Today’s students no longer fit the mold of an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. More are considered non-traditional, and want to set the terms of their experience. Personalization and customization have become key to institutional retention.
Today's learners want a modern education experience that matches what they've come to expect from the consumer world. This consumer mindset is forcing colleges and universities to change the way they operate to create a modern education system.
Simply put, the purpose of modern education is to prepare students for the realities of today's workforce by providing them learning experiences. And the characteristics of modern education need to reflect the same consumer experience learners have in their everyday lives.
Ruffalo Noel Levitz research has consistently shown that adult learners expect clear, responsive service and streamlined processes from their institutions. Earlier findings from the 2019 Adult Student Satisfaction-Priorities Report highlighted that adult students have little patience for administrative “run-around,” while more recent RNL research continues to emphasize the importance of personalized communication and frictionless enrollment experiences.
The impact of modernization in education can have a ripple effect. Marie Cini—former provost of academic affairs at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC)—saw this effect first-hand.
Cini and the team at UMUC were trying to understand why they weren’t achieving a full graduation rate. After all, they’re an online institution designed specifically to serve adult students. After conducting internal research, they found that the customer experience played a significant role in student retention.
“We lose them when they’ve had approximately three problems with administrative bureaucracy,” she said. “If they call about financial aid and they don’t get an answer they understand, and then they stop in, and they try to enroll with a face-to-face advisor, and then they’re not given accurate information, and then one other thing occurs, they leave us. We know that’s an incredible impact on student’s retention and success.”
Oftentimes, most challenges in education today begin with engaging the modern learner. Higher ed providers of all sizes are challenged by an engagement gap between their offerings, services and experiences, and the expectations of modern learners.
However, there are a few major warning signs leaders should be on the lookout for:
Is your relationship with students transactional? You’ll know it is if you’re focused on students enrolling in one-time programs where they earn a single credential and then progress to “alumni”—whose engagement with the institution is limited to donations and occasional football games.
Transactional student relationships happen when colleges don’t proactively encourage students to continue coming back for upskilling, reskilling and ongoing learning across their lifetime. This kind of persistent access supports career development and growth. Importantly, it places your institution as the hub for a student’s lifelong learning, not just the place where they learned how to be an adult.
An engagement gap between your institution and your learners will definitely emerge if you lack a digital engagement infrastructure that meets students where they are.
That’s a lot of jargon, so let’s break that idea down.
Do your students have no choice but to call, fax or come to campus to conduct basic tasks like registering for courses, accessing their transcript or getting information?
Are you leveraging the latest technological advancements?
Are you able to offer them an Amazon-like shopping experience?
Does your website clearly feed them relevant programs, services or offerings so they don’t have to dig?
Are you suggesting related courses or programs that might interest them?
If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you have low digital engagement with students. This will surface if you look at performance stats around web conversions. If they’re low, or if your shopping cart abandonment rates are high, take that as a clear sign you need to make some improvements.
By making it easy for students to see how your institution addresses their needs, you’ll more clearly stand out as the best learning provider for them.
Enrollment growth is a priority for every type of higher ed provider. For some schools, enrollment numbers are critical for financial stability. For others, they’re central to ensuring the mission of the institution is being met.
In either case, those numbers are increasingly difficult to meet. The marketplace for every kind of student enrollment—whether you’re focused on degree programming, non-credit courses or workforce training—is highly-competitive and crowded. But the fact is, there’s growing demand for education programming (as long as it meets the expectations of the learner).
If your institution is still struggling to bring people in the door, it’s essential to find out why. Maybe you’re not offering a diverse enough set of credentials to meet students where they are. Maybe your website makes it impossible for prospective students to see what you’re actually offering. Maybe your alumni engagement tactics need to be updated.
In either case, demand for ongoing education suggests that no school should be dealing with enrollment declines. Addressing the gap between learner expectations and institutional engagement will help bridge that divide if you’re experiencing this challenge.
Students want to see clear connections between their education and labor market outcomes. This kind of visibility right from the start helps keep them on track through their programs, and also supports their outcomes and direction after they graduate.
For some educational institutions, career pathways are embedded into the core of their program offerings using pathways software. Some even display career and salary information right on the program page. But for others, career support only goes as far as Career Advising Services, for which students need to manually book appointments, and booking is restricted to specific hours on specific days.
Unfortunately, if students are progressing toward a credential but don’t know what it’s going to get them—or the jobs and salary they’re preparing themselves for—it sets them up for underemployment at graduation (if they even get that far).
A learn-work disconnect is an essential gap higher ed leaders need to address. You'll know you have one if:
Students struggle to get career advising
You lack digital badges that help communicate specific skills and competencies
Learners don’t have a clear sense of how their credential connects to a career
Most higher ed registration systems are designed to be iterative, not innovative. That means they were built to digitize paper and pencil processes, instead of actually taking advantage of being digital assets.
That means your institution is probably making students jump through all kinds of hoops to get what they’re looking for. And that’s your best-case scenario.
“The harder we make it for students to jump through our hoops to get to their goals, the more likely they’re going to leave and choose another institution for their educational needs.”
Lesley Nichols | Executive Director of Professional Studies, Emerson College
Students today think and act like customers. Modern teaching methods have to start with a next-gen system in place. Without it, prospective students will give up on your website and seek out a digital experience that more closely matches their expectations.
Education in the modern era begins with improving the digital experience. Here are some ways to modernize your students' experience:
Examples of modern technology in education begin with a registration system. Most systems expect everyone to go through the same process: the student comes to the website, they add an offering to the cart and then they check out.
Three steps. That’s it.
The problem is, there’s a whole world of people and a wide range of pathways and experiences that your next-gen system is probably missing.
Today’s online shopping environment is incredibly complex. Modern consumers are looking for an experience that is tailored and personalized. Your registration process needs to deliver on both.
“We could improve the student enrollment registration experience by modeling it off of similar features in Amazon.”
Emily Joy Bembeneck | Associate Director of Pedagogical Innovation in the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, University of Chicago
A modern registration system should make the most of being a digital asset. It should deliver more than just an online shopping cart and answer the question: can people find what they’re looking for?
Your next-gen system needs to provide search engine optimization for your website.
The website has to be easy for students to navigate. They need to be able to browse programs, certificates, courses, and badges to find what’s right for them. For those who know what they want, you need to offer an advanced search that helps them find it quickly and easily.
From either step, students then expect to arrive at a landing page for their selected offering that provides the information they need to make an informed buying decision.
“A superior user experience can help universities attract learners to their programs and provide an education that is conducive to learners’ needs and lives.”
Quentin Ruiz-Esparza | Associate Director of Online Duke, Duke University
So many factors go into whether to run a particular course or program. But just because something’s not being offered right now doesn't mean people aren’t looking for it.
If a student gets to your offering landing page, but the course they want isn’t available, what does your registration system do?
More than likely, it suggests students come back later. Do you really think—in a market with over 8,000 competitors—the prospective student is going to put an alert on their phone to navigate back to your website?
Clearly not. You need to make it easy for them.
Your next-gen system needs to provide Remind-Me functionalities when a program isn’t available, and automate your waitlist if it’s full.
That way, when the course or spot opens up, the system automatically notifies the right people.
The more technology you can leverage to simplify the education shopping experience, the better.
There's no reason for a digital shopping cart to be static, but in most higher ed registration systems, that’s all it is. The shopping cart does nothing more than collect offerings and allow students to process payments.
But it can be so much more! Think about your Amazon shopping cart. It:
Provides visual cues to remind you what you’re purchasing.
Allows you to input discount codes and shows you, right on screen, your adjusted price.
Saves items for later, so you don’t lose the products that interest you.
Reminds you when you’ve left things in your shopping cart, so you can come back and make the purchase.
Sticks with your account, so when you add items to your cart on your phone, you can see those same items when you log in on your computer.
A next-gen registration system should also do all of these things. Education and modern technologies don’t have to be separate. You should be offering your prospective students that exact engagement—because it’s what they expect.
Modern Campus Lifelong Learning is the next-generation system institutions need to expand their reach and serve today’s learners. Traditional registration systems weren’t designed for the complexity and scale of modern continuing education and workforce programs.
The platform streamlines registration with a seamless checkout experience built on proven eCommerce best practices—but it does far more than process transactions.
It helps prospective learners discover your offerings through searchable, easy-to-navigate websites, making it simple to find programs that align with their goals. From exploration to enrollment, the platform provides the information learners need to move confidently through the process.
Automated waitlists, reminders and notifications keep learners engaged and ensure opportunities aren’t missed. Meanwhile, the shopping cart evolves beyond a simple transaction tool into a persistent engagement mechanism that helps convert interest into enrollment.
Students are looking for the same modern experience from their postsecondary institution that they get from every other customer engagement. After all, they’re not interested in why information might be harder to share in a postsecondary environment. Understanding the importance of modern education starts with that modern experience.
If you’re not using a next-gen system, it’s time to put your registration system to work.
Learn how postsecondary institutions can create a positive experience across the learner lifecycle. Schedule a demo today!
Last updated: May 29, 2023