Jun 24th 10 Posted by Brenda Harms in Adult Students, Featured Articles

What I Learned From the For-Profits

As many of you read in my last blog, I attended the Career College Association Conference last week and promised to share with you what I learned, picked up on, and think might be helpful to all of you. First let me say the CCA Conference is a huge event. Hundreds of people (I never heard the official count) and former President Bill Clinton as a keynote. You can imagine, it was quite a thing to participate in.

All that aside, I spent time at some good sessions learning about recruitment practices that are implemented by these institutions, as well as some of the new federal guidelines that are being considered for those in the for-profit industry. The main point of what I learned: there is no secret sauce when it comes to recruitment for these institutions. I know more traditional institutions often blame “aggressive” recruitment practices and overpromising on the part of for-profits as to why many of them have done so well, and I will not argue that this is out there. Just like in any industry there is some good and some bad—we have it too, we just don’t like to acknowledge it very often.

What I learned is that the vast majority of for-profit institutions are not doing anything that each of us couldn’t be doing if we were willing to evaluate our process and make changes, no excuses.  Typically what I saw when I looked at recruitment models was a much more focused process that engaged the prospective student by finding out about THEM, not telling them about us. Yes, there is a swift response that most for-profits implement, much of which we can compete with I believe. But the real difference came, in my eyes, in the messaging. The questions of “how” and “what” and “when” were being talked about during the recruitment cycle and seemed to be as important, if not more important, than the “how fast” question.

This finding reinforced for me the importance of the recruitment process and the importance of the relationship during the process, and while I have talked about that issue now for several years it was really reinforced during this event. This has led me to add to the agenda for the adult student marketing conference for 2011 (February 16-18 in Tempe, AZ) another session with a person who handles recruitment at a for-profit. We have offered a session on this before, and frankly it didn’t go as well as I would have liked it to. We spun off into issues of the quality of the faculty and AACSB accreditation rather than staying on point with the process of recruitment. I am determined to do a better job keeping us on track at the next conference because I am personally convinced there are things to learn. The segment of higher education that is enrolling more adult students than any other right now is the for-profits, and while some of it is not being done tastefully, it also can’t be 100% wrong. I am a big believer in learn where you can. I hope, considering that we all work in the profession of education that we can all be more open to what we CAN learn from this rising group.

Photo by Vaguely Artistic