Recruiting new students and retaining current students are both extremely important issues to the overall success of a university. Measuring the effectiveness of mailers, door hangers, and other traditional types of recruitment efforts can often be difficult. However, technology provides a much cheaper and more effective outcome for universities who decide to implement it.

What can edtech really bring to your university to help recruit or retain your students? Be sure to check out these five tools that can radically change your school!

UChat

UChat was designed to help recruitment staff find more effective ways to communicate with prospective students. This app can be integrated directly into a university’s website so that admissions officers and students and converse with potential applicants. This gives interested candidates a chance to ask their most pressing questions and determine whether this school is right for them.

Retention Suite from Target X

With the retention suite from Target X, professors can easily see which students might be at risk of failing or dropping out. It allows for an extremely quick glimpse at a student’s overall performance that can save time on searching paperwork or grade books for the answer. You can create a communication plan to increase the odds of retention and engage with students through the Schools App. A predictive model can also demonstrate how effective this level of intervention should be for your university.

Cloud-based Learning

One of the most important things to this generation of students is flexibility in their academics. They want to be able to access their course content and engage with the material in their own time. Flexibility gives them the opportunity to work a job, sleep in, or volunteer in their spare time without worrying about making it to class. By using cloud-based learning for some courses, universities are more likely to draw in students and to retain the ones who show up year after year.

Texting

After First Lady Michelle Obama created the Better Make Room campaign, it became a great idea to engage with potential students via text message. This was more convenient for prospective applicants and kept them engaged. According to one report, there was a fifty percent response rate from students who received messages through her campaign. This strategy allows students to ask their questions about every stage of the application and admissions process, helping them to make more educated decisions about their futures.

Social Media

Is there a better way to get your university’s name out there with potential students than through social media platforms? Encourage students who tour the campus to snap a selfie with a special filter for Snapchat or Instagram. Create your own hashtag for prospective applicants to filter through so they can see what campus life is really like for real students. Social media is a completely free way to boost your visibility and recruit new students.

Utilizing edtech to help recruit and retain students in your school doesn’t have to be extraordinarily difficult or expensive. With a few of these tools, you could make a much more effective plan to help keep your student population healthy and growing year over year.