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Every October and again every March or April, we have an open house on campus. We pick a Sunday and advertise the daylights out of it. Faculty and staff turn out in force. Over the last few years, attendance increased dramatically. I made a habit of showing up incognito -- I go undercover in my “middle-aged suburban dad” disguise, which is pretty darned convincing -- and either eavesdropping or doing ethnographic research, depending on how you look at it. Obviously the faculty and staff know me, but I mingle among the crowds of parents and kids, seeing what strikes them. (My favorite, spoken by a parent a few years ago: “This isn’t what I expected. It’s nice!”)
That wasn’t possible this year, for obvious reasons. Herding hundreds of parents and kids into an arena for a presentation, then sending them around campus to speak to faculty standing a foot or two away from them, isn’t great social distancing. So we moved the open house online, where it drew much lower numbers.
I give the open house committee credit for finding a way to put something together in this context. They did yeoman’s work. But it was harder to catch people’s attention this year.
I doubt any of this is unique to Brookdale. The whole college search process is suddenly very different, and we’re all trying to figure out how to make it work.
As a parent, I see it. The Girl is a junior in high school; this is when The Boy and I made our first few forays onto campuses. She would like to, too, but the environment is so strange now that it’s hard to know even how to do that, let alone the value of what one might see. And that’s without even including the risk of exposure to the virus.
Yes, there are online tours. But as with the online open house, they’re just not the same. They may be helpful as a sort of first-level triage, but there’s a feel for a campus that’s hard to get without physically being there. So I understand why parents and students skipped the online open house; it’s for much the same reason that TG hasn’t really warmed up to online tours.
All of which is fine and reasonable, but it leaves larger questions unanswered. TG is a junior, so she has another year before this stuff gets real. What are high school seniors doing this year about college searches? And given that public colleges have been forced over the last few decades to base most of their budgets on tuition, what can they do to recruit more effectively in this strange new world?
Ideally, we’d be able to experiment. Try this, try that and slowly get better. But with state budgets in rough shape, college budgets long since battered by over a decade of austerity and enrollments dropping, there isn’t the margin for error that makes a comfortable environment for experimentation. But there’s no “playing it safe,” either; the status quo ante is off the table.
Wise and worldly readers, have you seen good, effective recruitment in the last month or two? I’d be interested in perspectives both of folks who work at colleges and of prospective students and parents of prospective students. Has someone found something that works?
I’d be happy to hear via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com, or on Twitter (@deandad). In the spirit of collegiality, I promise to share anything helpful! Thanks …
