Enrollment Evolved: How Inquiry Timing Affects Deposits 

In our second post highlighting MARKETview’s new eBook, Enrollment Evolved: A Five-Year Study of Changing Student Behavior, we’ve chosen an excerpt exploring the correlation between the point at which students inquire and when they deposit.   

This study, running from 2019-2023, is empirically based, reflecting real-world student actions. It comprises of 60M+ student records, 130M+ consumer households, and institutional data from 150+ MARKETview partner colleges and universities. 

Below, we’ll look at how inquiry-to-deposit numbers have unfolded from the onset of COVID through to the most recent entering class. 

Given the way enrollment by inquiry timing (the point at which a student first engages with a school) has been trending later and later over the past few years, MARKETview has been closely monitoring stealth applicants and senior-year inquiries. 

In 2019, students who waited until senior year to express an interest made up 56.6% of ultimate enrollment, followed by juniors (34.8%) and sophomores (7.3%). The COVID-19 pandemic briefly reversed this trend, with the uncertainty of what the college experience would look like, causing many students to hit pause and reassess their situation. This is evident in the drop in enrollment for seniors in 2020, as they compromised 50% of total enrollment that year.

With college life getting back to normal as the pandemic wound down, student behavior began to return to the baseline of 2019, with the proportion of enrollment by seniors rising to 55.8% in 2021, 56.8% in 2022, and 57.8% in 2023. 

As a side note, we have also observed that admissions policies across institutions are evolving in reaction to large groups of students showing less interest in filling out school-hosted applications, taking standardized tests, or drafting essays to get a college acceptance. 

If you would like to see further data dissecting student preferences, we encourage you to check out the full eBook for additional views, including: 

  • Demographic breakouts by region and race/ethnicity  
  • Changes in first-source proportion and yield  
  • Enrollment by decision round  
  • Actionable next steps for enrollment teams  

Also, please be on the lookout for the final installment of this series where we’ll investigate “First-Source Enrollment and Yield.” 

eBook

Enrollment Evolved: A Five-Year Study of Changing Student Behavior

Discover how five years of multiple disrupting factors in higher ed have affected student preferences regarding college choice.

Download the eBook

Want to learn how MARKETview can provide your institution with comparative data you can use to achieve your enrollment and financial goals? Schedule a brief demo with us today.