In January of 2017, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities publication stated that the average cost of paid tuition for undergraduate students attending one of their schools was $14,190 dollars. That is the net dollar amount that was actually paid by attending students from the published tuition cost of $33,480.
Regardless of the published price and the actual paid price, there are a lot of dollars at stake. A lot of jobs, a lot of people, a lot of infrastructure, a lot of resources, a lot of support, and anything else you can think of that relies on those tuition dollars to be paid by students.
Now I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings here, but the bottom line is you are not in the business of giving things away. You still have to generate proceeds, revenue, tuition dollars, whatever you want to call it. You can say you are not a business, but you are. Everybody is a business. You don’t go around saying you personally are a non-profit entity do you?
Come on man. You don’t wake up every single day and tell yourself or your company that you just want enough in salary to cover your expenses for the year do you? Heck no. You want to make some money and provide for your family. Everybody does.
You can’t run your household with a deficit. Well, I guess you can, if you have some credit cards, but eventually that will catch up with you.
Everything is a business. Everything must generate revenue to exist. And if you want to continue to exist, you have to make additional money to make up for the years you don’t make enough.
Back to the $56,760 dollar mistake these colleges are making. If you want to use the published tuition dollar amount you can, but that just makes my point even stronger.
How many prospective students are you losing because your Admissions Reps aren’t equipped with the skills and the techniques to influence, sell (I know that is a bad word to some, but it is what it is), or persuade the students to come to your institution?
As I go around to colleges and universities, I keep hearing the same things. We are losing enrollments to some of the bigger schools, state schools, or even some of the big non–profit privates that operate more like the for-profit model.
Look, I don’t care what your tax status is. It doesn’t mean anything in the marketplace when it comes to influencing and persuading people to buy your products. The only thing that matters is how can your institution get enough attention to get a prospect to look at your school and then hopefully attend your school.
You can spend all the money you want on the funnel. You can spend all of the money you want on the marketing. But you can’t compete with the big school groups in buying keywords and ad words. They are going to crush you.
You have to do it at the level where you can make the biggest impact. And that is equipping your people with the skills to convert more of the people they see, and don’t see, to walk through your doors, check you out online, or wherever else, and ultimately enroll into your school.
How many $56,760 dollar potential sales are you going to keep losing?
The Brian Willett Group has a developed a training program for Admissions teams. We call it the Admissions Advantage. And by learning this process your admissions team will have an advantage.
We not only teach a process that provides techniques and processes for admissions team to utilize, but more importantly the folks who attend the training sessions walk away with increased confidence in themselves. At that by itself is worth the investment.
If you are interested in learning more about the Admissions Advantage, reach out to me at bwillett555@gmail.com
To your success and your future.
