In this episode of the Higher Ed Demand Gen podcast, host Shiro Hatori sits down with Paige Piontkowsky, AVP of Enrollment Management at the University of La Verne.
Discover how this small private university increased transfer student enrollment by 43% and the innovative strategies behind their success.
From leveraging data-driven recruitment plans to the surprising effectiveness of LinkedIn campaigns, Paige shares insights into enrollment management and the importance of collaboration with marketing.
Tune in to learn how the University of La Verne is navigating the competitive landscape of higher education and achieving stability in enrollment.
Connect with Paige on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paige-piontkowsky/
Read the transcription
Shiro (00:01)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Higher Ed Demand Gen podcast hosted by Concept3D. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on whatever channel you are listening to us today. As always, I’m Shiro Hitori, your host, and today I’m very excited to talk about how this small private university increased transfer students by 43%. We’ll also get to talk a little bit about LinkedIn advertising, which is something I really love and enjoy as well.
So today’s guest is the AVP of Enrollment Management at the University of La Verne. Please welcome Paige Pionkowski to the show.
Paige Piontkowsky (00:40)
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to talk with you today.
Shiro (00:44)
Likewise, yeah, I’m really excited for this one. It’s a, we were just talking about this, right? I grew up in Southern California. So this kind of hits a little bit of home, although LA is really big. So, ⁓ but yeah, anyways, I’m very excited to speak with you today. Can you start us off with just a quick intro about yourself?
Paige Piontkowsky (01:01)
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been working in higher ed for about 13 years. I’ve grown the ranks in different roles in higher education, but I have really found my place within enrollment, specifically admissions. I do a little bit of everything in admissions currently. I oversee our undergraduate, graduate, regional, online, and admission operations team. So I have a pretty big portfolio, but it’s exciting. It keeps me busy every single day, but I can still find time to do things like this podcast.
So I have a great team of individuals. I’ve loved this field. Like you mentioned, I’m currently at the University of Laverne. It’s an institution that’s been around forever, and we’ve seen a lot of change at the University of Laverne. So we’ve seen some enrollment growth. We’ve seen some enrollment decline. We’ve seen some hopeful enrollment stabilization, and we’ve seen a lot of leadership change. But we’re stabilizing leadership at the University of Laverne, and I’m excited to see where we’re able to go in the next five years.
Shiro (02:01)
Absolutely, and for those of you on the East Coast and maybe Central, can you tell us a little bit of the lay of the land of Laverne, locationally and also what the university stands for?
Paige Piontkowsky (02:11)
Yeah, great point. So we are positioned about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. For those who know about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, that means that the Claremont colleges are about four miles from us.
Cal Poly Pomona is another four miles from us, but we’re positioned between the mountains and the beach and we have a lot of really great things to do in Southern California. But we have so much competition just regionally. Beyond that, there’s a few community colleges that we are also competing with because there’s just more and more schools everywhere that people could go. So there’s a lot of options for higher education in our small area, but we do have some really great students that come through our door. We are
a mission-centric institution. are ranked fourth in social mobility and sorry I need to go back. Ranking just changed.
Shiro (03:04)
Yeah, no worries.
Take a note.
Paige Piontkowsky (03:08)
Yeah, sorry.
Shiro (03:11)
Yeah. Take a, take just a breath and then start whenever.
Paige Piontkowsky (03:16)
Okay, so we are ranked sixth in social mobility with the new US News and World Report rankings that just came out. But we really are making sure that our students come into the institution are transformed by the institution and can go and find the careers that are meaningful to them.
Shiro (03:35)
That’s fantastic. I did not know that. That’s amazing. You talked a little bit about a lot of change, right? In our pre-call, I really liked about as the ABP of enrollment management, we talked a little bit about your overall enrollment strategy and your planning as an institution. Can you tell us more about that?
Paige Piontkowsky (03:55)
Yeah, so like I mentioned at the top of this, we haven’t had stable leadership for quite some time at the University of La Verne. And what that has meant is that there hasn’t been a lot of strategy. And if there has been a strategy, there has not been a lot of opportunity for implementation. So within the last few years, I’ve been with the University of La Verne for three and a half years now. And within that timeframe, what we’ve gotten to do is we’ve gotten to create a recruitment plan that is what my team is now calling the playbook. So I mentioned that I have a couple of different teams on the
undergraduate side, they like to call this the playbook. On the graduate and regional side, they like to call it the roadmap. So they like to see this is where we’re going. This is how we’re getting there. But our recruitment strategy is really comprised of four main goals. And the team can then take those very high level goals and take them into more manageable pieces, right? At the goals point, that’s where senior leadership is able to see we’re getting here and our team is able to see how are we getting here. So
When senior leadership tells us we need to enroll, let’s say, 470 freshmen, then the roadmap really says, how are we enrolling 470 freshmen? What are we doing to get there? And what are going to be the tools that we are putting in place to ensure that our staff can get to where they’re going? So there’s this difference, right? Senior leadership says what’s going on. And then when our counselors need some of those tools for how they’re going to get there, that’s where they can refer to the playbook and they can see how we’re going to go to where
need to go, how are they going to do their phone outreach, their text campaigns, their email campaigns, and all of the visits that come with that as well.
Shiro (05:35)
amazing. And in terms of like, ⁓ overall strategy, I know, like just because you’ve had so much turnover and leadership changing, like stability is one of your goals that you’re trying to reach, right?
Paige Piontkowsky (05:46)
you
Yeah, so we had a new vice president of enrollment come in just over a year ago. And the thing that she told all of us when she first started was we are going to focus on stabilizing as a unit. We are going to focus on not seeing our enrollment skyrocket one year and then tank the next year and then skyrocket again and then tank again. And that’s just not a trend that is going to keep our doors open. And so her main focus has been stabilizing enrollment across the board from the freshman
Shiro (05:48)
That’s great.
Paige Piontkowsky (06:18)
all the way to the highest level doctoral students, we’re not going to see these very large spikes in enrollment from the highest classes to the lowest classes we’ve ever seen. We’re really focusing in on maintaining our classes and making sure that we’re bringing in the same numbers year after year. You mentioned it at the top of the podcast, but we exceeded our transfer.
enrollment goals by 43%. If we’re looking in a world of stabilization, well that means we have to do that same number next year. And so we really have to focus in on utilizing the same strategies that we used last year, again this coming year, so that we don’t see this tank in transfer enrollment. We can see a little bit more stability and we can see that our classes remain about the same size and there’s some predictability with that.
Shiro (07:06)
Amazing. And I love this topic about talking about your transfer students. you mentioned at the very start, lay of the land, locationally, right? You have a lot of these schools around you, community colleges specifically. Did you see that as an opportunity to be like, Hey, like this is opportunity to vamp up or revamp up our, our transfer student campaigns.
Paige Piontkowsky (07:28)
We know that there’s a lot going on in the world of higher education. There’s a lot going on in the world, period. And we know that education is really a catalyst to better things for people. And it has been for quite some time. But education is really becoming this hot button topic. And there’s a lot of conversation around it. Beyond that, education is becoming more and more expensive. And so there needs to be pathways for students. One thing that we had
not done previously is let the data tell us where to go. And so in that recruitment plan we utilized data that said tell me the feeder institutions and the feeder ⁓ community colleges that are bringing transfer students into our institution. What I did was we are a slate school so I just pulled data from slate for as far back as we could go and said if an institution has enrolled 20 or more students consider them a feeder school. Give me those students.
Then that gave us so many schools. Then I said, I really want to narrow this scope. Let’s go with 50 or more students. Then that was too few. So our sweet spot was 30. Our sweet spot was to go with 30 or more students that have ever historically enrolled at the University of LaVern. And that gave us a list of 12 institutions. So we went through and we said these 12 community colleges for us, they’re schools that are very, very close to our campus. But there are 12 schools that we’ve said these are feeders for us.
we must be at their transfer centers. We must build relationships with their transfer counselors. We must make sure that students know the value of transferring to the University of La Verne post this community college. So we had a transfer team of one. One individual did all of the transfer admission. And if you know small liberal arts institutions, you know that’s about right because we don’t have a lot of staff at these smaller institutions. Resources are sometimes limited.
But what we did was we created a transfer team. So again, at the top of the podcast, I mentioned that I oversee regional admission, online admission, undergraduate and graduate. But with that regional campus and that online campus admission, I started to see, well, students are transferring to those campuses as well. Why don’t we build a transfer team that consists of this undergraduate counselor, the one transfer counselor, as well as our regional counselors?
and build a team, build a team of individuals that have the same goal in mind. From my seat, if a student enrolls at the University of La Verne, it’s a win for the University of La Verne. From their seats, well, they have to enroll in this specific program or for this specific campus, right? Because enrollment management is so numbers driven and it’s a hard field. So I started to see there was so much competition just within our own team. Why don’t we break down that competition?
And why don’t we just work together and enroll the same students? So we started to go on the road. We started to say, let’s take these institutions and divide them up between the team. And everybody takes a few. Some had three, some had two. And they would go and that would be the primary school that they would go to. They would spend time at the transfer center. One of my counselors spent one day a week just working in the transfer center. And as students would walk in, he would be there just on his laptop.
He happens to be the kind of individual that will talk to anybody about anything. There’s that phrase that he could probably sell water to a fish. That’s this guy. He could do that. And so him sitting in the transfer center really made such a difference. But we started to see as more and more students just started to understand who is the University of LaVern. You had me talk about the schools that are within our small ⁓ region.
Well, beyond that, UCLA is not too far away. USC is not too far away. And students know all these really large schools. They don’t always know the smaller schools. So by just sitting in that transfer center once a week, it was time consuming. And it was definitely resource consuming. But it was something that made such a difference. Like you said, we increased transfer enrollment by 43%. That was not the only way we did it. But of course, that was one of our tactics.
Shiro (11:42)
That’s amazing. ⁓ I love your approach to starting with data and then figuring out your attack plan basically from where to go and creating those segments. Cause you can’t just, you know, you can’t just target everyone. Right. And so I like that you started with the smallest and it looks like you ran some small experiments and then you’re like, okay, like now it’s, it’s time to develop this even more.
Paige Piontkowsky (12:05)
Yeah, and I think with these smaller liberal arts institutions, often we don’t think, like we always talk about data being so important to our recruitment practices, but we don’t actually implement the data. We don’t actually take the data, understand the data and say, this is going to drive us forward. We just say, well, we need to have a data-driven approach, but what does that mean? Right. And what are we doing with it? I happen to have somebody that is part of my slate team. He is the most brilliant person that I’ve ever
worked with and he can put together any report and so I did not do this on my own he absolutely is the person that went through and said I need to pull these numbers for you and he ⁓ I think he has a math degree or something like that so he can do some statistical analysis that I couldn’t even comprehend but he was able to tell me through these these types of analyses this is what’s going to give you your numbers and then you go and take it from there
Shiro (13:01)
That’s fantastic.
trying to look back to the start of this conversation about how you set goals for your team. And maybe this is part of that, right? You you give them a goal and you say, Hey, like, I don’t care how we get there or how we get there is up to you, but this is what we need to get there. And maybe it’s some of that agency that you give in management also helps your team get there as well.
Paige Piontkowsky (13:25)
Yeah, it’s, I’ve definitely seen that that’s been a thing that giving them sort of the tools and then having them design what works best for them.
is really something that attributes to that 43 % enrollment growth. I can’t do it on my own. There’s no way that I could go and do all the work that everybody does. But what I can do is help guide them to where they need to go. And I can help give them the tools and give them everything that they need to design their own plan. So as I’m giving the schools to people, I give them some ideas, you know, a transfer visit, or I would have never thought to just go sit in the transfer center once a week, but it worked. And it was something that
Shiro (13:49)
Mm-hmm.
Paige Piontkowsky (14:07)
he wanted to do on his own. Other counselors were like, no, thank you. I need two screens. I need my office. I just want to go to the transfer visit and then I want to go back to the office. But I gave them the tools and let them design the plans that would work best for them and their schedules.
Shiro (14:12)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that’s amazing. ⁓ Very specific question, but you said you were already seeing transfer students come from some of these community colleges, right, already in these two-year institutions. ⁓ Was there anything being done before that or were they just choosing and then you were just using that data?
Paige Piontkowsky (14:41)
There of course were things being done. It wasn’t as tracked as it is now and it wasn’t as I don’t want to say rigid, but I also sort of want to say rigid. Like when we all put our events together, it’s very much like you’re going to this school on this day at this time and it feels very rigid. It’s not like that, but you know travel season can feel just so hard and when we’re in travel season, it’s a lot more tracked now. Before of course there were things
Shiro (14:47)
Mm-hmm.
Paige Piontkowsky (15:11)
were happening but like I said there was only one transfer counselor and there’s only so much time in a day, time in a week, time in a year right and so people didn’t have the time to do all the outreach that needed to be done and so when we took that team of one into a team of five or six we then really started to see the fruits of our labor ⁓ coming to fruition.
Shiro (15:37)
That’s amazing. Okay. I want to make sure we have time for the other topics. So we just covered the first enrollment tactic deep into the tactic. I love that we get to go with all these examples. Number two, I’d love to talk a little bit more about how you’ve collaborated with, with marketing specifically around running LinkedIn campaigns to increase enrollment for graduate and doctoral programs. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Paige Piontkowsky (15:41)
Okay.
Yeah, so.
Absolutely. I’ll be honest, I was not a person that said the LinkedIn campaign is going to work, partly because I get all those LinkedIn messages all the time of different individuals trying to sell me something. And I love the hustle. And I think it’s so great for all the people that need to do it. But as the consumer myself, I was sort of thinking, there’s just no way, there’s no way people are going to read these in-mail campaigns and say, yes, sign me up for the University of LaVern. So we had seen, we were very
close to the start of the term and we had seen that we just needed something. I really called this my Hail Mary campaign. And I just said, I just do something because I need to enroll students. And so we were doing some LinkedIn campaigns for one of our doctoral programs that over the past several years was a failing doctoral program. We were seeing fewer and fewer students looking to enroll in the program.
Through that and maybe some other SEO type work, they were putting out campaigns for this program and my counselor that was over that program started to say like, what is it that you’re doing? Because I’m getting so many more appointments. And the only thing that was different was that LinkedIn campaign. And we did partner with a company called Complete U.
to do some phone outreach. There were some students that did do phone outreach and did answer the phone through this, but the success of that program and the enrollment metrics of that program was really attributed to the LinkedIn campaigns that our marketing team did. So they put together some really creative ads. They really made sure that they were targeting the correct profile. So they had us utilize Slate to create a student profile, several student profiles, because the program attracts a couple different types of students.
and they went through and they said, we’ll find these students for you. And we ended up meeting our goal. We met it just one shy after the add drop period because one student did end up dropping from the program. But I mean, from the fact that we were at like one or two students at the start of the summer to the fact that we
were one shy of our goal by the time the ad drop period came, I attribute a huge success to that. And again, say that my marketing team is the only reason, well, one of the only reasons that we could have even gotten close to that.
Shiro (18:21)
Yeah. What a great example of working together with marketing who maybe runs the ads, has the partnership, but working with your team who has the enrollment, the persona profiles from Slay from already enrolled existing students. So another great example also of data too, right? Using Slay, figuring out who your audience is, who your persona is, relaying that information back to running those ads and creating a target persona there. That’s awesome.
That’s fantastic. And I know we just started talking about this a little bit. Tell us a little bit more about phone outreach. Where have you seen this effective? Like I was not expecting you to talk about phone outreach and it felt like I was talking to a sales company. So tell us more about that.
Paige Piontkowsky (19:02)
Right?
Yeah, as a millennial most people hate it when I say phone outreach does work, but when I build my recruitment plans…
I always put call campaigns into my recruitment plans and each time the counselors read it, they cringe because they’re just like, Paige, be so for real. Like I am being so for real. They work. ⁓ I’ve really seen phone outreach works for the populations, all populations that I oversee, but it has to be hyper-focused and it has to be within a time frame that makes sense for those student population we’re calling. I’m never going to be able to call a college senior at
10 o’clock in the morning because they’re in math class. It’s just never going to work. And I’m really not going to be able to call a professional probably between the hours of eight and five. Maybe I’ll get lucky, but for the most part, they’re also not picking up their phone. And so when I designed the call campaigns, I designed them around the hours that work for most people in our population. That’s typically the four to seven PM timeframe. I see about 20 to 30 % of students pick up the phone. Somebody will probably
tell me that’s not a great metric, but even 20 % ends up yielding the results at the end. So as you’ve probably heard for this podcast, I really love numbers. I love to utilize numbers and say, can we make this better? How can we use those 20 % and put them into our enrollment pipeline? How can we make sure that that 20 % of students is within our funnel? But Complete U also has done a lot of that early phone outreach for us. So they do a lot of top of funnel outreach. So those real cold calls
that nobody likes doing. Those are the people that Complete U calls for us and then they schedule appointments on behalf of our team with somebody on my side so that we can get that student through the funnel.
Shiro (20:56)
Yeah, and take me through the process of figuring out which programs or which educational programs you thought were a good fit for this campaign.
Paige Piontkowsky (21:08)
Well, we started this in 2023 when all the financial aid issues were happening. So, you know, the FAFSA was pushed back and then it was pushed back again. And then they were like, we don’t know when it’s going to open back up. And so we just saw nobody enrolling. We saw nobody submitting tuition deposits. And so we had to go through and say who are going to be the people that is going to make the biggest impact on the institution. We started with our undergraduate students. So complete youth.
started a campaign with any person who was directly admitted to the institution. Direct admission is becoming a very very popular
the thing for students to enroll. They want to know, they want to know right away that they were admitted to the institution. So we started with those direct admit students. If they had been directly admitted to the institution and they were receiving a phone call from Complete U, while my counselors focused on a different area. So they focused on the app generation side of it while Complete U was focusing on the direct admit side. On the grad side, we just went with any person who was an app start or an
and hadn’t yet worked through the funnel. So Complete You called all those individuals and gave them all the tools that they needed to submit an application to the institution. We started to see call volumes increase. We started to see appointments increase and we started to see their call times were a little bit different from our call times. So we just shifted our strategy a little bit to say from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. two nights per week we’re staying late and we are making phone calls. And the 7 p.m. not everybody likes.
when you have kids at home or just anything outside of work, you yeah right you don’t want to stay till seven o’clock. It’s work. Who wants to stay there till seven? ⁓ But like you talked about, I’m definitely the leader that will give them the time back. I won’t make them work eight to seven. If we work until seven tonight, we’re not coming in until ten tomorrow. Maybe eleven if we really are successful in our call campaign. I also found that buying people food and not just pizza really does work.
Shiro (22:50)
In general, yeah.
That’s amazing. Not just pizza. Okay. That’s great.
Paige Piontkowsky (23:17)
Not just pizza. I
mean, in higher ed, right? All we get is a pizza party for all the things, but no, not just pizza. We did a lot of Thai food. We did a lot. So. Yeah.
Shiro (23:21)
Hahaha
Think.
Think beyond the pizza for gifting. That’s great.
Okay. So what I’m hearing is, ⁓ you know, adjusting those talk call times, figuring out how you can segment an audience. ⁓ primarily this is for, ⁓ graduate programs and doctoral programs. Right. And so thinking of your ICP, did you ever try this with like a gen Z population as well for undergrad? I’m just curious. I don’t think it would work, but
Paige Piontkowsky (23:50)
Yeah,
you know what, I didn’t think so either. It is working, but you know what I’m finding is it’s working if we call them once. We usually are screened, especially now those of us who have iPhones and the new update with the iPhone, you can actually screen your calls. So they are usually screened, but then we send them a text and we’re just like, hey, Shiro, I’m trying to give you a call. I want to talk to you about the University of Laverne. Can I give you a call tomorrow at this time? And they’re just like, oh yeah, for sure. Or
you the common one is bet. So we get a lot of that back.
Shiro (24:24)
Gotcha. That’s awesome. That’s great. yeah, call, dial and the text follow up just to get past that initial, ⁓ the call like ID, right? That shows up automatically on the iPhones. Man, these are amazing tactical steps. Whoever’s gonna listen to this is really lucky. This is great. ⁓ Awesome. Well, you I think we’re just at about time here. I’m wondering where our listeners can follow up.
with you or learn more about what you’re up to.
Paige Piontkowsky (24:56)
Yeah, I’d love for people to connect with me on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is just first name dot last name. Last name is a little bit tough, so maybe Shira, if you could help me out and link that in your podcast, that’d be awesome. But LinkedIn would definitely be the place to connect with me.
Shiro (25:09)
I sure will.
Fantastic. Okay. Well, maybe I’ll be put into some system now and get some cold calls from you. Make sure to pick up. All right. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate all the knowledge shared. It’s been amazing. Thank you so much.
Paige Piontkowsky (25:21)
Yeah, maybe.
Thanks
for having me Cheryl. Talk to you soon.
