Jennifer Wick

Are you on the lookout for stealth ISIRs? Now that the 2013-2014 FAFSA is available, the aid office should be downloading Institutional Student Information Record (ISIR) files. Most of these records will match up with students already in your admissions database. Some won’t match because of errors in the spelling of names, dates of birth, or social security numbers. These mismatches need to be cleaned up in a timely manner so that students can be considered for aid – they won’t know that their ISIRs have been rejected, and will be waiting for an aid letter. Being proactive will ensure that these students receive timely aid offers. Some mismatches will be students that simply aren’t in the system. These students listed your institution’s…Read more

The fact is that most colleges and universities today are not in the selection business, accepting 80% (or more) of completed applications. Most higher education institutions should be focused on sales, but that is not how many schools chose to spend their time and energy. Here are a few suggestions. Are your admission counselors buried under a mountain of applications? Sounds like a good problem to have, but if your sales force is busy handling applications, how much time are they spending selling? Not to diminish from the time and care students put into preparing their applications, but if students are clearly admissible based on quantitative measures like GPA and SAT, automatically admitting them and reserving more thorough reviews for borderline…Read more

Although helping institutions with financial aid strategies may be why we are most often hired, we typically find that an institution’s enrollment success is seldom just about financial aid - making the case for value, building relationships, and providing excellent service are also key in meeting enrollment goals. The best aid strategy will not be effective in growing enrollments, for example, if there is not sufficient demand to generate a critical number of admitted students. In addition, at some institutions, admitted students are simply not very sensitive to increases in grants. In this case increasing grants would likely result in minimal enrollment growth and come at the expense of net tuition revenue. Even if students are responsive…Read more