Spending Money to Make Money: A Scholarship Alternative that Impacts Enrollment Matriculation and Student Job Outcomes Through Professional Development

Are you and your budget already stressed while you stare at a looming enrollment cliff? Are you seeking fiscally-conscious approaches for impacting your GEM goals and objectives? Can your GEM team demonstrate differentiated value from peer competitors? Research does provide evidence that scholarship funding tends to positively impact student enrollment decisions. However, most of the research focuses on matriculation into bachelor-level programs or research-based doctoral programs. What is less clear is whether traditional scholarship funding impacts enrollment decisions for graduate programs in which most students are self-funded. Enrollment Management has been described in the literature as an Anarchical System. In such an environment, alternative approaches to traditional practices can provide unique, differentiated benefit with defined goals and key performance indicators. Incorporation of marketing elements, like brand identity and unique selling proposition factors, into novel scholarship practices can positively impact student enrollment, retention, and graduation. With that in mind, a case example from the Office of Professional Education in Purdue University’s College of Engineering will showcase how an unconventional scholarship approach focused on professional development, rather than funding for discounting tuition, has contributed to increased enrollment, student satisfaction with program value, and consistently strong graduate job outcomes.