Rethinking and Tracking the Campus Visit

It’s a nearly universal truth of higher ed admission. Students who visit campus generally move through the admissions funnel at a significantly higher rate than those who don’t visit. Not only that, the later in the admissions process that they visit, and the more times they visit, the higher the likelihood that they will enroll. So it stands to reason that schools should place a premium on finding ways to get students and their families to visit.

While most schools are acutely aware of the negative impact they’ve felt by the recent decreases they’ve seen in campus visitors, too few actually factor campus visit numbers into their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their enrollment funnels and projections. Most institutions keep track of the total number of campus visitors from year to year as a general indicator of interest in their prospect pools. This approach provides a broad sense of overall interest in your institution, but it falls short of providing a true projection of potential enrollment. Tracking campus visit totals alongside your admissions funnel data at each stage—prospects, applicants, admits, and deposits—will give you a truer sense of the level of interest and engagement, and the overall strength within each segment. In an ideal world, your visit percentages should increase at each stage of the funnel. At the very least, you should aim for consistency throughout.

To gain an even more robust level of analysis of your visit pool, you may want to consider utilizing an analytical service like Spark451’s proprietary Enrollytics service to consolidate your engagement metrics, including campus visits, along with demographic, academic, and socio-economic factors to turn data tracking into enrollment predictability. By reviewing your historical enrollment and visit data, we can help you determine just how impactful your campus visit experiences are on your admissions funnel productivity, as well as next-level data like who is visiting and who is not. By drawing true correlations between campus visits and a student’s progress to the next stage of your admissions funnel, you will be empowered to either continue your already effective visit processes or enhance them as needed. Additionally, you will gain a data-driven perspective on the likelihood that your applicants and admits will eventually matriculate.

So, it’s clear that enrollment planning must still involve maximizing campus visitors. However, we must also now adjust our mindset to what our audience considers to be a campus visit these days. The realities of the pandemic era have fundamentally altered the ability, if not the desire, of many families to make long-distance trips to visit multiple campuses in person for a variety of reasons, ranging from health concerns to finances. Additionally, the rise of virtual information tours and info sessions, and even full scale events like virtual open houses immediately made necessary in 2020, have enabled families to broaden their definition of a campus visit, and in turn, “visit” more schools than ever before.

This is not to imply that the virtual visit experience is a good replacement for an in-person visit. Indeed, there’s no replacing the feeling of finding one’s home away from home that a student can get when they set foot on the “right fit” campus. It’s priceless.

But the fact is that fewer families are visiting in person, and colleges and universities can’t let that be a hindrance to the overall enrollment boost that campus visitors provide. The answer is to provide as many and as varied an assortment of on-campus visit opportunities as possible, but to also expand your reach by providing virtual options for those who need them.

Here are several strategies for planning both on-campus and virtual visits that drive enrollment results: