With traditional undergraduate recruitment in crisis, institutions are increasingly prioritizing graduate recruitment. After all, graduate enrollment across the board continues to rise, with professional degrees in fields like business and health professions being particularly desirable among today’s students.
At the same time, simply shifting focus to graduate recruitment is not automatic. This is an audience with very different needs and priorities compared to traditional high school students and their parents.
Attracting top graduate students means building an intentional strategy that accounts for these needs and priorities. At its best, this type of graduate recruitment strategy is comprehensive, focusing not only on messaging or marketing but also on the academic and student support resources to support them. This guide can help you get started.
Start With a Graduate Student and Program Audit
The first step in any successful marketing and recruitment strategy revolves around a clear understanding of your existing offering. For graduate recruitment, this step requires an audit of your current situation on two levels:
- Your current graduate student body. Closely evaluate demographics and metrics like part-time vs. full-time students or online vs. in-person students. These variables will have a major influence on building a strategy to attract the right students effectively.
- Your current graduate programs. Involve your faculty and students in auditing not only what your graduate programs are, but why they attract incoming students. It also helps to understand which programs are operating at capacity, and which may still have room to grow.
In addition to evaluating both of these variables separately, their connection also matters. Which programs tend to attract which types of students? Do programs that attract a particular student type have more room to grow than others? Take the time to analyze both your student body and the graduate programs in which they learn to inform your entire graduate recruitment strategy.
Adjust Your Messaging to Graduate Audiences
With good data from your audience and program audit in place, it’s time to build messaging specifically designed for potential graduate students. Here, one thing is important to keep in mind: graduate students tend to be more functional and rational in what programs they choose than their undergraduate counterparts.
They care less about the school spirit and community and more about the nuances and outcomes of the programs in which they’re interested. Externally-validated information, like accreditation or recognition by well-known employers, can also play a big role in building credible messaging that will attract potential graduate students.
Finally, not all potential graduate students are created equal. Potential doctoral students will have very different needs than their master’s-level peers. Meanwhile, part-time students will look for information about convenience around their existing life or careers, compared to full-time students who will look for information focused on their studies above all.
Account for International Graduate Recruitment
Never underestimate the power of international students in the graduate realm. After all, this is the fastest-growing graduate-level demographic in the United States, surging more than 20% between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years. Much of the growth attributed generally to post-bachelor’s studies is due to international enrollment from around the globe.
International students, of course, have unique requirements and needs. They speak different languages, requiring communication that accommodates them as they seek information about potential programs of interest. Their questions will also likely differ, focusing on needs such as their visa, scholarships, and accreditations that might be recognized internationally.
Many institutions avoid targeting international students because of these nuances. It can be difficult to scale up graduate recruitment in multiple languages and with an understanding of immigration law in mind. Here, automated tools can become immensely helpful.
Consider, for example, the benefits of an AI-enabled digital assistant. Able to draw on one central database of knowledge, the AI assistant can converse in multiple languages. General questions common among international students, like visa requirements, can be fed into the database to receive immediate and accurate answers.
Create a Program-Specific Graduate Recruitment Strategy
The functional nature of graduate recruitment means that attracting the right students requires a highly program-focused approach. Students at this level can benefit from some institutional communication but largely want to hear about their program of interest—and from people connected to their program.
This is why many higher education institutions and graduate schools have opted for a hybrid approach:
- A central marketing office coordinates messaging that can apply to all programs, such as institutional scholarships or basic application information.
- Program directors, often faculty members, can speak more directly about their programs, highlighting individual features like cohort sizes or typical placements for recent graduates.
This hybrid approach can extend to printed materials and websites as well, where the general materials and content act as an ‘in’ to the more relevant program-specific information. Meanwhile, program-specific information should also be designed to be relevant when accessed directly, as many students will go straight to it as they look for potential places to study.
Once again, resource limitations can become a potential challenge with this strategy, especially when promoting multiple programs without personnel to support them all. And once again, AI-enabled chatbots can help, thanks to their ability to provide a wealth of program-specific information and answers at a moment’s notice.
Expect to Work Outside of Regular Business Hours
Attracting top-level graduate students means accounting for their needs and preferences. Increasingly, especially on the graduate side, that means considering the fact that they don’t intend to continue their studies full-time.
According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, 43% of the nation’s 3.1 million graduate students are enrolled part-time—and that number is rising. They choose this route for a variety of reasons, often connected to trying to balance work and family commitments with continuing their education.
Financial considerations also come into play, both in reducing the cost per semester and through bringing in employer incentive programs that might serve professional development needs for their organization.
For all of these reasons and more, part-time graduate students are looking for evening and weekend classes—and chances are that they will only have time to look at potential programs during that same time. Any effort to attract the best possible students to your graduate programs must account for these preferences.
Ask yourself: Is your office responsible for graduate recruitment prepared to take weekend and evening questions? If not, it might be time to look for tools like autoresponders and knowledgebases on your website. A chatbot that can answer text messages around the clock can also play a role in this effort.
Take a Data-Focused Approach to Graduate Recruitment
As graduate enrollment around the nation grows, especially in light of undergraduate enrollment challenges, graduate recruitment will only become more competitive. And, as more schools look to attract potential master’s and doctoral students, those able to take a data-focused approach will be able to gain a core competitive advantage.
It starts with deciding what programs to offer or build-out. Data like bachelor’s degrees awarded or job postings that list specific graduate degree requirements can give a clear indication of demand, while reviews of competitor institutions can indicate the areas where supply has not yet caught up with the demand and opportunities for growth exist.
Data can also inform the strategies and tactics most effective in attracting potential students. In addition to providing information about whether messaging for part-time or online students might be most relevant, it can provide an overview of which tactics tend to be most successful and worth investing in as you look to build your budget and strategy.
Finally, a data-focused approach allows institutions to build graduate recruitment benchmarks in both the volume and the quality of students they attract. Over time, measuring against these benchmarks allows you to ensure not only that you attract the right number of students, but also that the students you attract are at the top of their class in GPA, GRE or GMAT scores, and other relevant metrics.
Leverage AI Tools to Scale Your Graduate Recruitment Efforts
Finally, don’t underestimate the power of AI tools as you look to scale your graduate enrollment efforts to attract top-level students. Students, after all, increasingly use these tools for their own academic success and have become more open to institutions doing the same.
The above-mentioned AI-enabled digital assistants are a great example of such a tool. They are comparatively easy to implement, significantly help potential students by providing relevant answers in a timely fashion, and save resources in the process. As a result, they can boost applications and yield among graduate students.
But these digital assistants are not the only AI opportunity. For example, predictive analytics can help you take a more data-focused approach by analyzing and anticipating trends that your recruitment strategy can build on. Meanwhile, AI and machine learning models can also rank prospects based on enrollment likelihood in your CRM, helping institutions better focus their recruitment efforts.
With AI at their side, even resource-capped institutions can build up their graduate recruitment efforts. It’s how they’re able to attract top students sustainably, supporting institutional enrollment and financial stability in the process.
