Dog Days of Summer?

The dog days of summer are not quite here yet and that means that there is still time to recruit and engage your prospective students as they are deciding to show up for the first day of class.

In the enrollment funnel process, your prospective student should be right down in the neck, almost ready to be counted as an actual student. Still, there is work to be completed to help ensure that these prospective students arrive on the first day of class and can truly be counted as your students.

I have had conversations with people and we discussed that their classes were full in May, but when August arrived these prospective students did not show. This could be for a lot of reasons. Maybe their girlfriend or boyfriend decided that they were not going to go to the tech center, they decided that football was much more important, they were told that they can not go to a technology center and go to college or maybe they became apprehensive and a feeling of discomfort about starting a new school without their old friends set in. Whatever the reason, and they are all valid, the prospective student decided not to show up.

How do we as a system fix this problem? Engaging the student through the last part of the enrollment process is the answer. Universities and colleges spend big money on one and two day student orientation programs and enrollment days, Oklahoma State University has Alpha Week, Texas A&M has Fish Camp, and many more events happen throughout the country with the same objective, to give a student a sense of place and belonging.

How can this apply to the Oklahoma CareerTech System? Ideally each technology center would develop two to three events or ideas to keep your new students engaged. If you weren’t doing anything, implementing one idea would be a great place to start!

Some simple summer recruitment ideas:

New Student Pizza Party
Invite all incoming junior students to a pizza party located at your technology center. Invite all staff and encourage them to interact with the new students. This can help jump-start relationship building and lead to increased retention over the summer.

Movie Night
Rent out a local theater and invite your prospective students and parents. Let them watch the latest flick and incorporate recruitment opportunities in the process. Maybe before the movie they are allowed to watch the latest Alliance video, maybe with their ticket they are given a bookmark with a school calendar. The ideas are as limited as your imagination.

Orientation Day
Hold a special Orientation Day that will allow new students the opportunity to meet other new students, allow them to spend some time in their classroom with their instructor and learn where the preparatory services are located throughout the campus.

Summer Newsletter
What better way to let the parents know what is going on than by sending each new student parents a packet of new student information or newsletters? Reminding the parents about starting dates, driving rules, or student organization is a great way to get parents interested in what is happening at your technology center.

Parent Letter
Why not send a letter to the parents of new students directly from the students new instructor. Allow the parent the opportunity to interact with the instructor via phone, email or face to face and you have created an avenue to communicate down the road.

These are just a few quick brainstorming ideas. If you have more, please share them as we would like to hear about them.