Jul 8th 10 Posted by Brenda Harms in Adult Students, Featured Articles

The Fear of Looking Within

It is a frightening thing really, being able to open up your institution and allow someone in to take a look at your process (for recruitment, or marketing, or any one of a handful of things we do in the world of higher education), in many ways it is like inviting a stranger into your house and encouraging them to open your closet doors. A bit unsettling, to say the least! Yet I can’t help but think that some of the best suggestions I have ever gotten have been from people who were not my direct colleagues, who were not part of my direct team, but were people who could take a look with a fresh set of eyes and see the glaring things that I was blinded to.

Each year dozens of brave clients ask Stamats to complete audits and assessments of their practices when it comes to marketing and recruiting students, and this year, I am proud to say, we are doing more of these in the area of programs serving adult students than ever before. What we find in many cases are outdated processes, some that worked very effectively when there was less competition for adult students, but that today are just not able to keep up with the institution down the street.

What is remarkable to me is that for many of these institutions letting go of “how it has always been” is really difficult. Despite the fact that enrollment is declining, despite the fact that the marketing efforts have not been altered in 15 years, we still hang on to what is familiar. I guess it is the comfort of doing something that is familiar that is hard to part with. Still, the higher education industry is changing rapidly, and yet many schools are not. This worries me and makes me think of the danger of complacency. Or worse yet, the idea that “next year will have a better outcome” despite the lack of a clear plan of doing something different to generate that different outcome next year.

I’m on a campus next week where we are assessing recruitment and marketing for an adult student program. I’m very anxious to make the trip as it is such an enlightening time for me and my colleagues to venture into the closets of an institution and discover what is lurking there. I’m also proud of this institution as they shared with me, in their initial conversation that this was a process that needed to be done on the traditional side of the house as well, but they were starting with the adult student program because they were “more receptive to change.” I hope that your adult student program is being operated by those who do not fear taking a critical look inside. Great things can come from having that outside set of eyes evaluate the possibilities of your program.

Photo by *cedro*