Set in a lushly pastoral, quaintly historic location in the Northeast, this medium-sized, four-year public university should have been breathing the fresh air of the countryside. Instead, it was getting queasy from the ups and downs of seesawing enrollment trends. University leadership was aware that their current financial aid model was no longer meeting their enrollment goals and that their approach did not fully account for a student’s ability to pay. They began looking for solutions and discovered RNL’s Advanced FinAid Solutions.
Growing Enrollment, Maintaining Student Academic Profile, and Boosting Revenue
We began our partnership in fall 2019. The overall goal of our partnership was to increase student headcount while maintaining the academic caliber of the overall student population.
Additionally, university leadership specifically sought to:
- Increase first-year student enrollment.
- Increase the number of students in residence halls.
- Maintain the academic profile of the incoming class.
Our consultant kicked off the onboarding process of our partnership with an on-campus visit in early November 2019. During this discovery visit, we met with key leadership team members whose positions, experiences, and insights are vital to enrollment success. A month later, RNL and the university teams met again to review historical trend data and present enrollment goal recommendations for the fall 2020 cycle. Once we got the go-ahead, we began working together on the following tasks:
- Aligning admission marketing and communication.
- Implementing new financial aid leveraging strategies.
- Educating university staff members in admissions,financial aid, athletics, and other key stakeholders across campus about the new initiatives.
- Redesigning email used by admissions and financial aid to ensure that outbound messaging was well-aligned with the new financial aid modeling.
Since then, the university has experienced the following results through our partnership:
9.6%
Year-over-year increase of first-year student enrollment
7.6%
Increase of first- year students in residence
STABLE
student academic profile
In addition to the outcomes above, campus leaders report that RNL has met and exceeded their expectations with:
- Speed to market
- Campaign reporting and optimization recommendations
- A positive and healthy team dynamic
Let’s create your enrollment success story
Talk with our enrollment experts about how you can create the right campaigns to engage more students, help more of them enroll and persist, and achieve your enrollment goals.