Julie Staggs Shares Her Insights on Graduate School Topics
Stamats: What is your professional background?
JS: I’ve been fortunate to work in and around higher education for the majority of my professional life. I worked at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in two capacities. First, I worked in specialized admissions, recruiting music students. Then, I worked as a performing arts director running the concert series and concert hall.
For a large chunk of my professional life—more than ten years—I worked with the curriculum side of higher education at Pearson Education, Web CT, and medical publisher Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Because I’ve worked on the curriculum side, I understand the building and launching of a program. For many years, I was in online learning, so I am definitely a specialist in that area. I have a fullness of understanding of institutions from the front end, with admissions, to the back end, with academics and academic departments and programs—and what it takes to launch one and dealing with academic departments.
The other part of my background includes time working for Corporate Executive Board, a publicly traded best practices research firm. In that position, I worked with Fortune 100 companies—such as Microsoft, Kraft, PepsiCo, Goodrich, Honda, and even steel companies in Australia—looking at their processes, metrics, and working across functional silos. I had the great fortune of working with these companies to help them understand how large companies look at and optimize strategy and innovation. I helped them understand the innovation process and the relationship between R&D, sales and marketing, and customer demand.
Stamats: Please talk about your focus in graduate admissions.
JS: After working in business for a while, I chose to come back to the higher-education market. Through Stamats’ history of working with colleges around the country, we have learned over time that this is a very specific market with conditions that are different from the undergraduate market. Stamats believes it is critical to have someone on the team focus on this particular part of the admissions and marketing market for higher education. This role was perfect for me because of my background. Over the years, I have been focused on what’s different about higher education as a market segment and how we can bring resources and solutions to bear specifically for the needs of graduate admissions.
Stamats: What are the biggest challenges you’re seeing among higher education institutions this year?
JS: The reason I’m focusing on segmentation at this conference is that recruiting has changed at the graduate level. Graduate departments are now dealing with many more students who got a lot of special attention as undergraduates. One of the biggest challenges is, How do you customize your recruitment without catering to each individual prospect? Schools have to give a higher level of customer service than ever in the past. It’s really become a challenge of resources of all types: personnel, time, and money.
Many of today’s entering graduate students are Gen Y. They’re used to more technology. They’re used to being recruited earlier. They often have “helicopter parents” hovering around to be sure they get all kinds of special attention. This is no longer your independent graduate student; there are a lot of schools getting parent requests for graduate school materials. With Gen Y heading to graduate school, the game has changed. The expectations have changed. The biggest challenges have been around the heightened expectations of prospects in the graduate market.
Stamats: What is working well for graduate admissions departments around the country?
JS: First, the schools that are wise enough to do research to focus their budgets and resources on the areas of greatest potential are doing very well. The other thing I see working really well is where graduate schools are messaging to various segments based on a certain and articulated brand. By that I mean, the schools that know who they are, what they provide, and who they compete with—and who can articulate it to individual market segments—are doing well and seeing good results. The last thing I would say is the schools that are transitioning to or giving greater weight to data in their decision-making process are able to be more flexible and nimble and make informed decisions throughout their marketing and recruiting cycles.
Stamats: What is the next trend you see coming?
JS: The biggest trend I see coming is the need for continuous decision-making in marketing and admissions. By that I mean, because so much electronic media is used—whether it’s social media or email, whatever it may be—it has become more and more critical to be able to gather good data, utilize it to make decisions, and so become much more nimble and flexible marketing and admissions departments. What’s going to help that happen is the ability to have the tools and the skills to collect and use data effectively.
Stamats: How does segmentation apply to that trend?
JS: In the non-academic world, individuals are used to being marketed to on almost a one-to-one basis, because consumer databases are so rich with information. Whether it’s the targeted Facebook ads that you see or your grocery store printing out coupons based on your purchases, identifying meaningful segments to whom you can give a specific message is going to be critical. And what’s also going to drive success is being able to identify certain segments that have common interests and needs so that you can message to those.
Stamats: Why did you plan the conference in this way?
JS: We want to give recruiters and marketing staff the opportunity to learn about segmentation through the experience, expertise, and advice of the Stamats consultants and graduate school marketing and recruiting professionals. My colleagues will be talking about the research and trend analysis that Stamats has been doing. This will be accompanied by specific tactics shared by fellow graduate marketing and admissions colleagues, who will talk about how they are executing on segmentation within their institutions.
Stamats: What will your preconference sessions be about and who should attend them?
JS: This year, we’ve added preconference sessions focused on those folks who are new in their roles in graduate admissions and marketing. The preconference sessions will focus on sharing information about the likenesses and differences with marketing roles both outside higher education and inside. We’ll also learn some terminology and discuss how these roles function within an institution.
