Prospective Graduate Students Get Short Shrift

I think that, in general and outside of professional schools, prospective graduate students get short shrift.

I think that many people assume that prospective graduate students know at the outset of their search the specific faculty members with whom they’d like to work. That they go directly to the department site to do their research.That they don’t need direction. That their decision comes down solely to funding and faculty relationship.

I think that’s not the whole picture.

While some prospective graduate students may start their search process with specific faculty in mind, and make decisions based on faculty and fit, many don’t. And that means that institutions are potentially losing prospective students. In our experience, institutions can realize significant improvements in two key areas of graduate admissions: process and fit.

Process
As adults, prospective graduate students should take charge of their own process, navigating their own way through applying, deciding, validating that decision, and navigating the various transitions involved in going to grad school. Right? Fair enough, but many times that admissions process is overly convoluted, largely manual, inconsistent, and marked by disjointed communications that come too late in the timeline for applicants. Even if you believe that prospective grad students should do the heavy lifting, why make it more difficult?

One of the best things a school can do is to develop mental models for its audiences and/or create experience maps of a prospective student from exploration through the first three weeks of the term. These maps help institutions to identify opportunities in which high-touch and high-tech can support a better experience for its target audiences. These techniques also help to identify major gaps it needs to address. For instance, do you know which office “owns” a student who has accepted but hasn’t gotten to campus yet? Does everyone agree? If you’re unsure, imagine how confused the student must be.

Fit
Prospectives care about faculty, funding, and rankings, yes. But they also care about fit. Questions that they have include:

• Will I be able to find safe, affordable, and comfortable housing?
• Is the local cost of living manageable?
• Will my spouse be able to find a job?
• Where will my children go to school?
• What student organizations am I welcome to join?
• What is the graduate student community like?
• How easy will it be for me to travel to see family and friends?
• What is there to do in the city or town for recreation or stress release? (Granted, we all know that — whatever they’re doing — they ought to be leading a section or working in the lab, but …)

The longer the program, the more these things matter. Many institutions don’t bother to provide information that addresses these questions — sometimes because they think that graduate students don’t need it or that they should be capable of finding it on their own, but more often because no one actually owns the graduate student experience.

Which brings me to my final thought of this post. In some of my more recent conversations with development officers, I’ve heard that alumni tend to give more to their undergraduate institution than to their graduate school because those undergraduate years are bathed in memory as golden times of discovery and transformation. Grad school, in contrast, was a slog during which one has no money and less of a life. If we treat the graduate student experience that starts with admissions as a series of self-service transactions, that shouldn’t surprise us at all.