9 college admission mistakes to avoid by admission director during goal setting

The important aspect of education that ties an institution in knots is the way educators set goals. But that’s when they mostly go wrong—college admissions mistakes are common. Most educational institutions struggle to set and achieve admission goals to improve the quality of the lives of students.

Successfully achieving the goals is not only the key to the advancement of the higher education institution but also triggers the growth of students, faculty, and campus. Unfortunately, when selecting the goals, institutions make commit mistakes, which is what is discussed here in this blog.

9 Common college admissions mistakes and how to deal with them

The common goal-setting mistakes that sabotage the success of college admissions are discussed below.

1. Not setting up SMART goals

Setting goals for admissions counselors is the top-most priority. Not all goals are equal! Some are smarter! Therefore you should set achievable SMART goals and allow sufficient time to accomplish them.

SMART is nothing but Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound admission goals. They rule out the ambiguity surrounding your admission and the marketing team and help optimize their efforts.

You need to train yourself before goal setting and make it realistic, even though some things can take a long time.

Your SMART goal should be to propel prospects to make inquiries, then convert them into applicants, admit, deposit, and enroll them into your college.

During admission, the institute wants the best students and is frustrated when they reject the institutes. This can happen with the manual admission process and takes a lot of time to even reach for verification. So an automated student admission system can help you achieve this goal.

2. Being conventional when it comes to specific goals

One of the biggest advantages of setting a list of goals is that they are focused on achieving specific targets and are ambiguous, you could be thinking too narrowly. This often leads to wasted effort and frustration.

Though goals are measurable and relevant, we are missing the broad range of possibilities that needs attention. Setting a goal for admission and enrollment is specific, goals which are aimed to eliminate manual work and fully automate academic processes, RFID and Biometrics-based student identity card, online and mobile document management system, mobile payments, etc. can make a difference to your institution.

3. Not setting up the right KPIs for admission officers

We know your challenge! Attracting a prospective student, scheduling an appointment, and confirming that they turn up is, without doubt, the toughest job. It is also a crucial part of your enrollment cycle.

As an admission director, among the rest of the KPIs, you need to focus on the ‘Number of Starts”, rather than concentrating on results that will bring those results. If you have failed to do this, then you are overlooking something important!

Some of the career colleges and universities that successfully meet their admission goals concentrate on the following KPIs.

• Lead contact rate
• Appointment set rate
• Appointment show rate
• Application rate
• Enrollment rate
• Start rate

The moment you keep a track of these KPIs, your entire team will know where the problem lies and fix it right away and close more admissions.

4. Not utilizing technology

When setting many goals for accomplishment, we unwittingly sabotage our growth by not focusing our attention on technology, which addresses our most critical academic needs.

Technology goals usually deal with automating and streamlining everyday tasks, which are easier and faster to achieve. When setting goals, focus on high-quality technology goals such as cloud, mobile, and analytics, which have more impact on transforming our education system.

5. Not having a plan of action or proper process

This is a common mistake made by every institution. The admission officers always underestimate the completion time and take a longer time to achieve. When educational institutions plan to complete their admission process, they always lag behind due to delays and setbacks. So don't be too upset if you fail to achieve your goals on time and on budget.

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6. Setting several goals but ignoring the monitoring progress

When you start planning, you will try to set several goals. Chances are that you will succeed on all the goals are minimal as few might require extra time and effort to track their progress. Educational Institutes must segregate their goals based on priority and time.

Automated admission management system with a real-time application tracking system that allows you to track and analyze at each stage of the admission process. Send instant notifications via email, SMS, and mobile devices, you will feel less pressure to achieve the goals within your timelines.

7. Not communicating with prospective students

The next biggest mistake that an admission director has to avoid is effectively communicate with prospective students. In the new normal where fewer campus tours happen, institutions are failing to push their desired students to enroll. Mere word of mouth doesn’t seem to help develop perspective relations.

Try sending automated admission-related email triggers. Our free email templates can help you.

The next thing you could do is to focus on virtual presentations of the campus tours to recreate a matching experience. Lead rates have been hiked by 29% by presentations of campus tours.

8. Not addressing staffing needs

Do your manage admissions but by lack of resources? Then that’s the biggest mistake you should avoid. No matter you be aided with technology, you need the right amount of staff to address the enrolment needs.

9. Not taking ownership

In short, due to the lack of an efficient process, admission officers do not have complete ownership over leads. This is why there are instances of lesser enrollment rates and missed follow-ups. An easy option is to make team responsible for their line of tasks and to track their performance consistently.

Conclusion

See if any of these five goal-setting mistakes in college admission are hampering you from becoming a top-rated institution. When you are motivated and inspired to set effective goals after learning from your mistakes, you have taken a giant step to ensure the successful completion of your admission and enrollment goals.

At Creatrix Campus we could help you materialize your dreams into goals. We have a strategic planning module that helps establish both long-term and short-term institutional goals and efficiently track them to completion!

The tool is a boon to all employed in leadership, the planning committee, and the finance team. It helps conduct SWOT and PESTLE tools, does KPI mapping and tracking, and has a wide range of dashboards, reports, and analytics options, all aimed at improving your institutional performance. Contact our team today to know how we do it.