A new initiative spearheaded by Lumina Foundation aims to help rural and semi-rural community colleges reach and enroll more adult learners.
Lumina is working with CollegeAPP and StrategyForward Advisors to help six selected colleges over two years with their branding, outreach and marketing efforts by using proprietary predictive modeling to increase engagement and enrollment of adult learners.
Melanie Heath, strategy director for access at Lumina, said the project builds on the foundation and StrategyForward Advisors’ work related to brand building at community colleges, known as the Million Dollar Community College Challenge, launched in 2022. Lumina also has done a series of related projects, such as mobile optimization for institutional websites and Instagram challenges, she said.
Lumina has previously teamed with CollegeAPP, which help institutions dive into data using modeling that best predicts which adults in communities intend to enroll in two to three years. The company then supports colleges in their media campaign efforts, including social media.
“We’ve noticed that rural communities seem to have kind of an outsized impact on enrollment when they utilize CollegeAPP and also when they focus on brand and awareness,” Heath said.
Part of the goal behind the request for proposals from interested colleges is to support the next step of this brand awareness strategy, and to leverage it to help rural colleges, she said.
Through the project, the colleges will assess and identify the size and composition of their potential adult learner population, and also learn about best practices, effective messaging and data-driven techniques for strategic and effective social and digital marketing campaigns. Although the colleges will learn as a cohort, they also will receive individual assistance from coaches.
Applications are due July 21. Selected candidates will be notified and announced in early August.
Why adult learners?
While community colleges tend to enroll a large proportion of adult learners, many of their enrollment management efforts don’t explicitly call out adult learner engagement as part of their strategies, Heath said.
“We want to support and incentivize institutions of learning on how to speak to adults in their communities about the opportunities to enroll or re-enroll back in college,” she said.
The project also can dovetail into Lumina’s efforts to help adult with some college but no credential to complete their credential.
The initiative isn’t focused on attracting adult learners to help meet workforce needs of any particular industries, but part of the application process asks institutions to identify a “pain point” that they want to address with the effort, Heath said. She explained that “pains points” could range from declining enrollments, to industry-specific needs. For example, a college may have a huge shortage of nurses in the community that it hopes the initiative could help them tackle through outreach, engagement and enrollment of adult learners, Heath said.
