Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet with many different higher ed leaders. Since my retirement, I’ve been invited by several leaders to discuss ways in which they can market their online courses and programs (many of which were developed during the pandemic) to a student who would be interested in attending their university/college online. I don’t hold myself out to be a consultant nor do I intend to. The cost for my advice is usually a cup of coffee and a bagel or danish.
When I know about the intended topic or questions in advance of the meeting, the first thing that I do is look at the institution’s website. The design of college website homepages generally falls into these categories:
- Designed for current faculty and students
- Designed for reporters
- Designed for prospective donors
- Designed for the outside world
- Designed for prospective residential or commuter students
- Designed for prospective online students
- Designed for all prospective students
- Designed to be confusing
The reason that I categorized homepages only is that once you click on a link on the homepage, the designs are more difficult to categorize. I’ll return to that point later.
The pandemic created some anomalies regarding distance education enrollment. The Department of Education reported in the fall of 2020, the number of undergraduate students enrolled in at least one distance education course was 97 percent higher than in 2019 (11.8 million vs. 6.0 million). The number of undergraduate students exclusively enrolled in distance education courses in the fall of 2020 was 186 percent higher than in 2019 (7.0 million vs. 2.4 million).
Thankfully, the number of people vaccinated or exposed to Covid-19 has increased to the point where most colleges and universities are optimistic that we will not return to the situation we experienced in fall 2020. But based on those reported online undergraduate enrollments reported for the fall of 2020, it’s not a surprise that more than a few college presidents believe that they are positioned for enrolling more non-traditional students online.
For online students, a college’s first impression is the website and for many, beautiful pictures of a fantastic campus with students hanging out together in class or on the quad are not as meaningful as being able to find the degree program or certificate that they’re interested in.
For comparative purposes, I decided to visit the websites of the 10 colleges and universities with the largest online enrollments in the fall of 2020. I chose to use a list compiled by Phil Hill. In order, the schools are:
- Western Governors University
- Southern New Hampshire University
- University of Phoenix
- Grand Canyon University
- Liberty University
- Dallas College
- Arizona State University
- University of Central Florida
- Strayer University
- American Public University System
Nearly all these universities that boast the top 10 online enrollments host a homepage that allows the visitor (aka prospective student) to select the degree that they are interested in. Most of them also provide an easy to find box to click for requesting information, applying, calling, or chatting.
Contrast that with a list of 10 state flagship universities that I selected for comparison purposes.
- University of Texas at Austin
- Penn State University
- University of Maryland at College Park
- University of Illinois
- University of Michigan
- University of Colorado
- University of North Carolina
- University of Washington
- University of California at Berkeley
- University of Florida
As a highly educated individual, I enjoyed the information about research that greeted me at a few of these websites. I also enjoyed reading about some of the social initiatives happening on campus. From the perspective of a prospective student, Penn State’s homepage was more like the universities in the first list than the second.
The website represents the first impression for a prospective online student. They are generally not interested in research or social issues. They’re interested in finding out if a school offers a program that they are interested in. The websites of the universities with the largest online enrollments meet that design requirement.
Once a student lands on the home page of the institution, what happens next? As one president told me, “I need help managing the marketing funnel.” I’m not ready to answer the question I asked in my headline yet, but I’ll try to address the marketing funnel issue in my next article.
