Scoping Out Your Competitors

April 6 2011

Knowing your competition for students is just one of the many critical things that campuses need to determine on a regular basis. Why is this important? First, it helps you target your messages appropriately. If you believe that you’re competing with Ivy League institutions, for example, but in reality your competition is with community colleges, your messaging about institutional distinctives may miss the mark. Admission staff, faculty, coaches, marketing team members, and others involved directly and indirectly in the process of recruiting students need to know this information. How do you determine your competitors from data and systems you already have at your disposal?

Look at your annual College Board and ACT reports – these reports include a shared score report page that tells you who else got test scores when you did. Tracking this list over time gives you a look at how your competition is changing and allows you to respond appropriately.
If you participate in the National Student Clearinghouse (http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/) the information you glean tells you where your non-enrolling applicants really went, allowing you to track trends and ensure that what you learned at the time a student decided not to choose you is where, in fact, they ended up. You can also use the Clearinghouse to determine where your stop-outs went to learn about competition at a different level.
Your financial aid office should be able to produce a summary of institutions that your potential new students were also considering seriously.
If you have a student calling team one of the questions they should be asking throughout the year is other colleges/universities potential students are considering – summarized information from these calls should be evaluated annually; individual information should help admission counselors and other target messages appropriately.

What should you do with this information as you gather it? Here are a few quick suggestions:

Prepare an annual report that summarizes the competitor information from each source to present to your staff, senior administration, the faculty, the Board, and any other relevant group on campus. A realistic understanding of your competition is critical for each of the groups as they support recruitment efforts.
Use this report to equip your team with the right messages about institutional distinctives depending on the competition. Remember to avoid those invidious comparisons that professional ethics statements for NACAC and NACCAP dictate. For example, if one of your distinctives is faculty engagement with students and one of your major competitors is your flagship state university with large classes and teaching assistants, make sure your staff knows how to highlight what faculty engagement means in contrast to what a student might encounter elsewhere.
Start a secret shopper initiative where you put a prospective student on the mailing list of your top competitors to gauge what they send when. If you’re blessed with a staff member who has a high school student in the house that’s a natural source for this research; if you don’t, create an identity and start shopping. Chances are your current database includes a number of such potential students from your competitors!

These steps to gathering and sharing information take advantage of existing sources of data and only require that most precious of commodities in most enrollment offices . . . time! If you need help withcompetitor studies or related research, don’t hesitate to ask Credo.