Salesforce.com is widely regarded as the premier Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool available in the market place today.  The platform has seemingly endless applications for sales and relationship-driven business; and because it is a hosted solution it requires very little maintenance.  EDU Interactive has worked with the Salesforce.com platform for several years delivering leads into the system in real time via the Application Programming Interface (API).  What has proven most interesting about Salesforce.com is that each of our clients on the platform uses the software in slightly different ways to facilitate enrollment.  This has a lot to do with the fact that Salesforce is highly customizable.  Our clients are leveraging the customization suite to build the system that suits their enrollment needs.

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There have been several very public failures of online degree programs in the past 12 months, and several others that were not so public as well.  As an observer of online higher education, I think it is safe to say that programs are closing almost as quickly as they are being launched.  The fact is traditional institutions seem to have a lot of trouble figuring out how to make a new online division successful.  In the process of trying to determine the equation for success, these colleges often spend large sums of money only to eventually close the online programs entirely.  This pattern begs the question, ‘why does this happen?’.  I think that there are several answers to this question, all of which center around a common theme: traditional institutions simply do not approach online education correctly.  The following are some flaws in approach that lead to online program failures.

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In the past several years online education has literally exploded. It seems that there are new institutions entering the online education space on a monthly basis, and the demand from educational consumers is keeping pace. The economic down turn of the past 12 months has contributed in part to a record number of new potential students applying for federal aid and looking to retool their skills by returning to school. The average observer of this trend might conclude that the proverbial rising tide is raising all ships, but in fact this is not the case. The explosion in growth is being enjoyed by a relatively small pool of institutions (not withstanding technical schools and career colleges). The truth of the matter is that the degree seeking student market is dominated by the large for profit providers. These institutions are succeeding in spite of negative perceptions of quality, negative press and high tuition rates, which begs the question ‘how do they do it?’. More pointedly, why is it that traditional institutions with high quality programs, long standing traditions, positive consumer perceptions and affordable tuition rates, launch online programs online to dissolve them one or two years later?

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What’s going on in enrollment these days? Those of us that work in and around the business of enrolling non-traditional students have started to notice some trends that just don’t make sense. More and more schools have entered the online and non traditional student education space, and the competition for the same students has become increasingly fierce. This competition has led to strong arm recruiting tactics, dishonesty through omission, outright lying and artificially manufactured urgency. Sadly the ones who suffer are the people who are earnestly looking for an educational solution.

Too many institutions have lost sight of the fact that if you take care of you take care of your students, the students will take care of your institution. It boils down to simple math. If the average cost per acquisition is between $1,000 and $2,000 and a first course costs anywhere from $500-2000, then most institutions will not realize any tuition revenue until the second and sometimes even the third course. If you are forcing students in to class, don’t be surprised to see them drop out of class.

The one common theme among students that persist in class is this, they are comfortable with the decision that they are making. The choice to go to school boils down to a student deciding to get over his or her fears about finding the time, paying for school and most importantly the fear of failure. No amount of arm twisting is going to change these fears. The admissions rep can only usher the prospective student to a place where he or she can make the decision on their own. When a student drops because they didn’t have the right expectations, the admissions rep is 100% to blame. The golden rule applies to enrollment as well, take care of you students and they will take care of your institution.