Speaking with prospective students

A recent Future Campus article highlighted the significant role academic staff can play in influencing prospective students’ university choices.

In the article, Director of Future Campus Tim Winkler, writes about an impactful conversation with an unnamed ACU law academic.

Unable to attend Open Day, Mr Winkler sent an email to the academic on behalf of his son, seeking further information.

What followed was a conversation that Mr Winkler reports left him convinced that ACU should be the number one preference for his son.

That unnamed academic was Professor of Law Patrick Keyzer.  We spoke to Professor Keyzer to find out how one conversation had such a big impact.

How did the conversation with Tim Winkler happen?

Tim wanted some more information for his son, and I thought the quickest way to deal with this was for me to just send him an email and give him my telephone number. Open Days are a great opportunity to speak to potential students and their parents, but not everybody can attend. I don’t often receive direct requests like this, but given Tim had taken the initiative to reach out to me I thought that I would reciprocate.

What advice would you give to other academics who are having conversations with prospective students or their families?

I would say our job at Open Day, and our job when we talk to students and parents, is not to “sell” anything.

It's our job to describe what we do, where we do it and how we do it, in a way that gives a person all the information they need to make a choice. If they choose us, that's great. But they're not always going to choose us.

I think it's also important for academics who are talking to prospective students to understand that there are a variety of things that they can talk about and a variety of factors that will influence the decision of a potential student.This might include things that really have nothing to do with what we offer prospective students.

For example, having campuses in urban locations rather than the suburbs can be a big drawcard for some students. For those of us who work at the Melbourne Campus, we’ve got a beautiful campus with lots of new buildings, it’s centrally located and it’s close to public transport.

On the other hand, our campus at Banyo might attract students who want access to parking or who live in the north of Brisbane and don’t want to travel into the centre to study.

Location has very little to do with our value proposition. Sometimes the specifics of the course won’t be the main factor in a choice.

How do you think academics can best work alongside marketing efforts when it comes to recruiting future students?

What we are doing with our marketing and Open Days is excellent and I don't think there is any room for improvement in how we approach those activities.

If we wanted to, I think that we could attract many more students to our programs if we were able to work out a way to leverage the skills of our experienced academics to attract those students. The conversation that I had with Mr Winkler was a case in point. There really isn’t a substitute for experience. You need academics to explain what a School does.