TTU Looks To Address Hurdles In Attracting More Students

Tennessee Tech officials look to address potential hurdles in attracting more students.

University Trustee Johnny Stites said other major universities like the University of Tennessee – Knoxville regularly publish their selling points to attract more applicants.

“You need to know and everybody in this school needs to know what are the top five metrics that say you ought to be coming here instead of UT,” Stites said. “That should become common knowledge among the faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Everybody in Tennessee we’re trying to recruit to this university needs to know those top five items.”

VP for Enrollment Management and Career Placement Brandon Johnson said metrics can be hard to measure as marketing to students can vary on a case-by-case basis.

“When you think about the top five, there are general ones, but there are times where students aren’t all the same. So we have to adjust our message, depending on if they’re a high-academic student compared to a student who is just average for us,” Johnson said. “They are looking for different things from research and elements of that. We have to adjust our message accordingly to make sure we’re talking to them appropriately.”

Johnson said Tennessee Tech continuously pushes common themes in its messaging to prospective students with some variations.

“All of our collateral in all of our messages is really the career readiness, number one public university, ROI (Return on Investment), career preparation, [and] Cookeville,” Johnson said. “We spend a lot of time making sure they understand the location and embracing that location… because it’s also important to us from a retention standpoint that we are communicating effectively with them, so we don’t get them here and it’s something they didn’t desire or something they didn’t want.”

Johnson said the University regularly asks campus visitors about their experience to help in their marketing efforts.

“We survey all of our campus visitors. We know any feedback that we get good or bad from our campus visits,” Johnson said. “For the most part, it’s good. Some things we can’t control. We do get complaints sometimes about construction, so we have to explain that’s progress and it’s important for us. If it’s negative we always follow-up with them.”

Johnson said he and the rest of his staff will look for ways to improve how they receive feedback on the university, whether from current students or students who chose to go elsewhere.

Statistics provided by Johnson during Thursday’s meeting indicate nearly 200 fewer applications were started by prospective Fall 2019 freshmen. That stat includes applications that were accepted, declined, or unfinished.

However, Tennessee Tech has seen an increase in applications completed from 2018 plus an extra 200 students admitted for the next semester.