To have a successful graduate program, you need students. While there are a variety of tools and strategies that you may use to achieve your recruitment and enrollment goals, it is most important that your program recognize the essential role of faculty in building and sustaining your student cohort. For graduate education in particular, faculty are often the most significant attraction to a program and should be utilized effectively.
To have a successful graduate program, you need students. While there are a variety of tools and strategies that you may use to achieve your recruitment and enrollment goals, it is most important that your program recognize the essential role of faculty in building and sustaining your student cohort. For graduate education in particular, faculty are often the most significant attraction to a program. You should encourage them to reach out to potential students, respond to program inquiries, and list their research interests on your website.
Every program needs a recruiting plan to ensure its ongoing viability. Recruiting the best students is a year-round process. It is increasingly competitive. Attracting, selecting, and enrolling the best prospects are critical to academic reputation, improved completion rates, and appropriate time to degree completion. Careful enrollment planning is also needed to develop suitably sized, focused, and diversified cohorts. The plan must take into account available resources, research and teaching needs, and the anticipated job market for graduates.
Without a recruitment plan that includes realistic short and long-term goals, you rely on the students to find you.
Components of a recruiting plan include:
- Examining program strengths and weaknesses, barriers and opportunities
- Collecting and using data on student/program outcomes for decision making
- Including perspectives of students (present and past)
- Periodically evaluating progress toward recruitment goals and making adjustments as needed
- Recognizing that effective recruiting requires continual action and attention and a collective, department-wide effort
The Graduate Studies Office is available to share our expertise and assist you in developing a plan that works for your program. The Assistant Director of Graduate Studies is ready to meet with you to review your current activity, offer promising practices, and suggest strategies for successful recruiting.
Your program’s website is likely the first place a prospective student will go to find information about your program. It is critical that your website is well maintained with up-to-date and engaging content for prospective students. You should have a “web guru,” or point-person, in your program who keeps your site updated throughout the year and manages an annual content review to ensure the accuracy and quality of the information.
If you wish to receive feedback on your website, a good place to start is by soliciting feedback from your current students (ideally those who recently enrolled in your program). The Assistant Director of Graduate Studies is also available upon request to perform a content audit of your website and offer feedback.
A current rack card can provide the basic messaging points and information that you want to share with prospective students. The rack card is useful at recruiting events and for students who drop in with questions. Developing the content for a rack card is also a useful exercise for distilling the main messages that you want to use to promote your program. A good strategy for consistent messaging and timesaving is to find ways of re-purposing content from your website on your rack card where applicable (and vice-versa).
Please first contact the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies when you decide to develop or revise a rack card. We have developed templates for your use.
We are happy to collaborate with your program and EWU Marketing/Communications to initiate and manage the project saving you time and effort.
Email and text messages are an important and easy way to communicate with students. Through well-crafted campaigns, you can share important messages with prospective students. You can encourage them to take particular actions such as apply to your program or attend an information session. Email can be a particularly effective, low-cost way to “nurture” prospective students through the process of exploring your program and navigating the steps of applying and enrolling. With the right content and tone, you can send emails to students that attract their attention, tell them what they want to know about your program, signal that you are thinking of them, and point them toward people and resources that will aid them in deciding to become a student in your program.
To start developing an email communication plan for prospective students using the EWU’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, contact the Assistant Director of Graduate Studies, who will collaborative with you to create your emails and automated communication plans within the CRM.
- Conduct a survey or focus group of current students asking how they learned about graduate programs to glean possible new marketing ideas/strategies.
- Host information sessions or open house events for prospective students.
- Develop relationships with faculty at other schools or relevant employers to develop “feeder” schools/employers for your program. Nurture these relationships with targeted outreach (e.g., visits/info sessions, sending promotional materials, and simply staying in touch and building relationships informally).
- Identify events and activities in which your current students and faculty already are involved (on- or off-campus) that could provide opportunities to market your program. Examples might include hosting a professional development workshop, taking part in a campus or community event, or sponsoring a campus speaker or a research event like the Student Research and Creative Works Symposium. Any opportunities for current students and faculty to recruit together are highly meaningful and engaging for prospective students.
- Take advantage of opportunities to recruit within EWU’s existing undergraduate student population.
- Develop an alumni/current student referral program where you provide a gift, prize, or other appreciative recognition that incentivizes your alumni and current students to refer prospective students to your program.
The Assistant Director of Graduate Studies is ready to meet with you to review your current activity, offer promising practices, and suggest strategies for successful recruiting.
- Create a blog with regular posts from current students and faculty discussing student experiences, research, and advice about life as a graduate student. Some of the best blog content can potentially be re-purposed for department/college newsletters, emails to prospective students, or video stories (in collaboration with MarCom).
- Spend time brainstorming over the summer about possible student profiles for the coming academic year that can be used to promote your program on web, video, email, social media, newsletters, Eastern 24/7 and magazine, etc.
- Make strategic and formal efforts to keep in touch and meaningfully engage with alumni. Among many other benefits, this will make it easier to learn about and publicize their successes in your program marketing. Alumni engagement strategies might include a regular program newsletter; an active department or program Facebook page; a formal meetup at a professional/academic conference; a program alumni advisory board; an alumni mentor program for current students; or invitations to come back and share their perspectives on their job market and career field in a course or workshop. (Another benefit: Developing a culture in which alumni are actively engaged with current students likely will often lead to more engaged alumni in the future as well.)
The Assistant Director of Graduate Studies is ready to meet with you to review your current activity, offer promising practices, and suggest strategies for successful recruiting.
“Yield” refers to the conversion of your admitted students into enrolled students. “Melt” refers to students who tell you they are coming to EWU by confirming their enrollment in your program, but who do not ultimately enroll. Here are ways that might help you increase yield and decrease melt.
- Hold an admitted student event that allows your prospective students to meet current students and faculty, tour campus and your facilities, sit in on a class, and learn more about what your program and EWU have to offer.
- Create a social media page for applicants where they can ask questions, talk with each other as well as current students in your program, and help build community.
- Use Zoom to host a virtual open house or admitted student information session for admitted students who are not able to attend an in-person event.
- Develop a calling and/or email campaign focused on yield (involving faculty and current students will make this most effective). Focus on congratulating students on their admission, answering FAQs (including about any necessary actions or steps required to confirm enrollment), and letting them know you want them in your program.
- If your department or college does a newsletter, send it to your admitted or confirmed students.
- If you are not able to offer an admitted student a GSA position, help point them toward opportunities elsewhere for GSAs, work opportunities, scholarships, or other sources of funding for graduate school.
- Create an email communication plan for students who have confirmed their enrollment to keep them engaged with you up until they start your program and answer their questions about getting started. Think of this like a mini program orientation over a series of emails. Include a Welcome message from the program director and possibly a message from the student’s graduate advisor.
The Assistant Director of Graduate Studies is ready to meet with you to review your current activity, offer promising practices, and suggest strategies for successful recruiting.
Graduate level tuition waivers are available to aid your recruitment efforts. These are intended to help your program appeal to students from a variety of backgrounds. Detailed instructions on how to request waivers, how to manage the offer process, and relevant timelines are available here.
More information can be obtained on the EWU website at Scholarships & Tuition Waivers or by emailing the Director of Graduate Studies.
When you are making offers to prospective students, we encourage you to include reference to travel funding resources available from EWU to all graduate students for attendance at professional conferences. For information on travel funding, please contact the Administrative Assistant in the Graduate Studies Office.
If your faculty apply for research grant funding, they are encouraged to include graduate students in their proposals to help support research experiences for EWU graduate students.
Various members of the Office of Graduate Studies staff have had successful recruitment experience. We are available to share our experience and assist you in developing a plan that works for your program.
The Assistant Director of Graduate Studies is ready to meet with you to review your current activity and discuss possible strategies for successful recruiting.
