I’m curious about the types of atypical or innovative incentives folks have seen from colleges that are trying to generate interest in their schools in what is an increasingly competitive market (between the declining demographics of HS grads, and waning interest of some in attending college among other factors). I know that free fly in programs has been a strategy used by some schools for decades along with application fee waivers. Eliminating supplemental essays is another some schools seem to be employing to generate apps, if not genuine interest.
I’m primarily thinking about things that are designed to get students interested in the school so that they consider even applying, as opposed to incentives for things like Early Decision (for example, I know some schools offer tuition discounts, early housing selection, or even other incentives like a free bike for all ED enrollees).
What got me thinking about this topic is Agnes Scott College’s $2000 per year scholarship for students applying for 2026 who visit campus. A campus visit will net a student who applies and enrolls $8,000 off of tuition over four years. Given that a substantial majority of the school’s students are from Georgia, I imagine there could be at least two reasons for this incentive: 1) to get more students from Georgia and locally to come for a campus visit because they believe more campus visits will get more folks to apply once they see what the school has to offer and what the campus is like (and I will say as someone who has visited, their info session and campus tour was excellent, probably the best of all the schools we visited); 2) to get more out of state students to invest in visiting because the scholarship amount would more than offset the cost of the trip if those students ultimately decide to attend.
I think this is a good strategy for a school trying to drive up interest.
Have you seen other innovative incentives aimed at getting more students interested in applying to schools?
My daughter’s school, Florida Tech had a ‘visit’ scholarship too, and also one for ‘knowing’ an alum (which if you didn’t they’d set you up with one). Basically everyone got $2000/yr off, except maybe international students who couldn’t visit. They also had scholarships for eagle scout/Gold Girl Scout award, hs robotics, and can’t remember the others but there were about 5 of them. There were some schools that used to give $1000 for filling out the FAFSA (I know Stetson was one).
I was just reading earlier that Pace is doing similar albeit at $1000 per year. The article noted that students were 50% more likely to commit to a school they had visited (I don’t think they cited the source for that)
Wasn’t there some school offering bicycles to admitted students who had ED’d? (Not sure if I am remembering the details correctly)
We toured one small university at a time when they were not in session and therefore did not offer tours. We politely asked if we could have a tour anyway. They said yes. I think that it might have been the head of admissions who personally gave us a tour.
St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY has a similar incentive to Agnes Scott College, offering a $1000 “Visit Award” which totals $4000 over the four years for visiting the campus with an officially scheduled admissions visit.
As an aside, it interests me that even colleges that say DI doesn’t matter track interest. C26’s Boulder portal has a “visits” page, that so far includes the general and department-specific visits as well as the visit to C26’s high school (all of which were done before they applied).
IME some colleges that don’t use DI in the admissions decision do still ‘track’ engagement (for students and sometimes even parents) for a couple of reasons:
Quantitatively measure efficacy and reach of various marketing tactics and overall strategy. Some schools spend big $ on marketing and they need to know the ROI on these marketing investments.
Use said engagement level in their predictive analytic models to estimate yield at the student level. (Which then can be rolled up to calculate a yield estimate for a given cohort of projected/actual acceptances.)
Not necessarily but maybe how many overall they admit - but not looking at who visited or interacted in that decision. and it’s likely just one thing they look at.
It’s more likely to see if their ad spend is impactful which many organizations in various industries do. Can they tie # if admits or attendees to specific activities? Are those worth doing again or expanding upon ?
Could be being done at a macro rather than individual level. Similar to the stat above that students are 50% more likely to enroll if they visited, then take that back to $x spend on y marketing tool gets z% more students to visit. Some schools have a lot more visit options for prospective students than others, so I guess part is figuring out whether that’s worthwhile.
Possibly, sure. There are many examples of CDSs being inaccurate whether by accident/because CDSs aren’t completed by admissions depts and/or with the intention to be less than transparent.
That was one benefit of the pandemic…the vast majority of schools have online visits. Some schools might ‘count’ that the same as an in-person visit, others might not.
From a student perspective they can be vastly different. Dare I say, like some airbnbs are just like the pictures you see on the site and others aren’t.
Not at Florida Tech. The merit money was on a formula (gpa, score, and if available rank), and the visit money was awarded separately (along with other minor grants like knowing an alum, boy scout award, robotics). All were at different times, but a student who got a $20k merit award could get the other awards if they did that item (ex, visit) and the same $20k award who didn’t visit didn’t get the money. None of the extra money was decision making or breaking, but it was nice to have and I’m sure the school felt it was worth it to get the student to visit if possible.
Merit money, on the other hand, is decision breaking as for my daughter it was about 1/2 of tuition, the other half came from different (smaller) sources like bright futures, the alum award, the visit, etc.
I think for us when we first saw the sticker price I was like there is NO WAY we’ll be able to afford this, but when we saw all the little awards it started to become possible. Then the big awards (for us, merit and athletic) and the amount left was manageable.