Test 2

There has been a lot of activity in my timeline about colleges changing their business practices due to the coronavirus. Yesterday I listened to a highly relevant piece at NPR (shout-out to Elissa Nadworny) about how COVID-19 is impacting students looking to attend college. Listen here. Some good print-takeaway:

[High school senior Xander] Christou spent most of last fall like many high school seniors: researching and applying to schools. He planned to spend the spring visiting some of the campuses he was accepted to. "Online, the colleges are just names and logos and programs," he says, "nothing will compare to actually being on campus and speaking face-to-face with current students."

But with so many colleges shutting down, all of those visits have been cancelled — including one "candidate weekend" on NYU's Abu Dhabi campus that was all-expense paid. "I was very excited for that," he says, "all I had to do was pack and go to the airport." He would have gotten back home last week. The return flight, without him on it, got cancelled too.

Of course it's more than just the visits — he's waiting on his financial aid offers, too. Money, and how his family is going to pay for college, has become even more important.

Indeed. And that's why we are seeing more and more institutions pushing the May 1st acceptance date to June 1st (or later).

Like the rest of the nation world, this COVID thing is impacting everything, and college admissions is no exception. However, how colleges and universities react to the challenges that are presented are very different. The next few weeks are going to see a lot of changes in the way that institutions of higher education recruit and enroll their classes...

But instead of focusing on our business processes, we should be taking direction from the needs of the students that we are recruiting. We shouldn't be concerned with "what we have always done" or "what will enhance our yield". Rather, we should be bending over backwards to help students - even if said students decide to not attend our institution.

This is a time in history when humans should all be helping each other, and the college search process should be no different.

Is this an uneasy time? Yes. Does each day bring about even more uncertainty? Absolutely. But, as I've been saying to our team, "We need to start to be comfortable with the discomfort that these times are bringing." If we can do that, we can help students get through the process of figuring out what to do after high school graduation.