earlier this fall, Dick Craddick, Hotmail group program manager, shared that a startlingly low 14% of email messages are actually person-to-person messages that we highly value. The rest? The gray area…containing all of those messages that we “requested” at some point, but may or may not value now.
What Hotmail Is Doing
According to Mike Hotz at ClickZ, there are several new features Hotmail has rolled out that will help users address the graymail issue:
1. Schedule Cleanup – Users will be able to set up batch deletions (automatic, everything other than the most recent newsletter, messages over a week old, and the like).
2. Advanced folder organization – users can automate the movement of messages from a sender en masse to a specified folder.
3. Flagging the top contenders – Messages can be flagged as important and will stay at the top of the inbox.
This is just one more step in the direction the ISPs began taking last fall with Gmail and Yahoo’s automatic sorting features.
What’s an Enrollment Marketer to Do?
According to new adult learner communication preferences research to be released at the 2011 UPCEA Marketing Seminar by DemandEngine, adult learners continue to prefer email as the top communication channel to learn about colleges and universities they are considering.
So, they want to receive email. How do we keep ours from falling into that non-engaged-with graymail category? Keep the following in mind:
Build a relationship – Email marketing success lies in the relationships you build, not just the feature set of your sending platform. Marketers that work to understand their prospective students and then deliver segmented, highly-relevant content to them are going to win the relationship race in the long run.
What works? For adult learners, consider content that updates them on the industry in which you know they either currently work or want to work. What’s the job market like? How can they prepare themselves to advance their careers?
For example, a private university in the Midwest marketing online healthcare programs has used a career guide for healthcare professionals to initiate and then cultivate relationships with prospective students. The email series focuses on the value of additional credentials in select healthcare careers, the reality that many healthcare systems either are or will be requiring this in the near future, and what salary projections look like post-credential.
Blatantly remind them why they are hearing from you – More and more, savvy email marketers are using the space above their messages to overtly remind the recipient why they are receiving their message. And many are also using that space to allow recipients to either manage their preferences or completely unsubscribe.
If they are receiving your message because they previously enrolled in part of your certificate program, tell them. If they are someone who recently expressed interest in your program and this is part of your follow up, tell them. Simple statements like, “You’re receiving this message because you recently expressed interest in our Project Management Certificate program,” can go a long way at capturing their attention, reminding them why you are contacting them, and increasing the likelihood they engage with your message.
Monitor engagement… and act on it– Use your email analytics to understand who is (and who is not) engaging with your messages.
Often, marketers focus only on those that are engaging and just keep sending the same content to those that are not in the hopes that they’ll come back around. Instead of hoping, take a more proactive approach.
What can you do? For starters, identify contacts who have not opened anything you’ve sent in the past six months. Email them and ask if they want to continue receiving emails from you. Give them an opportunity manage their preferences (i.e. alter frequency of your message or even unsubscribe). If they don’t engage at that point, consider removing them from your list.
The Take Away
At the end of the day, marketers must focus on valuable interactions that build relationship. Too often, the focus is on the latest technology or a cool feature that’s available. Quality relationships will trump quantity of pushed-out-messages any day.
