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You are here: Home / Archives for graduate students

Nontraditional Student Satisfaction: What You Need to Know

November 29, 2018 by Julie Bryant, Associate Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL 1 Comment

Nontraditional students are becoming the new tradition for colleges and universities. One in three students are enrolled in at least one online course, and online enrollments have increased by 3.4 percent while on-ground enrollments have declined 1.2 percent (according to the NCES Digest of Education statistics). Nearly two-thirds of part-time students at four-year privates and half of part-time students at publics are 25 and older, while 11-15% of full-time students are adult learners at these institutions. In addition, “Fast Facts” from the NCES show that 37 million students in the United States have some college but no degree—a large pool of potential adult learners who may come back to college, many through online learning.

With an increasing number of nontraditional students coming to college, what do we know about this population? Ruffalo Noel Levitz has been surveying adult, graduate, and online learners for years with our satisfaction-priorities surveys. Here are key things every institution needs to know about nontraditional student satisfaction.

Nontraditional students are very satisfied

Nontraditional students—adult undergraduates, graduate students, and online learners—have generally higher satisfaction levels than their traditional student counterparts.  The 2018 National Student Satisfaction and Priorities Report reflects the following summary satisfaction scores:

Nontraditional student satisfaction dataThe three nontraditional student satisfaction data sets reflect higher summary satisfaction scores than the four-year private, four-year public, and community college data sets (which are dominated by students 25 years of age and younger).

I often say that if nontraditional students aren’t satisfied, they likely aren’t enrolled at your institution because they don’t have time for less than a high quality experience.  These students are often choosing to pursue higher education while balancing other life commitments of work, family, volunteer activities, etc., so they are going to have high expectations if they are enrolled at your institution as well.  I have also heard it said that adult learners may not immediately identify as “students” when asked to describe themselves (“I am an assistant at XYZ Corporation; I am a parent; and I am also taking classes at ABC College.”) so when the pressure of life closes in, enrollment at the college may be the first thing that gets dropped.

Older and more satisfied

This year’s National Report takes a closer look at demographic subpopulations to identify where student groups are more or less satisfied with their experience.  With this approach, we can see that a big influencer on overall nontraditional student satisfaction is the age of the student, with older students indicating higher levels of satisfaction in each data segment.

Student satisfaction by age

Nontraditional student satisfaction: adult undergraduates

Nontraditional student satisfaction: graduate students

Nontraditional student satisfaction: online learners

What are the age ranges for your nontraditional students?  Do you have students on the lower end of the age range (25-34) who may be generally satisfied, but who may still be at risk for leaving the institution if you are not scheduling classes at convenient times, making it easy for them to get access to the support services they need and encouraging your faculty to be understanding of their life circumstances?

When gathering student satisfaction data, it is important to assess your nontraditional populations as well as your traditional students, and then look at the data by demographic segments to target your actions.  While your enrolled nontraditional students are more likely to be generally satisfied with their experience, there will still be areas where you can make additional improvements which will help you to attract additional students to your programs.

Satisfaction levels for other demographic populations

In addition to examining student satisfaction by age indicators, this year’s report also slices the national data for nontraditional populations by:

  • Institutional Choice
  • Race/Ethnicity
  • Gender
  • Employment
  • Class Load

The data is reviewed separately for adult undergraduates, graduate students and online learners (as well as traditional students at four-year privates, four-year publics and community colleges).  Institutional choice in particular has a powerful link with overall student satisfaction for students at all levels and all institution types.

Understanding which populations have higher and lower satisfaction overall, can point campuses in a direction to more deeply explore unique experiences with campus climate, instruction, registration, financial aid and other campus services for potential improvements. (See my previous post for more detailed discussion about examining these different populations.)

I encourage you to download this year’s 2018 National Student Satisfaction and Priorities Report and to consider how you can work on your campus to improve satisfaction for your nontraditional student populations.  If you are not currently surveying student satisfaction on your campus, you may want to add this assessment to your activities to provide the student voice to your student success efforts. RNL offers a full suite of satisfaction-assessment instruments for traditional and nontraditional students, used by campuses of every size, type and mission. I encourage you to learn more about how student satisfaction can offer tremendous benefits to your campus.

Filed Under: Enrollment Management, Student Success and Retention Tagged With: adult learners, graduate students, nontraditional students, online learners, student satisfaction data

Navigating new challenges in graduate student recruitment

November 6, 2012 by Sheila Mahan 1 Comment

Campus staff can turn to a number of resources to find data and ideas for how to develop a successful graduate student recruitment strategy.Anyone working in graduate recruitment was probably not surprised by the latest annual enrollment report from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). For the second consecutive year, CGS reported a decline in new graduate students in 2011 after almost a decade of steady growth. Even with applications up, many graduate programs are finding that prospective students are not enrolling as predictably as in the recent past.

But there are differences in the details—even good news for some programs. More importantly, we now know which recruitment strategies yield the best results for the time and money invested, according to research and a recent survey of graduate recruitment professionals.

First, here are the details of new graduate student enrollment. The field of Education has been hit the hardest in terms of new graduate student recruitment. In our consultations with graduate programs across the country, we at Noel-Levitz are seeing big dips in new student interest in degrees leading to teacher certification, and the CGS reports bear this out with news that new student enrollment in Education programs declined by 8.8 percent in 2011 after an 8.1 percent decline the year before.

Education programs have been a mainstay of graduate enrollment for decades. Indeed, even with these declines, Education enrollment still represents about one-fifth of all graduate enrollment, according to the CGS report. So declines in this area hit institutions hard. Arts and Humanities programs have also seen declines, and master’s programs in Business have been flat or down for the past two years, according to the CGS reports.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Enrollment Management, Student Recruitment Tagged With: graduate student recruitment, graduate students, graduatestudentpage, recruitment best practices, student recruitment, student recruitment strategies

The graduate student funnel: 11 top-rated practices to recruit and enroll master’s students

October 11, 2012 by Ruffalo Noel Levitz Leave a Comment

A funnel-shaped graphic that illustrates various practices that have been considered to be effective for higher education graduate student recruitment and marketing.

Click on image to enlarge.

How can your campus build a strong graduate student population? We are seeing an increased interest from colleges and universities looking for ways to strengthen their graduate recruitment efforts, especially in light of recent decreases in new graduate student enrollment across the nation.

The above graphic shows the findings of a recent Noel-Levitz report on graduate marketing and recruitment practices specifically for master’s programs. This graphic highlights 11 practices that were frequently rated either “effective” or “very effective” across all institution types.

The 11 practices shown are mapped against a traditional student enrollment funnel to allow us to examine which practices are particularly effective as prospective students move toward enrollment. This approach allows graduate professionals to analyze their process more granularly to identify specific actions to take to improve graduate recruitment efforts at each stage.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Enrollment Management, Marketing, Student Recruitment Tagged With: graduate enrollments, graduate marketing, graduate student funnel, graduate student recruitment, graduate students

What influences nontraditional student enrollment?

August 29, 2012 by Julie Bryant, Associate Vice President for Retention Solutions, RNL 2 Comments

In May, I wrote about the driving factors influencing traditional student enrollment decisions. We now have data available on which enrollment factors are critical to nontraditional students, including online learners and students 25 and older.

Every year, hundreds of campuses administer the Adult Student Priorities Survey™ (ASPS) to their adult undergraduate and graduate students and the Priorities Survey for Online Learners™ (PSOL) to students enrolled in online programs. In addition to the items rated for importance and satisfaction on the general student experience, both the ASPS and PSOL include items that address factors in a student’s decision to enroll (nine items on the ASPS and ten items on the PSOL). The 2012 national research report The Factors Influencing College Choice Among Nontraditional Students focuses on data from more than 5,500 students and 17 public and private four-year institutions that completed the ASPS and 17,000 online learners from 16 institutions that completed the PSOL during just the fall of 2011. There is special emphasis in this report on the different perceptions of undergraduate and graduate students in both data sets.

This graph shows enrollment factors rated by their importance to adult college students.

Click on image to enlarge.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Enrollment Management, Marketing, Student Recruitment Tagged With: adult students, Factors to Enroll, graduate students, online learners, undergraduate students

Ten enrollment roadblocks for graduate and professional programs: Part two

November 7, 2011 by Craig Engel 1 Comment

Craig Engel discusses 10 issues that impact enrollment management for graduate students and professional students at universities and other institutions.

In this second post on graduate and professional enrollment, Craig Engel examines issues of funding, communication, and planning.

In my previous post on graduate and professional recruitment, I examined issues related to goal-setting, funnel management, and database management. In this post, I’ll examine planning, relationship building, communication, financial aid, and coordination.

Issue 6: Lack of a strong annual plan

Does your campus have a graduate recruitment plan? If it does, is it a macro plan developed by a centralized office, a smattering of individual decentralized plans developed by individual programs, or a combination of the two? Unfortunately, most campuses I have worked with lack any type of plan, or do not like the plan(s) they have.

How can you build a strong graduate recruitment plan? It needs to have these elements:

  • A situation analysis—an annual review of the mission, historical data, driving and restraining forces, and environment;
  • Goal setting—cumulatively, by the individual program, and by market segment within the program (e.g., domestic, international);
  • Strategies for goal achievement—every goal must have at least one key strategy and every stage of the funnel should have at least one strategy;
  • Action plans—the implementation schedule for the initiatives that support the goals.

There should also be one master plan that is in synch with the plans for individual programs—the whole equals the sum of its parts.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Enrollment Management, Student Recruitment Tagged With: graduate students, professional students

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