Blog Recap:
In Episode 96 of the Higher Ed Demand Gen Podcast, Scott Cline and Shiraz Chavan from California College of the Arts (CCA) share groundbreaking strategies addressing summer melt and international student recruitment. This blog distills their insights, revealing critical processes and tools for boosting student engagement and institutional planning.
Combating Summer Melt: Challenges and Solutions
Summer melt, where students drop out after accepting admission offers, creates significant challenges for colleges. At CCA, this was highlighted by strong deposits in May followed by unexpected dropouts in August due to affordability issues.
To combat this, CCA introduced a comprehensive dashboard, the “incoming student mail tracker,” for real-time data tracking and daily updates on student engagement. This tool provides a 360-degree view of each student’s journey, allowing staff to intervene proactively and support students from the early stages.
Early Indicators and Real-Time Engagement
The use of early indicators like housing applications and payment plans helps predict student engagement and retention. By focusing on these factors, institutions can offer timely support, reducing the chances of summer melt.
The real-time tracking system can also be expanded to monitor returning students, reinforcing the importance of continuous engagement. Scott highlighted how this tool fosters a supportive environment for both new and existing students, leading to better retention rates.
Collaborative Efforts and Data-Driven Strategies
Previously siloed processes at CCA contributed to a fragmented student experience. The new system facilitates cross-departmental collaboration and streamlined communication. Scott and Shiro emphasized the key role of united efforts and data-driven insights in creating a smoother enrollment process.
International Student Recruitment: Bridging the Gap
Shiraz shared his insights on enhancing international recruitment at CCA. Understanding regional communication channels like WeChat in China and WhatsApp elsewhere is crucial for effective engagement. Moreover, comprehending local higher education options and cultural contexts helps build trust with prospective students.
Shiraz highlighted the significant investments needed to support international students and the importance of institutional readiness for building long-term relationships. His experiences traveling and engaging with students globally provide CCA with a nuanced approach to international recruitment.
Adapting to Uncertainties: Post-Pandemic Recruitment
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a reevaluation of recruitment strategies. At CCA, providing clear cost and payment information early in the process reduces last-minute affordability shocks, mitigating summer melt risks.
Recruitment staff also adapted by gaining a deeper understanding of curriculums and cultural insights, resonating better with prospective students. These efforts aim to create a transparent, supportive environment conducive to successful student enrollment and retention.
Conclusion
The discussion on the Higher Ed Demand Gen Podcast revealed that successful anti-melt campaigns and international recruitment strategies require significant collaboration, investment, and adaptability. As Scott and Shiraz illustrated, staying competitive in higher education demands a data-driven, empathetic approach focused on student-centric policies.
Read the transcription
Shiro:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Higher Ed Demand Gen Podcast hosted by Concept 3 d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple, and Google. My name is Shiro Torrey, and I will be your host today. And for this episode, I’m really thrilled to learn more about how to reengineer anti mail campaigns as well as recruiting international students successfully. And for that topic, I’m super excited to have Scott and Shiraz join us today from the California College of the Arts or CCA as we’ll be mentioning for the rest of the call. Scott is the senior vice president of enrollment management and auxiliary services, and Shiraz is the associate VP of enrollment management. Welcome to the show, you 2.
Scott:
Thanks for having us.
Shiro:
Alright. And I have an icebreaker place that I just mentioned to you. So please tell me what you love about higher ed.
Scott:
That’s a great question. I think for me, having been at CCA now for 14 years and not, we’re a specialized art and design college, I’m not an artist and designer, but every day, I get to come to work with our students that are so creative. And that energy, that, you know, thing that they put out there in the world gives me that energy to show up every day for our students.
Shiraz:
I would say I really enjoy working with the different staff and the different, communities and the different organizations that are within the college to come together and support the students. I, have had the pleasure of creating, the student services office here at CCA, which is a one stop shop for a number of different, business of the student sort of offices of the financial aid, you know, the accounts, advising, and all these other players, and to give the students a coordinated, response in all their questions. And that would not have been possible if we didn’t work in higher ed and did not enjoy working with all the different parts of higher education in a in a university setting there.
Shiro:
That’s that’s so important. Team is, like, everything. Right? Your work culture and how you get along. I just had we do these, things at concept 3 d called lun lunch and learns. So we have, like, one employee, like, shared a little bit about their life story. And one funny comment, he made was that he worked at Sonic, like, I think in high school, and there was one that was actually, like, closer to him, but he usually worked at the one that’s, like, 40 minutes away. And he worked one day at the one closer to him, and the the the team was just not there. And so he left after the 1st day and continued commuting 40 minutes at age 18.
Shiro:
So that’s, it’s pretty impressive how big of a difference that makes. Thanks for sharing that. Awesome. Well, yeah, what’s, similar to, like, what you love about higher at, can you tell us a little bit more about, your background and your role and how you got here today?
Shiraz:
Sure. Yeah. I, started at I am originally from Africa, Nigeria. Indian. I came to the United States as a, international student, University of Missouri, Kansas City, and then went to do my higher ed work in at University of the Pacific, U of P in Stockton. I interviewed at CCA for a job in the international office as the adviser there, and waited a good 4 months for that because I really, really, really wanted to work with international students, and was able to come to CC and then, started working in the admissions office and worked with our director and vice president at that time to recruit international students, and I got to travel all over the world in all these different, areas and learn about all the different cultures and curriculums around. I took a different perspective from the other recruiters per se on the road because I did not come from a art background recruiting for the arts, arts, school, the visual arts school here at CCA. So I took the curriculum perspective, which I know well and, learned and, used that to talk to all the different schools and students and parents and, educators there about how it is we align curriculums at CCA versus the current curriculums in all the different countries that we travel to.
Shiro:
Thank you for sharing that. Is there a country that you like the most to go to or that was really interesting for you? That’s not a story I get to hear very often. So
Shiraz:
Yes. Japan. I loved loved my time in Japan. It was one of the funnest place sorry. No. That’s not a word. To travel to and, take the the the train ride to all the different cities and take it so quickly and to be able to visit all these different schools in a day, you know, and just travel the country. It was beautiful there.
Shiraz:
And, of course, the food was amazing, and I spent most of my time at the train station because the food’s great there too.
Shiro:
That’s great to hear. And, Scott, do you wanna fill us in with a a bit of your background as well?
Scott:
Yeah. Sure. And I’m a short timer, at California College of the Arts compared to Shiraz. I’ve only been here for 14 years. While Shiraz has been here, I think we celebrated her anniversary coming up here next month for 17 years. But I’ve been in higher education since I graduated from undergrad and grad school at Chapman University down in Southern California, and I fell into financial aid like most people and worked my way through a few financial aid, roles at Chapman University and then had a stint at Stanford’s Business School, also in the financial aid office, and applied for this job at the school that I honestly didn’t know much about, California College of the Arts at the time. And I came in as their associate director of financial aid and thought it was gonna be, you know, a 2, 3 year, 4 year job or something like that, and then I would be looking for another job as a director of financial aid. And then 14 years went by.
Scott:
And since then, I’ve jumped into the enrollment management space, first working with Shiraz and the team on the undergraduate mission side. And then when my predecessor retired of about now 6 years ago, stepping into the vice president role, and then fast forward actually added on auxiliary services, which for CCA includes housing, dining, little bit of parking and transportation thrown in there for fun. So the joke I have is CCA seems a little, you know, crazy enough to offer me a new job every 2 to 3 years here at the college. So and I’ve loved it since.
Shiro:
That’s amazing. Yeah. 2 years went went to 14 real quick.
Scott:
It does.
Shiro:
Yeah. That’s great. Awesome. Well, yeah, let’s jump into some of the topics here today. At the time of this recording, it’s the end of July, but I believe we’re gonna post this next week. So it should be the first sorry. End of June, and it this should be posted next week, which is the 1st week of July. And so this topic should be very, very pertinent to what’s going on in higher ed right now, which is, a lot of schools are focusing on anti mal and making sure their drop day numbers are gonna be, close to what their, enrollment numbers were.
Shiro:
So, we we talked a lot about on our pre call with Scott around, you know, some of the things that, CCA has been doing to help combat MELT and reengineer the system. Can you tell us a little bit more about what happened to MELT last year and why you’re reengineering the system this year or for this fall?
Scott:
Yeah. CCA saw, like many universities last summer, a significant uptick in our, summer melt. So our deposits were looking incredibly strong coming into May last year without a FAFSA delay, and we saw, the time period during summer, coming out of the pandemic. We thought things were stabilized. By the time we got into August, when the bills were due, the payments were due, we’re having students arrive on campus, a number of students, both international students and domestic students popping up and say that they couldn’t come to the college. And this was a significant uptick from previous cycles, even including the years during the pandemic when a lot of things were, moving around for a lot of colleges. And so we really started to dig in and try to discover what was happening, what was the issues with timing, what was the processes like. And like many institutions, we had processes in place to combat, summer melt.
Scott:
You know, a lot of those processes were siloed or connected to a certain department, whether or not that’s our international students doing their I twenty process, our students who are receiving financial aid accepting their aid and completing those processes, and then also the registration process and paying their student bills. We had all those price, processes in place previously, and there’s engagement plans and the teams were working really hard. But what we quickly discovered was both some of the processes that were in place, weren’t ideal from a student experience. And then 2, we didn’t have all the pieces of data connected to really give a true 360 degree view from both a people working on the ground, engaging with those students, and then from a leadership perspective of the college to be very much aware of how we’re going through this process. And so we were taking those lessons and seeing how we could change our processes going forward into this current summer.
Shiro:
Gotcha. And, you know, what helped identify I’ve obviously, the the melt rate went up, right, or percentage went up. So that was one indicator. But how did you know, you know, that there were issues in in the current process and it wasn’t just because of, you know, the economy or, like, the world in the state of the world? Yeah. And without a doubt, I
Scott:
think a lot of schools saw an uptick in, the the melt last summer for a variety of reasons. And we could have said, okay. Is that the economy, the world, visa processing for international students? We could have shrugged our shoulders, but we really wanted to make sure that we were doing everything within our control, to make sure that our students could be successful from the time they chose and said they’re gonna come to the college through the time period. And the particular indicator for me early on was the timing of when students were melting. Previously, students melted, you know, somewhat towards the beginning right before the school year started, but it was kind of more of an even process. What we saw that was a pretty telling indicator was a number of students dropping, near the very end of the summer, you know, right before they’re showing up. And from a student perspective, that’s, you know, really, you know, detrimental to that student experience because they also means that they’re not just going to CCA, but they might not be able to go to another college or another educational avenue for that coming semester. And from an institutional planning perspective, we’ve already contracted with faculty, set up courses, you know, made and designed budgets for the next operating year.
Scott:
And so on both sides of that equation, particularly the timing was the biggest indicator for us that we really need to make sure that we are doing everything within our control to make that both a great student experience as possible and then making sure we’re connecting all those data points.
Shiro:
Gotcha. Well, let’s talk about the exciting part, which is, you know, what have you done, in in regards to trying to mitigate those, MELT increases?
Scott:
Yeah. I think it starts in 2 phases. 1, we really looked at and Shiraz led this with our student services director, and we have a unified student services, that we came out of the pandemic as a one stop for students, still with different offices operating and touching base both within the student services and external to the college. But draws really dived in with those student services directors on really redesigning both from a business of a student and the engagement processes. And then we also looked at it from a data perspective as well. But happy to have Shiraz first take you through a bit about how we really started to think about it from a student experience, process, and our engagements.
Shiraz:
So we, looked at the different, touch points that a student has with, the the different parts of the college. So we looked at financial aid. We looked at, the international students with international office. Student accounts was involved in this as well, and, housing and dining, of course. So these are, like, 4 touch points that the student has to have completed in order to move through the process. And so then we worked with our associate vice president of technology services, to create this really amazing dashboard that allowed us to visually see where the students are as they’re going through the different, aspects of that. And we, put pointers, you know, number num numerical pointers to each of those, places. But it took a long time to get there.
Shiraz:
You know? It took a lot of conversations with each of the different offices to understand, what their touch points are and which of those touch points we need to bring to the surface to actually count on to understand where the students fall in all the different, sort of dashboards that we were looking at. Yeah.
Scott:
And what that really drove us to was really looking at what those catch points are for students. For instance, CCA, sent out bills usually starting on July 1st. And what we really discovered was students were reporting, well, if I know what my bill is, you’d think they would have had that information. They might have had part of that information, but it didn’t really set in for the students until after they received that bill. And there was a number of reasons why we did that, and we really looked and tried to tick off the things that would be able to send out or provide that really concrete information of, like, this is what your charges are. These are what your direct costs are. These are what your indirect costs are. And we even built those back into our admissions process for the for the cycle working with our financial aid team to really redesign, and we adopted the college transparency initiative to really be able to have a very clear cut aid offer that says, this is what your direct price is.
Scott:
This is what your non direct price is. And even though that might mean that less students might have deposited by, in the case of a non FAFSA delayed year, May 1 or in our case, June 1 for us, some students might not have deposited. It meant that they were depositing with more information up front, and then we back that up with being able to say, here’s a really clear idea of what your payment is going to be, what your costs are gonna be, and give the financial our amazing financial aid team, our amazing student account team, and the other teams working on this more time. So instead of having 30, 45 days to really work that problem set, They really had all of summer to help them figure out, like, okay. Is it a financial aid change of circumstances? Is it a parent plus loan? Is it a payment plan? They just have more time, and the key for all these students working with them is needing more time to work the problem. And even if, ultimately, they’re not gonna be able to go to, you know, CCA in the fall, knowing about that in May for us is a whole different thing than knowing about it in August.
Shiro:
Yeah. That makes a huge, huge change. Have you seen any early, indicators now that you’ve changed those dates? Like, we’re at the end of June, so I’m just curious.
Scott:
Yeah. I mean, the early indicators, I mean, we’re still like, everybody, like, fully on through July August. We’re all we’re all in the same, component. And particularly, you layer on, we didn’t nobody knew what the impacts were of the FAFSA delays. But, you know, we didn’t predict that as the future, and we wish it were were not the case, but we because of all this effort we did, we came into the FAFSA delays, I think, above the average of prepared because we were really approaching this in this new way. And the early indicators are we have the data. You know, again, looking at that 360 degree view, we can see by student by student level where they are and what those where they might be not having completing something. So for right now, you know, really looking at our international students, have they completed their I twenty process.
Scott:
We sent out housing assignments last week. We know who hasn’t done their housing application, going through the registration process, and early indicators of, you know, payments while they’re not due. We didn’t move up the payment deadline, which you might have done or something like that to get an earlier indicator. We wanted to make sure that students still had that time to make that payment and be well prepared to be successful once they’re here. We didn’t push it up, but we can tell by that early indicator of accepting financial aid, setting up their payment plans. Those type of key indicators are giving us a much better idea of what we’re looking at and then being able to, anticipate and really reengage those students at the critical time when we need to do it. So, again, early days. And as Shiraz and I, having worked for many years, we always are little superstitious and we say knock on wood.
Scott:
We have some pretty good indicators for this coming, this fall semester and the start for CCA.
Shiro:
Gotcha. Yeah. Maybe we do I need to follow-up with you in about 3 months and see how everything went because I’m I’m very curious to learn how things went. And it sounds like you just had a a magic 8 ball, and you’re able to predict the the faster delays because, yeah, the timing could’ve I mean, I know it’s based on a reaction to something, but, like, the timing was, you know, really, really worked in your favor. So that’s that’s great to hear as well. We’re happy not to have that for
Scott:
the record for next year. Yeah. We’ll be happy to have on time fast for next year.
Shiro:
Yes. I think I think you and everyone, which is that students, admin, staff, everyone. I’m curious. You talked about your tracker and your 3 60 view. Right? This new reporting you’ve created, I think you call it the incoming student mail tracker. I got a sneak peek at it, I think, the other week when we had our intro call, and, it was it was really neat. So before, like, to my understanding, all that tracking was very disjointed depending on the department. Right? And now you have one lens or one view at a whole, you know, class of students.
Shiro:
Is that is that right?
Scott:
Yeah. And this is the magic of doing a podcast and trying to paint a a word picture of what this looks like, but I’ll do my best. Is so for context, so CCA is a Workday student, as our student system. And we have an amazing team over on our technology team as as well that has really been a a very solid partner for everybody working on the business side of, enrollment management auxiliary services as well as, like, student accounts business office as well. We’ve had that really great team. And while Shiraz was mentioning, it took a lot of energy and effort in many ways, like, from my perspective, being able to work with our technology team to take what a lot of schools have as individual reports, a spreadsheet, maybe a dash board, or something like that, but it tells you a sliver of that. What we now have is in one dashboard, you know, each individual student is listed on that, and you have a color coding system to indicate if they are effectively a stoplight exercise of, do they have a red light? Is there something that they need to do a critical path that they need to do, take it their I twenty process, accepting their aid, you know, setting up their CSA email, account or something like that at the early stages. Are they yellow light? Have they started a process? Or is it a timing thing where it’s like they’ve viewed their financial aid but not accepted it? And then we have a lot of green lights.
Scott:
So for in the case of an international student, they’ve submitted their I twenty. We’ve issued their letter. And you can see it across the board for each individual student where they might have all green lights. They might have a combination of yet, green, yellow, and red lights, etcetera, each individual student. And then we can aggregate that up into a risk profile, that we’re tracking for the first time to say, what’s their likelihood of melting? Or the inverse, we like to think of the positive way. What’s their likelihood of enrolling and continuing to enroll in the the fall semester? And we can look at that. In addition to that, our technology team has been able to provide that within our own system, a snapshot on a daily basis. So the great thing is as we talk about, like, we can see in August September what the results of this were, but we’ll actually be able to go back and say next year, yeah, we’ll have different circumstances.
Scott:
Hopefully, not FAFSA delays for, that push deadlines back for instance. But we’ll be able to say, is in on July 15th, if a student has this type of indicator, what’s their risk profile of not enrolling at the college and really be able to tailor our outreach and engagement as well as redefine our processes, again, based off of that day by day tracking that we’re gonna have. And you’re gonna put that over a few years, and we’re gonna be have have really great results that way.
Shiro:
That’s amazing.
Shiraz:
And the other way we’ve been able to also track is what the students have been, seeing in terms of the engagement. We have, these very specific engagements that come out from Workday under the title of journeys. And so students can we can track to see what part of those journeys students have, engaged with versus not engaged with or just clicked and not, you know, comprehended the information that has been given to them. We also work with a, really great engagement, assistant director of engagement, on our team who is able to provide enrollment, information to students about how it is they can take this information in, in bite sized pieces. So this is what the the generation, the, the type of student that is coming to the college, you know, wants to be able to quickly get through all the different things because they’re such busy people now, especially when they’re finishing high school and, you know, trying to complete prom and say bye to their friends and then, you know, head on to college. So it’s the that that part in terms of, not just the technical part of making sure that the, the different aspects of of their touch points are taken care of, but how it is they interact with the information that is being provided to them is also pretty important.
Shiro:
Yeah. The engagement key. Right? Yep. Go ahead, Scott.
Scott:
No. I was just gonna say, I mean, it’s the other thing that in my previous number of years of experience in higher ed, oftentimes, people would pull a report. It would take a few days to churn through the data, be able to give that to the team that’s actually operationalizing it and do their engagement. Every day during the summer matters. We know this. And so being able to have real time data, like, you can just anybody who’s working on this team can go in and refresh it or there’s no refreshing it. It just is there, every single day. And if something changes, we can also see that, with indicator scores of whether or not they are going in a positive direction.
Scott:
They just started a process, and so they’re less likely to, have a melt risk or the opposite. So we might pass a certain deadline. Take, for instance, international students. If we get into a certain time period and they haven’t started their I twenty process, that’s a pretty big indicator. We wanna know that, based off that timing for that student.
Shiro:
That’s fantastic. And is this report just built for incoming freshman or 1st year students, or is this also, like, for, you know, sophomores turning into juniors, juniors into seniors?
Scott:
You’re thinking ahead of us. Exactly. So it’s primarily being used for the the incoming students, but it has the capability of being able to use for all of our students because, again, we know, you know, it’s not just the incoming class. It’s also the number of students that you retain. And that’s just as key as the total enrollment, the total health of an institution is driven both by your incoming class and the number of students you retain. And particularly for the assumption previously often is like, oh, yeah. The students are gonna come back who are already here, and we know that has also changed throughout the pandemic and since the pandemic.
Shiro:
Yeah. It’s it’s interesting to think, like I I’m not an expert like YouTube, but, like, in my brain, like, MELT is, like, sort of like retention in a sense. They haven’t, you know, set foot on campus yet, but I feel like some of the responsibilities of that could be shared as well. And so Mhmm. A report like this is amazing because you can, you know, build on top of it and not make it just like, you know, this one time a year. Like, it can be for all classes, and I think that’s fantastic.
Scott:
Yeah. And it’s given us a tool to really broaden out and under Shiraz and the director of student services, that leadership team. That’s a pretty broad base of the college across different divisions, really a tool to be able to actually expand it out to those other stakeholders from the academic side or chairs to really understand and be able to see how the shape of it is, not just from their planning perspective, but how they’re the importance of engaging with those students during, quote, unquote, that quiet time of the summer when a lot of people go away that we know is a critical time period for, success of an institution that starts in that fall semester.
Shiro:
Gotcha. It and before we switch gears a little bit, I had one follow-up question is, like, what, what are you most excited about this new engineering of of anti melt? Like, it could be from the report, a piece of data that you’re able to pull now. It can be anything else. I’m just curious.
Scott:
I’m curious what Shiraz says, and then I’ll follow-up after put her on the spot after 14 years.
Shiraz:
I am excited about the estimated billing side of the house, and I think that is going to allow us to speak to students in a very different way and has already allowed us to speak to students in a very different way.
Scott:
The thing that I find most exciting about this is is actually stealing from Shiraz talking about the team. In all my years and one of the thing that has really kept me at the institution is I haven’t found a crazy enough idea that they haven’t been willing to take on and say, yes. We can do this. We can solve this problem. And so that’s the excitement of, like, really on top of serving students, providing better services, being able to guide students through, and then be successful and say here they’re on campus and, through their time and journey here at CCA. It’s really like, what type of crazy idea can can I come up with at 2 AM and say, hey. What do you think about this? And they’re like, yeah. We can do something.
Scott:
So that’s the most amazing thing for me.
Shiro:
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Okay. Well, like, let’s switch gears now. I know I’ve covered international student recruitment quite a bit. Like, a year or 2 ago on this podcast, I had, like, a series, and it it kinda quite you know, it got a little quiet for some reason. I definitely heard less from the market as well. I think people are, you know, just trying to recover to what the new normal looks like.
Shiro:
And so, you know, I’d love to learn from Shiraz about, you know, what is the current state of international student recruitment? How how have things shifted since the pandemic? In your opinion, this is all your opinion. So yeah.
Shiraz:
No. You’re right. I think everything did take a little bit of a break, and everyone was trying to recover from the pandemic, and, you know, just try to get a sense of where everyone and everything is. And I think we’re still in that mode where we are trying to still understand where the international students are, where the domestic students are. You know, at CCA, we saw quite a bit of, students from California. They decided to stay home and, you know, go to school here. So we we we were really excited to see that because we hadn’t seen, the uptake in Californian students at CCNA in a little bit of a time there. And then because we are we were mostly, about very close to 50%, 47% international there for quite some time.
Shiro:
Mhmm.
Shiraz:
So and that is, that was always exciting for us on the international recruitment side. Our most of our international recruitment has been done by 2 individuals. But after the pandemic and just before the pandemic hit, we had, a number of staff members that were interested in, you know, having to learn about international recruitment and wanting to travel in that direction and and and take on that kind of responsibility. One of the key factors, as you might know, about international recruitment is that you need to be able to speak to everything. So graduate, transfer, you know, 1st year about the curriculum of the college, you know, not just the the what the college offers and to what extent, the admissions criteria is. You you really have to be able to be the sort of one voice when you’re standing in front of families or in a presentation or, in that sort of category. So it’s a lot of responsibility for any person that is traveling, which I learned the hard way, my first year here. But it it is a lot of fun when you can be when you can stand in that position and and definitely talk to that.
Shiraz:
So one of the things I was, mentioning in the very beginning was my my side of the house was very much on the curriculum aspect of of, international recruitment. And that’s kind of what the students, the parents, the teachers that you speak to, the agencies that you’re working with, EducationUSA, really connect with. If you can differentiate between the education curriculum at CCA or colleges in the United States versus understanding, you know, the very specific national national curriculum in Singapore versus when you’re speaking to a school that is international baccalaureate and the kinds of classes they offer or a combination of international baccalaureate and the AP curriculum and o levels and a levels in this com combined, you know, type of curriculum that the student is. And then you can tell the parents, oh, yeah. Yeah. This is how it would transfer. This is what the student’s experience would be like with this kind of technical understanding into a more conceptual sort of college like like CCA, which is, you know, both on the technical and conceptual side of things. So I think that really helped our, international recruitment, knock on wood, on at CCA here.
Shiraz:
We we we trained our staff to not just be, quote, unquote, recruiters, but to really be the voice of the college to talk through all the different aspects of the different parts of, the college and also to understand which population and who it is they’re talking to. And is it a graduate student and coming from what kind of technical university? And to be okay doing the research on the spot about the college that they’re looking at Mhmm. And then making those differentiations and comparable, items between CCA and the and the place that the student is coming from. The other the other big thing that I know Scott and I always talk about is having a diverse staff on the international recruitment team, not just in terms of language, but also just understanding the cultural differences between, all the different, kind of places people travel to and adapting yourself to that culture and understanding, you know, even the volume in which you talk, to students, parents, teachers there too, or how it is you sit or how it is you, position yourself to have those conversations. Because at the end of the day, to me, recruitment is really about creating a comfortable environment for people to have a conversation and for that person to be comfortable enough to understand what the college has to offer and being open to the art education that we offer here at CCA, which, you know, in itself is already a hard topic getting into, art recruitment and art and design kind of recruitment too. So, you know, it it it already positions us sometimes in a difficult sort of position. So you wanna make sure that people are definitely comfortable there. And then the other part is also being, you know, very adaptive to the changes in, the different countries that it is you’re traveling to and, being aware of those changes and making sure you’re speaking to them when you are, in Turkey and something has happened in the country and you understand that, and then you’re in, you know, the classroom on the Asian side or the European side.
Shiraz:
And knowing the difference between the two sides and and and being able to speak to those students, and the teachers that it it builds the relationship. It builds the trust. It, allows for us to, be the voice that is knowledgeable and not just there to, quote, unquote, recruit the students. And, you know, I’ve always told Scott this is one of the things I love about CCA’s for nonprofit private, and he is open to many of the risks we take, on the international recruitment side too and being open to traveling to new countries like Africa and Nigeria, in in, in, in Africa and also Ghana and South South Africa and, you know, being okay with being in armored cars and still keeping it cool there. Yeah. So I think adapting to change is big one. And then, of course, the understanding of the digital spaces that the students are in. So Mhmm.
Shiraz:
You know, Scott and I were one of the first people after we found out what WeChat was to get on it for the entire call. Right. Like, alright. Let’s do this. Let’s talk to students. So I am proud to say that I have 300 students on my WeChat that I speak to.
Shiro:
Yeah. That’s that’s really interesting because, yeah, I think, what was it? What’s the what’s the one that Facebook developed? Meta? WhatsApp. WhatsApp is, like, what a lot of the rest of the world use. WeChat is also another one. I know in Asia and East Asia, they use Line. Like, there’s the the communication channel itself is different. And so, yeah, like, one one big thing I was hearing from, you know, what you you told me just now is, like, you can’t you can’t just learn to talk about yourself and your institution. Not only do you have to know all everything about that, you also have to know about them, what are their options for, higher education in their local region? What is their culture like? And so that’s a big part of this understanding them in order for them to understand you.
Scott:
Yeah. And the role of the enrollment management team or the admissions team on the road, it’s it it is that very, you know, hyper specific to each country or even regions within a country,
Shiro:
and
Scott:
being building a team, investing in that team, supporting that team as they’re out on the road doing that work. And then on the strategy side, back into the institution as the institution evolves and as we continue to have to adapt to and adapt to the changes of educational demands in the United States, you have to also prepare your your institutions to be ready for to be able to support those students coming in from all those different countries, which is a extraordinarily extra level of complexities on top of a very, very complex system here in the United States. You need to do the work in order to build those bridges and really have, you know, those faculty engagements, those leadership engagements, those building of that knowledge, and that takes time and investment. There’s no quick road to that. At least, Strauss and I have not discovered a quick road to it yet. We’ll let you know. We’ll come out of a different podcast and tell you the secret there if we figure that out. But that that’s that’s investment both within the team that’s doing the work on a year to year basis and then the institution as it continues to adapt and be able to be ready for those students.
Scott:
And this all takes the time of, you know, an investment that’s gonna be needed. And sometimes it’s not going to see the enrollment for 2 or 3 or 4 years while it needs the upfront investment, to be able to build those relationships in an authentic way.
Shiro:
Got it. Well, thank you so much. I think we’re just at about time here. I’m wondering if, you know, either of you wanna share your your profiles so that our audience and listeners can follow-up with you afterwards. Is LinkedIn good for both of you? Is that the best channel? Yep. LinkedIn is the place. Awesome. Well, yeah, make sure to, connect with both Shiraz and Scott on LinkedIn afterwards if you have any questions.
Shiro:
Thank you so much to the both of you for joining this recorded, podcast today. It’s been awesome. Love covering both these topics. So thank you so much.
Shiraz:
Thanks for having us.
Scott:
Thanks for having us.
Shiro:
Great. And thanks for our listeners for tuning in. Please catch us on the next episode. Thanks, everyone.
