Boosting Enrollment by 50% in Just Two Weeks

The Remarkable Journey of a Small Department

Photo by: Cristina Lozano Argüelles, John Jay College Commencement Ceremony 2023

Enrollment is a big puzzle in academia, and one likely to get more challenging in the coming years. When I first checked our enrollment right before fall 2022, the numbers were startling: a drop of 75%. Our Certificate in Spanish Legal Translation and Interpreting went from 47 students when I first started in Fall 2020, to 12 students in August 2022. Translation is a discipline with a clear career pathway. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics projects a growth of 20% (much faster than the average 4%) for this profession between 2021 and 2031. The need is especially urgent in my area (New York City). So, why are we losing so many students?

Our program feeds on transfer students from community colleges, which were hit the hardest by the pandemic. CUNY community colleges lost 25% of students between fall 2019 and fall 2020. Transfer institutions like mine are now suffering the effects of COVID enrollment declines at community colleges. Moreover, fewer high schoolers are choosing to go to college, leading to a troubling nationwide fall in enrollment. A shortage of unqualified labor and the high cost of tuition make students prefer a relatively well-paid unqualified job over going into debt. This problem might get exacerbated in the next few years due to a declining trend in birth rates. 2.3 million fewer babies were born between 2008 and 2013, which translates into fewer students going into college starting in 2026.

All these factors are rather clear. What's less obvious is the role of influencer culture. YouTubers such as Emma Chamberlain, Casey Neistat, or Mr. Beast (12, 12.5, and 159 million subscribers, respectively) are famous college (even high school) dropouts. American teenagers, who spend an average of 7 hours per day on their phones, are bombarded with the notion that college is not necessary for success in a rather glamorized fashion. Although it may be difficult to investigate the relationship between the anti-college movement and enrollment declines, academia should not ignore this trend. If anything, it should be a call to strengthen our social media presence and draw attention to how college education improves students’ lives.

I’m interested in the power of social media for research dissemination (although Instagram also knows that I like baby and sailing videos). In my subway commute, I enjoy watching what people do on their phones. I can tell someone's age by how they consume TikTok. Kids under 20 scroll through TikTok at a speed that my mind cannot fathom. People over 50 watch videos multiple times. And those of us between 20 and 50 fall somewhere in the middle. But we all share that little screen. The average American spends 5 to 6 hours per day on their phone. So, it occurred to me that if I managed to slide into the students’ phones, I might be able to lure them into our program.

Connecting with students

Our program is relevant for our students from personal and employment perspectives. However, we are not always good at communicating it. One of the principles marketing uses to reach people is tapping into their emotions and personal experiences. When we consume media, we are often attracted to messages that resonate with us: "yeah! That's me". This is exactly I approached promoting our program. I took note of what the students were telling me in the classroom about their experiences and transformed it into an ad: "¿Traducías para tus padres?" (Did you used to translate for your parents?). Around 90% of our students acted as child language brokers for their families, and those four words captured their experience in their language. The researcher in me couldn't help running an experiment. I launched two campaigns (one digital, one analog) and tracked their effectiveness.

Analog Campaign

Our main problem? Students don't know about us. Most students come to John Jay College (CUNY) to study criminal justice, criminology, or forensic psychology. 47% of them are Hispanic, but the idea of combining their majors with a certificate in translation doesn’t cross their minds. To make us visible, I created a flyer in Spanish, and with the help of my department’s chair, we placed it on all bulletin boards next to the elevators. Students need to take the elevators, so maybe if they see it, it'll pick their curiosity. The flyer is not 100% analog. It includes a QR code that takes them to the program's website (some QR generators allow tracking of how many people scan the code and measure its effectiveness).

Digital Campaign

The second outlet was Instagram. I have an Instagram account for my lab but building a following takes a significant amount of time, which pushed me to figure out how to post on my college's account. For us, there are two steps: the graphic design team and the social media team. The process can take up to two weeks and involves some back and forth about the design. Once I approved the design, I added a caption and sent it to our social media manager. Both teams made good suggestions about information and links that could be included.

The day the college Instagram account published our post, I received around 15 emails asking for more information. The following day, I met with ten students and enrolled seven of them in the program. I asked them how they found out about the program, and they all mentioned the Instagram post. These numbers might seem low, but remember that we had 12 students when I first logged into the system, seven more students is an increase of almost 60%.

What happened with the analog campaign? In my little experiment, I discovered that the paper flyers reach a different population, namely older students. Instagram posts are effective, but short-lived. After a few days, I stopped receiving emails. The flyers stayed on the bulletin boards for a couple of months, and they generated some interest among older students (even colleagues have told me "yeah, you got those flyers everywhere").

I (a millennial) remember reading the bulletin boards as an undergrad. But when I look at what students are doing around me, they are not looking around, they are checking their phones, mainly Instagram and TikTok. While problematic, it’s also telling. It would be naïve to think that we can continue boosting enrollment at this rate with a single Instagram post. But ignoring the role of social media in shaping students’ behavior would be heedless. We need to pay attention to how students interact with the world and, like a colleague recently said, "meet them where they are”.