Seek & Deploy: Modernizing Graduate Student Search

While undergraduate and graduate student search can be similar in concept, there are still key differences between someone who is pursuing a traditional undergraduate experience and someone pursuing their graduate education. Jack Klett, Capture Higher Ed’s director of graduate and online initiatives, touched on five such differences during Capture’s recent webinar, Seek & Deploy: Modernizing Graduate Student Search.

According to Jack, graduate students:

  1. Are Program Focused: “When I’m talking about grad students, I’m always talking about it through the lens of the program, not the university,” he says. “The grad student decision has very little to do with the overarching university experience. It all comes down to the program. The grad student is hyper-focused on the academic program.”
  2. Research Stealthily: “Grad students do their research!” Jack says. “They are scouring websites and learning as much as possible about their programs of interest. They often avoid embedded forms where they can learn more or request more information.”
  3. Apply Stealthily: “One of the great problems in graduate recruitment is that it’s fairly common for the first known interaction with a graduate prospect to be the application they have completed. There are actually some entire graduate enrollment operations that do little to no active recruitment. They basically wait until the application comes in.”
  4. Apply to Far Fewer Schools: “The average undergraduate student applies to about five universities and gets accepted to about four,” Jack says. “Therefore, an institution has about a 20-25 percent chance of yielding the student. Most applicants to master’s programs, which account for 85 percent of all conferred graduate degrees annually, are applying to one school.”
  5. Yield at A Higher Rate: “So the question that is asked so often with traditional undergrad is, ‘If not my institution then who?’ In grad, the question is more, ‘Will they choose me or simply not choose to pursue graduate study at this time.’ “

For these reasons and more, traditional graduate student search is no longer working. But that’s OK because we now have powerful new tools to optimize and modernize graduate student search efforts.radio dishes

During the webinar, Jack along with Jamie Gleason, Capture senior enrollment advisor and student search expert, talk about how student search has been used in graduate enrollment management. The two also discuss why it is no longer generating the return of years past and how to implement new methods of finding students for your graduate programs.

Tune in to Seek & Deploy: Modernizing Graduate Student Search to listen back on this fascinating webinar.

By Kevin Hyde, Senior Content Writer, Capture Higher Ed