This article recently made its rounds through our inboxes at Hope, and I couldn’t help but feel like it underminded some of the work that I had been doing with Facebook, Vimeo, and the like.  For quick reference, here are the results of the survey that Cappex did among 1000 high school seniors: Cappex survey results It makes a whole lot of sense that “a college’s website” is the number one item on the list.  However I would contend that this article suggests that you should shift your focus away from student blogging, Facebook, MySpace, et al.  (To be honest, I’m not...

It’s no secret to any of us that the economic recession that both our country and world are feeling right now will (already is) having a direct impact on higher education.  All signs point to the challenges that colleges and universities will encounter this year and next, at the very least.  As I heard our President remark on these types of national issues this morning, it hit me (maybe for the first time) how the efforts of myself and my colleagues in the Admissions office influence the viability of our institution. Wow. That’s pretty heavy-duty stuff on a Monday morning. So...

I take no credit for our latest venture.  After stumbling upon Rachel Reuben’s recent post on .eduGuru just after our Christmas break, we quickly decided it was something we needed to move on for our fall 2009 students.  It was actually something that I had been mulling over since the Innovative Educators’ conference in Cincinnati this past June, but I wasn’t sure we had the resources to make it happen.  Once I had read Rachel’s post, I knew it was something that we could get going quickly. So last Wednesday I began the process of putting a similar site together from Hope. ...

Wow, this one’s really interesting.  It seems that 1st Financial Bank USA has launched a site called CollegeData, a place where students can search for colleges, sort through the financial aid process, and perhaps most interestingly, calculate their odds of getting in with the Admissions Tracker.  Credit card and student loan offers also abound on the site. The Admissions tracker is interesting because students can indicate whether they’ve applied to a specific school and also if they’ve been accepted, waitlisted, or denied.  Other students can then assess their chances of getting...

I’ve posted a fair amount about the video content that we’ve been creating for prospective students from the Admissions office at Hope.  Along with creation, I’ve been trying to promote and syndicate like crazy.  In the process I inadvertently learned how to develop and submit a video podcast to iTunes.  Here’s my stress-free process for doing so: 1.  You’ll need to put together some content. Depending on your setup, this can be fairly easy to do.  I’ve outlined our process for putting together our monthly updates in a previous post.  What we end up with is a...