A College’s Applications Fall by Half, and the President Is Thrilled

Mark Putnam has been president of Central College in Iowa since 2010. Since 2017, the college has lost more than half of its applicants, dropping from 4,016 to 1,971. Putnam is thrilled.

“All I care about is yield,” he said, referring to the percentage of admitted applicants who enroll. And his philosophy has led to improved yield rates (22.5 percent this year, compared to 11.4 percent in 2017). Central’s entering class of students is larger, too (351 versus 322).

Wonder if Central lost its better students through its approach? The grade point average of new students has remained the same, 3.6. What’s more, his approach has saved the college money. He’s spending about one-third less with Capture Higher Ed for enrollment help than he was spending previously with a better-known company. The enrollment is 83 percent white. (The state of Iowa is about 89 percent white.)

And his eight admissions counselors are spending all their time on real applicants, most of whom are genuinely interested in Central, he said.

To be sure, Central has done a number of other things that may have boosted yield, in addition to not paying much attention to total application numbers.

In 2019, it cut tuition by $20,000, to $18,600. (Tuition has since gone up a bit, but remains under $20,000.) And this year, it decided to award a scholarship of some type to every new student, first-year or transfer.

But whereas other colleges that have cut tuition or added aid dollars boast about the impact on applications, Central hasn’t.

Under the old system, “we convinced ourselves that 4,000 people really loved us,” he said. But when Central did market research, it found that “a huge number of people didn’t take it seriously.”

Many of the old applicants, Putnam said, didn’t finish their applications or visit the campus. They weren’t real applicants, he said.

The new system “is about working with fewer students, but more intensely.”

Chevy Freiburger, vice president for enrollment management and dean of admission at Central, said that before the change in approach at the college, the college’s admissions counselors spent too much time on every applicant, including those who weren’t going to enroll. “We were counting them as applicants, but they weren’t really interested,” he said.

Each admissions counselor wondered, “Of your 800 applications, which you should be working with.”

These days, he said, “We don’t even talk about applications.”

Central recruits most of its students in Iowa, but the percentage has gone down from about 80 percent to roughly 70 percent, Freiburger said. He said the college is likely to remain an institution without a truly national reputation. But the college has grown its number of students from Arizona and Colorado in recent years. It also recruits in neighboring states.

Still, Putnam said the yield is higher for those admitted applicants who live in Iowa.

Putnam said the experience of charting a different approach to admissions has reinforced the basics: of caring about students, of having faculty members who will talk to potential students and who teach engaging classes.

But it’s also about separating himself from the pro-application conventional wisdom.

He said he doesn’t go to as many national events about higher education as he might otherwise. At meetings, he would only hear about how to get more applications. He thinks plenty of colleges could benefit from such an approach.

Heather Mueller, vice president of Capture Higher Ed, said of Central, “It’s not a story you hear every day.”

She said she’s explored the idea with other colleges (but declined to name them). Most are very nervous about any strategy that would deviate from going all in on applications.

“In the end the measure is enrollment,” she said, not applications. “We truly believe that the most important thing in an applicant pool is making sure the students are there,” Mueller added.

Other Views

The Central approach, not surprisingly, draws considerable interest and also questions from those not involved with it.

Robert Massa, principal and co-founder of Enrollment Intelligence Now, said via email, “This reminds me of strategies pursued in the early 2000s where the focus was on narrowing the funnel. The thought was to attract applicants for whom a specific institution was the right fit, rather than the prior shotgun approach where colleges would buy names of students based primarily on academic record and, of course, on geographic location. I don’t hear very many admissions and enrollment professionals talk about narrowing the funnel these days. That could be because colleges have already perfected a method to attract students who are interested and able. But as fewer students take standardized tests, it will become more challenging to develop a prospect base that will convert to applicants with a real interest in your institution and with the potential to succeed there.”

Massa added, “A strategy that ignores potential applicants is always risky. If a college employs a data scientist or hires a firm that can reasonably project enrollment probability from the data available through list providers and public sources, then this strategy could pay off. But it likely could lead to an applicant pool that is devoid of underrepresented students and could be a setback for equity and access. And that does matter. If underserved students are not in your pool because the data suggest they wouldn’t enroll, you cannot obviously admit them and recruit them.”

Craig Goebel, a principal of the Art and Science Group, said there are real risks to what Central is doing. “It’s laudable to not exclusively focus strategies for recruitment to improve rank alone, [but] the narrow focus on yield activities does come with risks,” Goebel said. “First, the less an institution is focused on generating early interest, the more likely application numbers will continue to drop. Second, relying on what is basically a self-select model where the focus is only on those prospects who choose to apply can make it very difficult to achieve strategic goals related to the composition or profile of the enrolling class. Third, the institution is missing out on months of opportunities to communicate, educate and excite a prospect pool about what is distinctive and compelling at the institution.”

He added, “The only reason I can see for pursuing this strategy is that there is a very strong core market of applicants each year and it’s expected to continue, it’s comprised of a very diverse set of applicants and yield is so low that you feel you can effectively enroll a class that will meet all your goals. Or you just don’t have the staff and/or budget to continue to reach out to prospects and so have no other choice than to try and rationalize your forced decision.”