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Enrollment & Financial Aid Solutions
You know that meeting enrollment goals is key to living out your mission and building a strong financial base. Finding the optimal mix of best-fit students and supporting their persistence to graduation requires your team to adopt best-practice-supported strategies that drive student success.
Whether you are striving to attract and recruit traditional undergraduates, graduate students, adults, online learners, or any combination of these constituencies, Credo equips your enrollment, admission, and financial aid teams with a customized set of strategies and recommendations that add up to success.
Our services are below, but if you don’t see exactly what your campus needs, let’s start a conversation. We never put our partner institutions “in a box” and we don’t just offer “out of the box” services. We get to know our partner institutions and individualize services based on your unique vision, mission, and needs. Our team of experts is agile enough to design a new solution with your campus in mind, beginning with strategy planning conversations focused on the challenges that you face and the opportunities for growth that follow.
An energized campus. A dynamic communication plan. Positive enrollment trends.
Sound impossible?
Not if you’re Lenoir-Rhyne University.
When Lenoir-Rhyne began working with Credo, deposit and yield were not at the levels they wanted to see, and the cohesiveness of the staff was not where they wanted it to be.
Taking Lenoir-Rhyne University to the next level of thriving all started with yield workshops led by Will Lee, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Solutions at Credo. His charge was to energize and prepare the freshman recruiting staff for the challenging yield season ahead.
Find out how Lenoir-Rhyne found success by reading the full story here.
With expertise across the higher education admission spectrum, Credo offers Undergraduate, Graduate, and Adult ACE® projects. "ACE" is an acronym for Assess, Counsel, and Empower. With Credo, you receive the commitment that our highly qualified team of enrollment experts will evaluate your recruitment and admission practices and work side-by-side with your team to ensure solid strategies are in place, the team is deployed and resourced appropriately, systems and processes are running smoothly, and the entire campus is mobilized effectively.
Expected outcomes include:
- Clarity about the effectiveness of current strategies, systems, processes, operations, applications of data, enrollment research, and team deployment.
- A highly detailed, prioritized list of recommendations including specific strategic and tactical recommendations.
- Two months of ongoing consultation in person and via email around recommendations.
- Campus-wide impact through the team presentation and individual meetings.
Admitted Student Research
Credo’s Admitted Student Research (ASR) project delivers comprehensive data and analysis that focus exclusively on admitted students and the factors that inform their institutional selections. Credo's ASR will help you understand not only the needs of your desired constituency, but also how to interpret data to implement strategic processes to improve your institution’s enrollment and retention success.
Expected outcomes include:
- A comparative analysis of your results against those from other campuses to see how your admitted students differ from other institutions'.
- Data-driven insights into what campus team members should be meeting with students when they visit your institution.
- Timely results. Our research is conducted during the summer before admitted students have turned into college students. This increases the value of the data since your team will receive it before perceptions from visiting campus can replace targeted recruitment impressions.
- Since you receive the survey results in the fall, your admission team will have time to utilize the research to impact the current recruitment cycle.
- Credo offers analysis of the research and offers recommendations on how to apply it, which expedites the speed with which an admission team and campus is able to turn the research into action.
Admitted Student Parent Research
Did you know that parents have always been rated as the most influential in a student’s decision on where to go to college?
One of the key ASR questions revolves around the degree to which various people influenced student choices. The data suggests a strong value in surveying parents, in addition to admitted students, to see how moms and dads form their impressions of colleges and what factors influence their thinking as they counsel their children on university choices.
Admitted Student Parent ASR provides both raw and analyzed data that can provide the following beneficial outcomes for your college or university:
- A solid baseline measurement of the impact new strategies are beginning to have as you build your team and improve processes, communication flow and systems. Subsequent ASR will show the progress you and your team are making.
- A clear understanding of the drivers of enrollment decisions at your institution.
- A deeper understanding of how prospective students’ primary influencers are navigating the college search process with their children, and what are critical factors for them in the decision-making partnership.
- Strategy implications from the data presented thoughtfully by a senior member of our Enrollment Solutions team.
- A presentation you can use with faculty, the board, and other campus groups to build understanding of the key factors and influencers of college choice.
The right data used the right way can greatly impact your institution’s net revenue, and can give you the tools you need to strategically and efficiently pursue the best-fit students--and parents--for your college or university.
Successful institutions utilize predictive modeling to enhance yield, engagement, and retention. PowerPREDICT® by Credo is a comprehensive, portal-based predictive modeling tool that will empower your admissions team to embrace viable objectives, execute best-practice procedures, and implement mathematically-based approaches to prioritize time and resources.
Utilizing your institution's historic enrollment data to produce a logistic regression analysis, PowerPREDICT provides an algorithm-based projection of the enrollment behavior for an inquiring student population. PowerPREDICT takes into account new student enrollment data from the past and predicts a clearer picture of what your new student enrollment can look like in the future.
PowerPREDICT streamlines recruitment practices, improves efficiencies, and provides your institution with the following benefits and outcomes:
- Increased yield rates as you focus relationship development on prospective students who have the highest likelihood of enrolling.
- Pipelines for enrollment growth by ranking students based on their academic interest, source code, geography, gender, high school, or other enrollment driving variables.
- Saved time, money, and human resources through the consolidation of recruitment travel and segmented communications.
- Leveraged resources to achieve quantifiable enhanced yield, enrollment, and retention.
- Your own customized institutional web portal allows you to autonomously update rankings for each stage of the funnel or conduct research as often as necessary.
- Dedicated support from a Credo consultant.
Credo provides parallel strategic oversight and the necessary ongoing reporting and analysis for the implementation of predictive modeling into current and future admission strategies. Our team of predictive modeling professionals provides support in developing, implementing, and measuring the success of your predictive model, and a Credo consultant makes a yearly visit to campus to present each predictive model, train the admission team, and offers assistance with the integration of PowerPREDICT into your annual recruitment plan. Additionally, your Credo consultant is available for unlimited email and telephone consultation for the life of the partnership.
Contact us for a free demonstration:
How can your institution cultivate and connect more effectively with prospective students? Request a demonstration of PowerPREDICT by calling William Lee, Associate Vice President for Enrollment Solutions, at 336.603.6030 or by emailing wlee@credohighered.com.
Are you ready to think outside of the traditional financial aid packaging matrix?
The processes of your financial aid department are integral indicators of the overall health of your institution. Balancing student success and revenue generation can prove a daunting task for even the most established financial aid departments.
The viability of your financial aid department depends upon data-driven strategies, operations, and technologies that align financial aid practices with the institution’s overall goals and mission. With Credo as a partner, your financial aid department can exceed the boundaries set by the rut of traditional need- and merit-based packaging and become a leading, healthy indicator of your institution’s overall success.
Expected outcomes of financial aid and packaging matrix services can include:
- Strategic recommendations targeted to address issues that will provide the greatest impact on an efficient and effective financial aid operation, as well as track commitments to ensure target goals are met.
- Meaningful contributions to new student enrollment efforts.
- Enhancement of the financial aid staff’s ability to serve current students.
- A new financial aid packaging matrix that awards aid efficiently and maximizes net tuition revenue.
- An alignment of matrices to federal, state, and other relevant guidelines.
Credo has been a partner in the enrollment trajectory in that from the beginning we were on the same page. It was important to me to find a partner that I trusted, that I could count on, and that I knew we could have a strong working relationship. We set our goals. We met our objectives.
--Rachel Nichols, Vice President for Enrollment Management, Lenoir-Rhyne University
What is your value proposition?
A key element to the enrollment health on your campus is the initiation and implementation of a Strategic Enrollment Plan (SEP) that encompasses important data, relevant projections, and current recruitment strategies. An SEP from Credo speaks to your institution’s value proposition, and serves as the roadmap for the enrollment team and the entire campus. Credo’s SEP follows best-practice principles and addresses critical enrollment issues such as institutional mission, organizational structure, competitive analysis of peers, strategic goals and projections, budget, accountability, and key performance indicators. The SEP provides a clear roadmap for goal accomplishment and growth in key indicators.
Expected outcomes include:
- Clear data and roadmapping to improve enrollment numbers.
- Increased clarity and efficiency around
- Organizational structure;
- Institutional mission, core values, and vision;
- A competitive analysis of peers, demographics, and other relevant factors;
- Planning assumptions;
- Strategic enrollment goals and projections;
- Key performance indicators/metrics;
- Budgets and investments;
- Plan implementation and accountability;
- Recruiting strategies.
The Campus Guest Experience is the most impactful recruitment activity that Credo will design in partnership with you. A campus visit is when your prospective students try your college on for size. We know that the experiences guests have factor highly in their eventual choice of a college.
Effective campus visits connect students with the most impactful people, places, and experiences on your campus—far more than a website can provide – and help them decide whether or not they should call your campus home.
Credo partners with you to assess your current campus guest experience and identify opportunities relative to the following key areas:
- Campus Event Organization (also includes summer events and those outside admission),
- Campus Tour and Tour Guide Assessment,
- Systems and Processes:
- A thorough assessment of your process from website registration to the welcome experience to closing the visit,
- An assessment of the look, feel, and functionality of your welcome experience including arrival branding, greeting families, reception spaces, restrooms, meeting rooms, and layout of the Admission space,
- Roles and Responsibilities,
- Data-Decision Making,
- Mobilizing the Campus,
- Recruitment & Marketing the visit, and
- Technology Use: social media, inbound marketing, virtual tour options, video clips, and more.
When these fundamentals are in place, the result is an innovative campus guest experience. When combined with great storyboarding of your tour and a genuine signature moment, your campus guest experience moves from good to great and will stand out from the rest!
Once there is great confidence that your campus guest experience is truly well-executed, customized for each student, and authentically demonstrative of what life on campus is all about, it is time to strategically focus on driving more campus visits by the right students in order to increase enrollment.
Benefits and outcomes of engaging in a campus guest experience solution include:
- A clear connection to the enrollment plan and understanding of campus visitor numbers as a predictive lead indicator of enrollment.
- A strategy to increase the number of campus visitors with the greatest likelihood to enroll.
- Strategies to mobilize the entire campus to provide the most impactful interaction with campus guests.
- A clear plan for campus visit logistics.
- An optimal campus tour route that maximizes key places on your campus.
- Script recommendations for your guides and story boarding of your tour.
- A training plan for your campus guides that balances emphasis on key selling points with sharing their own student experience.
- A strong close to the visit with an emphasis on moving students to the next steps to apply, make their deposit, and enroll.
Credo provides a range of training, coaching, and consulting opportunities designed to energize and empower individuals and teams to think strategically, lead, and serve others and meet enrollment goals.
Whether you are a President investing in a new Chief Enrollment Officer who has great skills and passion for higher education, but needs to learn more about Enrollment, or a Vice President for Enrollment looking for an experience that will train, revitalize, and inspire your team, we can meet that challenge. These highly customizable solutions are shaped in conversation with you and are all about investing in your most critical resource—your team.
