Webinar: Social Media - An Overlooked Opportunity to Boost Enrollment Yield
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Webinar: Social Media - An Overlooked Opportunity to Boost Enrollment Yield

SightLine founder is hosting a webinar featuring MeetYourClass on November 7th, 2024.

Admissions and enrollment teams across the country are currently focused on growing their admit pool with high affinity students by increasing awareness of their institution. From the student perspective, it isn't only about awareness, but more importantly about connection and community.

Read More
Career Services - One of the Most Important Enrollment Drivers
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Career Services - One of the Most Important Enrollment Drivers

When universities invest in retention, career services, and student employment, they create a cycle of success. Higher retention rates, improved graduation rates, and strong career outcomes all contribute to a positive institutional reputation. This, in turn, attracts new students, improves alumni engagement, and strengthens overall enrollment numbers. This is a particularly important investment for smaller private institutions to be making for the longevity of their institution.

Read More
The Impact of Entry Pathways on Student Retention and Achievement
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

The Impact of Entry Pathways on Student Retention and Achievement

Navigating the transition from high school to college can be challenging, particularly for students with lower academic preparedness. To address this, many institutions offer entry pathways designed to support students as they acclimate to higher education. Our retention analytics team at SightLine worked with a regional 4-year public institution in the Midwest to evaluate how different entry pathways for students may impact their early and long-term success at the institution.

Read More
SightLine’s Top Five Tips for Mid-Funnel Conversion
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

SightLine’s Top Five Tips for Mid-Funnel Conversion

In the past few months, we have seen a lot of higher ed leaders scrambling to look at new enrollment and communications solutions throughout the student funnel. Across the board, the goal is to increase enrollment without sacrificing discount rates, overall revenue over four years, or the caliber of the incoming class. At SightLine we are focusing on the best strategies to improve on mid-funnel conversion of the highest quality students who are interested in your institution. We have five strategies to focus on this year.

Read More
Are Panicked Enrollment Managers Focusing on the Wrong Funnel Stage?
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Are Panicked Enrollment Managers Focusing on the Wrong Funnel Stage?

Higher education institutions are facing a daunting challenge: the enrollment cliff. With fewer potential students on the horizon, many enrollment managers are under pressure to maintain or increase enrollment numbers. However, in their quest to fill seats, are they focusing too much on attracting new prospects at the top of the funnel and neglecting the crucial task of converting quality leads into enrolled students?

Read More
How Younger Generations View Education and Career Paths Differently
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

How Younger Generations View Education and Career Paths Differently

As we usher in the next wave of future leaders and learners, Generation Alpha, born between 2010 and 2025, is poised to redefine the landscape of higher education and career paths. Growing up in an era marked by rapid technological advancements and societal changes, Gen Alpha exhibits unique perspectives on education and career choices. In this article, we will delve into how Gen Alpha views higher education, contemplates potential career paths, and evaluates their options in ways distinct from prior generations.

Read More
Recent Featured Guest: College Viability Podcast
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Recent Featured Guest: College Viability Podcast

Podcast Guest! This Week In College Viability (TWICV) provides content and commentary on the financial health and viability of private and public colleges in the United States. Gary Stocker fills the role of unofficial fiduciary for students, their families, faculty, staff, and other college stakeholders.

Read More
Financial Aid Optimization Analysis Reveals Increased Student Price Sensitivity Year over Year
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Financial Aid Optimization Analysis Reveals Increased Student Price Sensitivity Year over Year

Each year, SightLine uses student application, financial aid, demographic, and census level data to optimize new scholarship offers for the following enrollment cycle with our university customers. During this process, we compare student enrollment behavior from the most recently completed enrollment cycle to the prior enrollment cycle. Earlier this year we analyzed the fall 2023 enrollment outcomes in comparison to fall 2022 enrollment and most of our findings were consistent across all our customers, indicating changing market conditions.

Read More
Apply Learnings from Retention Programs to Enroll Students, Reduce Debt, and Propel Careers
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Apply Learnings from Retention Programs to Enroll Students, Reduce Debt, and Propel Careers

In a world where public perception of higher education is at an all-time low we need a revamp of the value that we provide to students, and how we engage with and communicate that value to students earlier in the student lifecycle. One approach is to apply what we have learned in student support and retention services to the realm of enrollment and recruitment.

Read More
The Emotional Versus Analytical Decision Process for College Enrollment
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

The Emotional Versus Analytical Decision Process for College Enrollment

In our last article, we talked about the evolving higher ed market. And as a data science company, of course a lot of our perspective on this comes from the data we work with every day. We analyze institutional, IPEDS and the College Scorecard data to understand the changing market. But often times this aggregated data doesn’t capture the full picture. Gasp!

Read More
Embracing Change: A Summer of Reflection for University Leaders
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Embracing Change: A Summer of Reflection for University Leaders

As universities navigate the aftermath of the FAFSA debacle, confront ongoing campus closures, and brace for the acceleration of the enrollment cliff, this summer marks a pivotal moment for reflection and reevaluation among university leaders. It is a time to re-strategize and contemplate the long-term value of your institution and the services you offer to students. SightLine offers solutions and strategies, backed by data.

Read More
Enrollment Leaders – If You Aren’t Considering Retention, You’re Doing it Wrong
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Enrollment Leaders – If You Aren’t Considering Retention, You’re Doing it Wrong

Scholarships play a vital role in attracting talented students to universities, but their impact extends far beyond enrollment numbers and new net student revenue. For universities, considering student retention when optimizing scholarships is not just about ensuring a stable student population; it's about fostering a supportive environment that promotes student success, enhances institutional reputation, and ultimately boosts long-term revenue.

Read More
Four Strategies to Combat the Demographic Cliff
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Four Strategies to Combat the Demographic Cliff

The landscape of higher education is evolving rapidly, with universities facing challenges such as the student demographic cliff, declining enrollment, increasing student price sensitivity, and having less information on student caliber with fewer students taking the SAT and ACT. To navigate these challenges successfully, institutions must adopt strategic and data-driven approaches that focus on long-term outcomes and impact. Here are four analytical strategies that we recommend for universities to combat these issues.

Read More
Six Steps to At-Risk Student Intervention
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Six Steps to At-Risk Student Intervention

Identifying individual students who are at-risk of dropping out is often a subjective exercise in higher education. Additionally, for each student the institution intervenes with, we must answer the question of why are we intervening? And what resources will we provide this student? It is critical to increase retention and graduation rates, while remaining conscious of intervention resources, budgets and university revenues.

Read More
Seven Higher Ed Marketing Strategies for Reaching Gen Z
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Seven Higher Ed Marketing Strategies for Reaching Gen Z

As Gen Z, and very soon Gen Alpha students, are contemplating their options for higher education, marketers and educators are faced with the challenge of understanding and engaging with these tech-savvy and digitally connected generations. Unlike their predecessors, they characterized by a deep integration of technology into their daily lives and a more critical approach to evaluating the return on investment from higher education.

Read More
Keep Financial Aid Expenses within Budget – A Predictive Modeling Approach
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Keep Financial Aid Expenses within Budget – A Predictive Modeling Approach

Financial aid expense forecasting is challenging for universities but is necessary to make sure the financial aid payouts will fall within the annual budget. With enrollment and retention levels fluctuating annually, there is much uncertainty around institutional financial aid payout amounts. However, SightLine’s innovative predictive modeling and machine learning solution allows colleges and universities to reliably estimate financial aid expenses, mitigating uncertainty and risk.

Read More
SightLine Partners with Social Media Company for Prospective Students– MeetYourClass
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

SightLine Partners with Social Media Company for Prospective Students– MeetYourClass

We're thrilled to unveil an exciting new partnership between two trailblazing entities in the education space: Sightline, a forward-thinking predictive analytics company with a steadfast commitment to improving education access and affordability, and MeetYourClass, a dynamic social media platform meticulously designed by GenZ students, for GenZ students.

Read More
Communicating Scholarships: Our Compiled Tips and Tools</a>
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Communicating Scholarships: Our Compiled Tips and Tools

Through our research with colleges and universities across the country, we have seen that student price sensitivity has been increasing (meaning students are less likely to enroll as out of pocket price increases). This makes price transparency very important for schools to understand and embrace.

Read More
Enhancing Student Retention: Leveraging Summer Engagement with SightLine
Ashley Kern Ashley Kern

Enhancing Student Retention: Leveraging Summer Engagement with SightLine

SightLine's recent research highlights a significant trend in college student attrition during the summer break, surpassing that of winter break. This raises questions about the reasons behind this summer exodus—whether it's a result of the extended break duration, the allure of temporary employment, or a period of reflection on education and career paths. Recognizing the vulnerability in losing contact with students during this time, SightLine proposes proactive measures to engage and retain students during the crucial summer months.

Read More