Last Word - Summer/Fall 2007
Why is St. Lawrence So Hot Right Now?

You’ve read the numbers -- applications for admission to the Class of 2011 reached 4,646, some 46 percent over last year’s number, then an all-time high. We admitted 2,030 students (44 percent, down from 59 percent in 2006); 690 paid their deposit (a “yield,” in admissions parlance, of 34 percent) and about 630 joined us on campus late in August, to begin a very special St. Lawrence education. 
The question is clear:  why such a sudden change?  How can admissions interest in a particular university increase so dramatically so quickly?

Our analysis is ongoing, but I want to share with you our best current understanding.  It says much about where we’ve been and where we want to go.

I am not surprised that we received over 4,600 admissions applications last year.  What does surprise me is that we didn’t get there more gradually. With all of our investments over the last decade in people, programs and facilities, I had expected an earlier, more rapid admissions response.  Our goal has been to improve faster than the competition in everything that matters most in the education of our students—a very tough challenge given the level of our competition—and I believe we have done so. We did see steady application increases, of course, at a rate faster than the number of high school graduates was increasing, indicating a growth in St. Lawrence’s “market share,” but we kept hearing from alumni and parents of a rapidly growing “buzz” about St. Lawrence in their home communities that we expected would turn into greater application growth sooner.

In retrospect, I think this further confirms that selection of a college heavily involves students and families weighing intangibles.  It is not the same as purchasing a car, where most of the manufacturer’s intended outcomes are measurable directly and comparatively, and consumer satisfaction is fairly easy to assess.  There is not, and I don’t believe there ever will be, the equivalent of a Consumer Reports for selecting a college, despite what many public policy makers hope.  The process of convincing large numbers of prospective students and families that an institution has made a transformative leap and should be in a prospective student’s application set happens only by a slow, word-of-mouth process. Prospective students and families learn from “early adopters” and “gatekeepers” such as high school counselors that things at the institution are indeed as exciting as they seem.  Because a college education in America is at least a four-year process, the early adopters need a long time to be sure that things really are right, and prospective later adopters believe they need multiple cohorts of evidence.  So a transformative positive change in a university’s market position takes a long time and a kind of opening of the floodgates may well result. 

That’s the macro explanation, but it is still appropriate to ask what it is that convinces us that St. Lawrence is indeed at a new place in admissions.  This is what convinces me:

• In an insightful analysis of how we do “head to head” against the top 10 institutions where the largest numbers of St. Lawrence accepted students have also been accepted (the University of Vermont, Hamilton, Hobart/William Smith, Colby, Colgate, Middlebury, Union, Skidmore, the University of New Hampshire, Bates), we saw last year that in the last decade St. Lawrence has moved from competing with the most selective of these institutions for students near the bottom of their applicant pools, in terms of high school performance and test results, to competing with them for students in the middle of their pools.  Our “yield” against these institutions remained stable, which means that we are competing as successfully for the students in the middle of their pools as was true a decade ago for students near the bottom of their pools.  This is very good evidence for a change in how strong St. Lawrence is perceived to be relative to these institutions

• If one had to pick one indicator of how successful a college is, that indicator would be retention to graduation.  Students graduate at high rates when three things happen:  1) they possess the requisite academic ability, demonstrated academic performance in high school and motivation to succeed at college work so that withdrawals for academic reasons are few; 2) there has been open and honest communication between the college and the prospective student and family so that when students arrive on campus, they encounter what they expected to encounter; and 3) the college meets the reasonable expectations of students and families at a high level of performance.  For many years, our six-year graduation rate exceeded 80 percent, but it began to decline in the mid-90s and for the Class of 1999 it dropped to 70.9 percent. Six-year graduation rates are once again nearing 80 percent.  This one statistic summarizes for prospective students and families what they are hearing from their word-of-mouth sources about St. Lawrence, it validates those sources for them, and it leads more students to apply for admission.

• We know that our increase in applications was not the result of significantly higher numbers of high school graduates in the states from which we draw most of our students.  Indeed, in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states there has been some modest and steady growth in the number of high school graduates in the last decade (about 1 percent per year), but that is about to level off and decline slightly

• Nationally, some other very selective colleges also saw major increases in applications this year.  We wonder whether our increase could just have been a change in the number of applications our applicants submitted.  We will know the answer with some certainty later in the fall after we have analyzed some questionnaire and survey results.  A majority of applicants now submit online (see page 3 for some figures), and they use the Common Application Form; the organization that manages the Common Application reported for this year that nationally students submitted an average of 3.9 applications this way compared to 3.6 last year—hardly the kind of sea change that could explain our data.  Our applications don’t come from a representative sample of national applicants, of course, and some of the most frenzied application behavior reported in the press occurs in geographical areas from which we receive a great many applications.  If there was a major increase in the number of applications our applicants submitted, I believe we should have seen a decline in yield—the percentage of accepted students who chose to enroll—because more of our applications would have been “soft,” yet our yield rate held strong and steady.

• Another factor in our increase is the growth in the scale and success of our marketing efforts.  We contact more prospective students and their families through direct mail; we have enhanced and expanded our Web site so that its overall focus and structure serve admissions recruiting purposes first; we do more to attract students and families to visit campus and do more than our competitors to cultivate them when they are on campus; and we have successfully provided a much more welcoming prospective student- and family-friendly admissions process.  The survey we conduct of admitted applicants each year shows clearly that we are perceived by our applicants to have a more welcoming and friendly process, and that too has an impact on future applicants

• Because alumni and current and past parents know us so well and we greatly value their judgments about where St. Lawrence fits in the admissions marketplace, we have paid special attention to family members of current students and alumni.  Alumni and parents who have prospective students can be our toughest critics, so it is important to us to see how we are doing in attracting their children as applicants.  Though it is not a huge factor in our application surge, the rate of increase over the last half-decade in applications from family of alumni and current students has been substantially in excess of the rate of increase in the application pool as a whole.

• Three years ago we decided to make the reporting of standardized test results optional for applicants and to rely even more on academic performance in a demanding high school curriculum to make our admissions decisions.  Analysis of multiple years of data convinced us that requiring standardized test results from all applicants was not improving our admissions decisions but was a disincentive for many students to apply.  As we expected, more students who are strong high school performers but have modest test scores, which they prefer not be used in the evaluation of their college applications, are applying to St. Lawrence and choosing not to submit those scores.  Since it takes time for this awareness to get out to prospective students and their families, we expected to see the first real impact of this decision this year

Understanding the “demand” for St. Lawrence is one of our most important and challenging duties.  If you have specific questions about what I have presented, or ideas for explanations on which I haven’t touched, I’d love to hear them and respond. 

Our changed admissions position is truly exciting.  It is also scary because we so often must rely on history to project the future in this area, and sea changes call that approach into question.  But I sure like where we are!