Test 2

Let’s start by channeling Maslow.

Humans want to feel the love. It’s right in the middle of that colorful pyramid. We all yearn to belong; we all want to feel wanted. Arguably, a young adult’s need for it is on overdrive.

Great recruiters routinely show love to their recruits by lavishing them with lots of attention, by sharing especially relevant and resonant information, and by making each one feel as though s/he is at the top of the prospective student V.I.P. list.

Technology now allows us to really pile on the love by sending “personalized” messages via every imaginable channel, each remarkably tailored to the recipient’s peculiar interests.

But the most influential of all “love gifts” that colleges and universities show prospective students comes in the form of scholarships and grants. Free money. Deep discounts. Great deals. All designed to help the recruits we love conquer what they view as the ridiculously high price of higher education.

[...]

Other than gift aid, what valuable symbols of affection can your institution offer students you want most? Here’s a handful of thought-starters:

• Priority/preferred registration.
• Priority/preferred housing or parking assignments.
• Athletic coach-like attention from music/theatre directors, student group leaders and sponsors, and other co-curricular personalities who are engaged in activities of interest to the prospective student.
• For new students with children, priority placement or discounted day care services.
• Assignment of a “career mentor” (an alumnus/a working in the student’s intended career field).
• Assignment of a “peer mentor” (college junior) who will be a senior when the prospective enrolls as a freshman.
• Assignment of a “peer family” (family of current student or recent grad) to provide unofficial, on-demand trusted counsel to incoming freshmen parents.
• Local host family assignment to offer first-year students a home-away-from-home.
• Academic advising/consulting during high school senior year.
• Multichannel outreach/attention (webinars, text messaging, social media initiatives, correspondence, event hosting, high school or home visits, etc.) by the student’s major professor or department chair.

Unorthodox thinking? Yes, by traditional recruitment standards. But to borrow (and butcher) an old saw, “Different times really do call for different measures.” It’s looking like that time is now.

Colleges must not establish policies, engage in practices,
imply advantage, or offer incentives whose effect is to
circumvent NACAC’s Code of Ethics and Professional
Practices’ established deadlines. Incentives are allowed
when equally available to students who wait until the
established deadlines. Colleges will not guarantee
admission, specific college placement, or institutional
financial aid or scholarship awards prior to an application
being submitted, except when preexisting criteria are
stated in official publications.

Old Main, on Penn State's University Park campus

New foreign student enrollment in the U.S. dropped by 6.6 percent in the 2017-18 academic year, double the previous year’s rate of decline, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE). While the total number of international students in the U.S. grew slightly, the drop in new enrollees is the biggest since 9/11, said Rachel Banks, public policy director at NAFSA: Association of International Educators. The decline seems to be continuing this year, she said.

The report attributed the drop to multiple factors, including visa delays and denials, the “social and political” environment and the cost of attending a U.S. school. The administration’s hard-right immigration policies, such as banning people from Muslim-majority countries and separating children from their parents at the border, make prospective students and their parents feel “that we’re not a welcoming country,” Banks said.

The number of F-1 visas, the kind issued to foreign students going to school full-time in the U.S., dropped from about 644,000 in fiscal 2015 to about 394,000 in fiscal 2017, according to data from the U.S. State Department. Vanessa Andrade, associate director of international partnerships and program development at California State University, Northridge, said safety is always the biggest concern.

The more than 1 million foreign students in the U.S. contributed $39 billion and supported more than 455,000 jobs during the 2017-18 academic year, according to an analysis by NAFSA. The largest spending benefits went to California, New York, Massachusetts, Texas and Pennsylvania. NAFSA said education is one of the country’s biggest services exports.

“Education—particularly higher education—is a major American export,” University of California, Santa Barbara economics professor Dick Startz wrote in a Brookings Institution blog post in 2017. “When we provide a service that leads to foreigners sending money into the U.S., that’s an export with exactly the same economic effects as when we sell soybeans or coal abroad.”

After a couple of admissions cycles, some will move on to something else, while others will get sucked into the higher education industry for the rest of their careers.

“A co-worker of mine once described admissions as a two-or-20 job, meaning you’re either in it for two years or 20 years,” said Matthew Kaberline, who used to work in UMW admissions and recently became the associate director of college counseling at the Severn School in Maryland. “There didn’t seem to be an in between.”

The centerpiece of the job is “travel season,” which runs from September to early November. Recruiters hit the suburbs with color-coded calendars and global positioning systems loaded with high school addresses. They rack up loyalty program points at mid-tier hotels, log thousands of miles on rental cars and learn how to hide booze on their expense reports.

Between appointments, they wander through shopping malls, search for a Panera with WiFi or dream about how they will someday blow all of these loyalty points on a major vacation. Many of these road warriors become friends. Some drunkenly hook up. A few fall in love.

But the lifestyle can be exhausting. The pay can be painfully low. And it can be frustrating for some recruiters, who are figuring out their lives, to deal with high school students who are doing the same thing.