College recruiting in Iowa gets tough

Of the 12 schools she applied to, Sydney Alexander received admission offers to eight.

The Birmingham, Mich., teen then narrowed her options to a few top choices by weighing each school's theater program - her intended major - location and financial aid.

In the end, Alexander, 18, said, 'I followed the money to Iowa.”

With nearly 80 percent of her tuition covered by scholarships or grants, Alexander will be starting as a University of Iowa freshman in the fall.

'It's funny,” she said, 'my mom actually said, ‘You can go anywhere east of the Mississippi (River),' and the one school I applied to west of the Mississippi was Iowa.”

Alexander turned down offers from schools such as the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Miami University in Ohio, and UI admissions officials said she's one of many accepted to more than one school who choose to enroll at Iowa.

But there also are plenty of applicants invited to become a Hawkeye who choose to go elsewhere. And, as competition in higher education ramps up both locally and nationally, UI officials are tracking those trends in an effort to identify top competitors both in and outside the state.

'It's good to know what other schools your students are looking at because that helps you to evaluate your own programs and make sure that you're truly representing the programs those students are interested in,” said Michael Barron, assistant provost for UI enrollment management and executive director of admissions.

During a recent UI Staff Council meeting, Barron said Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa in the fall 2013 enrolled the most in-state applicants who also were admitted to UI.

ISU enrolled 403 of the in-state applicants accepted at the UI, or 10 percent of UI resident admission offers. UNI enrolled 149 of the in-state students Iowa admitted, or 3.7 percent of UI offers to residents.

Of out-of-state applicants accepted to Iowa, 955 enrolled at the University of Illinois, 496 enrolled at Indiana University, and 368 enrolled at the University of Missouri, Barron said.

UI officials obtained those numbers from the National Student Clearinghouse, a not-for-profit organization that collects enrollment and degree information from more than 3,600 colleges and universities that enroll 98 percent of all public and private U.S. students.

The Clearinghouse does not make public the data on where students are accepted and then enrolled, meaning the information must come from university and college officials. Iowa State and UNI did not provide numbers on how many students it admitted in fall 2013 who enrolled elsewhere.

'What these data can't describe is how many of those students that actually enrolled at the UI were admitted by other schools and which schools those were,” Barron said.

Of the 4,512 first-year in-state applicants who applied to UI, 3,993 - or 92.7 percent - were admitted and 2,134 - or 53.4 percent - were enrolled.

‘A buyer's market

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Industry experts said it's a 'buyer's market” for prospective students as the higher education landscape nationally becomes more competitive. And, within Iowa, some officials believe competition among the three public universities will become even stiffer after the Board of Regents last month agreed to start allocating state dollars using new funding metrics that tie 60 percent to resident enrollment.

The new metrics will be rolled out over three years beginning in 2016 and, if enrollment figures at the three institutions remain unchanged, Iowa State will become the state's top funded university.

If implemented in one year, UI would lose $47.8 million. The Board of Regents has attempted to lessen that potential impact by capping the amount that can move from one institution to another annually at 2 percent of the 2013 budget - or $12.9 million for the UI.

But UI officials have no intention of letting those dollars slip away. UI President Sally Mason has said the university will compete by growing both its in-state and out-of-state student numbers.

That could include aggressive marketing campaigns, added recruiting visits, and efforts to enroll more of those admitted students accepted elsewhere.

But experts say college selection for prospective students is complicated and goes deeper than marketing and recruiting.

Many students enter into the application process with preferences and needs - such as what they want to study, how far they want to move, and how much they're willing to pay. Those prospective students who go into the application process with an open mind about major, location and cost are hard to come by, experts said.

'It's a tough time to be a chief recruiting officer anywhere,” said Eric Sickler, vice president of client services for Stamats, a Cedar Rapids-based higher education marketing company. 'You can pour your heart and soul into recruiting just the right group of students, only to find that some go elsewhere for a number of factors the school couldn't impact.”

Stamats, which does higher education market research, reported in its 2014 TeensTalk Study that - for the first time in recent history - the most important factor in a student's decision of where to attend college was financial aid and cost to attend.

Those also were the most important factors for parents.

Other important influencers include quality of preferred major or field of study, job placement after graduation, quality of faculty and safety. 'Feels like a good fit” used to be among the top criteria for college choice, and Sickler said that still weighs into a student's decision.

But, he noted, programming, quality and finances 'have and will continue to play the most significant role in how students determine where they want to go to school.”

That has changed the profile of the typical prospective student. Some, like Alexander, are applying to a dozen schools, and Sickler said, 'They know they're a sought-after commodity.”

'They are applying to more schools, taking longer to decide, and they are pitting schools against each other - saying, ‘Here's what I'm getting from one school. Can you beat it?'” Sicker said. 'It's tough to stomach if you've been in the business for a while.”

Staying closer to home

Location also seems to be a driving factor in the college selection process, and Sickler said about half of the 2013 freshmen attended college 30 minutes from home. So from a recruiting perspective, 'You need to make sure you own your backyard,” Sickler said, 'because on average kids are staying closer to home.”

Iowa City-based ACT, which produces the ACT college admissions and placement test taken by more than 1.6 million high school graduates annually, collects data on the students it examines - including information on where they want to attend college and where they end up enrolling.

ACT figures also show that most students stay closer to home - the average distance a student travels to attend college is 51 miles, said Michael Hovland, principal consultant for college and career readiness at ACT. And, he added, student mobility rates can be predicted based on test scores, religious affiliation, geographic location and parent education.

'Parent education matters because those parents with college degrees might have taken the students on more visits and talked about it more,” he said.

In fact, Hovland said, ACT research shows that a lot about where students end up enrolling - including what type of institution, what size of school, and its location - can be predicted.

'The overall conclusion is that the whole process is more intentional and predictable than most people think it is,” he said.

But, according to Hovland, colleges do have some ability to change their enrollment patters - including the universities in Iowa.

'And you probably have more luck changing student patterns closer to home than with students farther away,” he said.