About Central Oregon Community College
Implementing the Modern Campus Career Pathways was pretty easy and straightforward. And after the implementation, we got overwhelmingly positive response from the faculty and more than three times the engagement of students visiting our website.
The Challenge
Insufficient and incorrect data on the website career pages
A college or university’s website is its key marketing channel that influences enrollment.
When COCC, like a lot of other schools, was facing the challenge of declining enrollment, it was looking for ways to boost it. The team decided to start with overhauling the website. They planned to audit and overhaul all of their academic program and discipline pages.
They discovered that 36% of the pages had confusion between the department, the discipline and the program information. But that wasn't the scary part.
We found that 78% of the pages contained inaccurate or outdated information, primarily related to career paths. This information appeared to lack a reliable source. It was like people just threw out random numbers about how much you could make after graduating, without any evidence or data to back it up.
Before revamping the pages, they also surveyed high school students. The results showed that prospective students wanted to see occupational data, so they began the redesign process with key focus on showing clear career information.
First, they had a deal for the career data with the state of Oregon, but the website they were using was outdated and they needed to find another source. They found a third-party company that provided such data, but the biggest challenge was having to write a lot of code to put it on the pages.
On top of that, they were using a self-hosted or on-premises software. So, they had to wait until they got the right variant of the software before they could install it on their website.
The Solution
COCC adopted the Modern Campus Career Pathways, and they were highly impressed with the product. They found it much easier to use. It was using accurate career data and displaying it in a simple and straightforward manner.
The implementation process was quite straightforward. Modern Campus provided us with a sandbox in which we configured everything – from selecting colors and fonts to matching job groups to our programs. Once we had the base of the layout for our career page, publishing Career Pathways to our website was simply a case of clicking an icon, typing in the title and job code, and pressing a button. In the end, we were up and running in a matter of hours.
The Results
Overwhelmingly positive response from the faculty
When the first pages went live in 2021, faculty had an immediate positive response to them. They were excited to have accurate career information data. The team had only launched 8 academic discipline pages and the feedback was so overwhelmingly positive that they created a career page for all 40 credit programs.
Everybody wanted a career page. So, we went out and made a career page for all of our credit programs. And they were going live even without going through the design process; everybody wanted them so immediately.
Improved student engagement by 3 to 4 times
The website analytics show that the average time spent on COCC’s career pages was between one and one and a half minutes - greater than the average of 15 to 30 seconds. Additionally, the pages account for 5% of all page views, with only the default page and program page receiving more views. Furthermore, 3 to 9% of visitors left the page by clicking the call to action, which was directing them to the apply page. These results indicate that the page is having the desired effect of drawing visitors to apply.
