I Didn't Meet My Admissions Target: Survey Strategies to Understand Yield Rates, Applicant Behavior, and Student Readiness

What do you do when you don’t meet your admissions target? Accept, refuse, defer, yield, and melt rates can change dramatically from cycle to cycle, leaving admissions leaders perplexed at times. It’s important to understand what went wrong, what went right, and how to course correct for next cycle. This presentation will cover how to use surveys to glean essential data on your program’s past, current, and future admissions trends – using data directly from your own applicant pool and student body. I will cover survey methodology, results, and follow up strategies from several in house surveys developed by me and my team at the Kelley Direct Online MBA. We sent surveys to all our recent defers, refuses, and application abandonment pools. We also sent surveys to our new cohorts asking them about their perceptions of the admissions process, onboarding process, their own readiness to start a graduate program, and how they are adjusting to graduate student life. We can now utilize this data to enhance our entire admissions strategy from inquiry to matriculation.