From interest to enrollment: The future of program exploration and student engagement

Bailey Boese — GMB
Kacie Eurek — Hardin-Simmons University

In today’s digital age, the process of selecting a university program should be as intuitive and engaging as shopping online. Unfortunately, many prospective students are not well equipped to make this decision, and often resort to changing their major, or even transferring to a different institution due to the lack of support and guidance.

Notes:

• Statistically, users spend most of their time on other sites and will have a negative reaction if you site is drastically different.
• Understanding the top criteria is important:
  • home buying:
    • Location
    • Kitchen / Pet friendly
    • Family
  • Students
    • Location
    • Social / Sports
    • Career
• Went from list to “program finder”
  • Interest (up to 25)
    • Brings up degree options
  • Rebranded degree pages
    • RFI right at top
    • Unique information
    • Testimonies
    • Related programs at the bottom
  • Note: the interest tool isn’t the only way to get to the program pages
    • Can also be viewed in list by name
• Bringing in careers from O*NET
  • Note: They added O*Net as a WordPress block in the editor
    • Uses free O*NET API (pulls in data and stores ID in an ACF field)
      • The stats can then be pulled dynamically
  • Can pull in dynamic stats
    • Median wage
    • Projected growth, etc
  • When narrowing down the careers for each program, ChatGPT helped
  • This part is not launched yet