With applications to Northwestern dropping for the second consecutive year, Assoc. Provost Rebecca Dixon said the Admissions Office will step up recruitment efforts Spring Quarter to boost the number of students applying next fall.
Admissions officials will send brochures and e-mails to 100,000 prospective students, redesign the undergraduate admissions Web site and send high school students more follow-up mailings, Dixon said.
The office also will purchase the College Board’s lists of 10th grade students who took Advanced Placement tests this year and will mail an admissions brochure to them, she said.
“We want to be on the upswing, not on the downswing,” Dixon said. “If you see two years of drops, you think, ‘Oh, that can’t go on anymore.’ You want to be sure that it’s not a downward trend.”
Applications declined about 5 percent this year and are off 16 percent from their 1997 high, according to statistics from the Admissions Office. This year 13,953 high school seniors applied, nearly 3,000 less than in 1997.
For the first time, NU officials will purchase the names of 20,000 top high school students from the College Board and contact them via e-mail Spring Quarter, Dixon said. The university will then mail a brochure along with newly designed follow-up mailings Fall Quarter.
The expanded mailing campaign will help the university reach out to a greater number of students and should generate higher application numbers, Dixon said.
“We’ll probably have more applications just because we’re going to be sending literature to more people,” she said. “The competition is pretty great out there. Even Yale gets nervous when Harvard does stuff.”
Dixon said NU also plans to overhaul the admissions Web site to make it more interactive, possibly adding chat rooms and message boards.
ADMITTING PROBLEMS
University President Henry Bienen said in February that the Admissions Office’s marketing efforts might have contributed to the drop in applications this year. Administrators have been so busy fixing problems with the Student Enterprise System, NU’s Y2K-compliant computer system, they have not focused on recruitment, he said.
He also said NU’s $25,839 yearly tuition might make students think twice about applying.
“Not everyone’s applications have spurted up,” Bienen said. “But price could start being telling at some point, particularly in the Midwest, where there are so many good state schools.”
But Dixon said the new computer system did not have a large impact on the application drop.
“We had some cliffhangers: Were we going to get the admissions letters out on time? Things like that,” she said. “There may have been some slippages while staff were diverted. But to write an article headlined, ‘SES Makes Admissions Decline’ would be a stupid article. It’s not true.”
Although many other colleges visit high schools to encourage students to apply, NU does not have the resources or staff to do that, Dixon said. Instead, she said, NU relies on bulk mailings and outreach events in about 70 cities nationwide.
The Office of Admissions and Financial Aid underwent a “disruptive” renovation last summer, Dixon said, delaying responses to admissions inquiries and increasing staff turnover rates.
But Dixon said student interest in NU, measured by the number of requests for information about the university, stayed steady through Fall Quarter.
Despite high turnover rates, Dixon said, NU began the school year with a full admissions staff and made the same number of recruitment trips as it did last year. But the university took too long to send a paper application to students after they had requested one, she said.
EBB AND FLOW
Although the drop in applications prompts concerns among administrators, Dixon said the decrease is part of the natural “ebb and flow” of college admissions.
“I don’t want to sound cavalier about it, but if you’re trying to get 1,900 students, this is plenty of applications, whether it’s 12,000 or 16,000,” she said. “I think it’s important to provide more quality to our respective students than just to get more students.”
Bienen said the number of applications doesn’t matter as much as the strength of the freshman class.
“The only reason you would like (20,000 applications) is to feel good and for the U.S. News and World Report rankings,” Bienen said. “It will have some effect on that one category. (But) Admissions would be tearing their hair out. They can’t handle above 16,000 (applications).”
Alan Cubbage, vice president for university relations, said too many applicants might even be detrimental to admissions efforts.
“It always strikes me as kind of awful that you’re gauged by how good you are by how many people you make unhappy,” Cubbage said. “The more people you deny, the better you are. Well, that’s kind of crappy.”
