The Ecology
Higher Education is now an economic statement. It has been for quite some time. As it is seen as some form of commodity it, like other industries, must justify its existence and seek revenue opportunities that are perennially viable.
The Goal: Develop services to better engage a potential student body and provide the groundwork for sustainable recruiting practices.
Education and learning are two distinct concepts. Learning is a series of processes that form an ecology, a series of dynamic exchanges reflective of need. Education is a set of interrelated, codependent functions and processes. It is an ecosystem.
Educational systems support learning processes. Students and prospective students are subject to their environments or ecologies and have become accustomed to them. Encountering new environments and, perhaps, distinctly different worldviews and parameters is a prompt for change and an encounter with the unknown. Predictably, this increases stress and students respond accordingly, physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Discovering Values and Needs
After reading through multiple studies and sources regarding higher education as viewed by prospective students over the past 20 years several key themes emerged.
There is a difference between awareness of the world and efficacy in the world.
Awareness: knowledge or perception of a situation or fact
Efficacy: Our efficacy describes how opererable we are in our chosen realms of existence. It is our ability to not simply influence or control but broadly impact strata within our realms to produce intended results. Efficacy is often implied and promoted by a demography by a variety of sources, slogans and persuasive bodies in absence of a consideration of reality or the psychological expenses incurred by such sources, slogans, etc.
Why understand the difference? Potential students are affected by their broad social upbringing. If there are told they can change the world they may try. If confronted with the difficulty of that reality, they may become disenfranchised and carry this with them into their education and post educational existence.
“We can’t be just another name on a list of possible colleges that a student looks at. We have to mean something to them.”
How we found out what students thought: Self guided journey maps and narrative summaries. We asked potential students to tell us what it was like before, during and after applying to University.
We compared this to how staff viewed the operations of recruiting students: And we discovered stresses and tensions in efficacy of the department itself. Meaning, bias.
Student insights were distilled into themes in order to build response archetypes:
The terms utilized to gauge student alignment are representative of their general narratives. The terms themselves are neutral in their application unless specifically noted by the student. It is important to recognize how a student might apply a feeling to or within a given context in order to understand how they are experience the context itself.
Assured, Confident, Excited, Stressed, Prepared, Connected
Staff insights were implemented in a co-facilitated workshop
Analyzing Insights and Trends
A response archetype structure was used to gauge dyadic stimulus response to understand how a student’s feelings may change over time when interacting with the concept of applying to college. This was done to clarify some of their own statements and used as comparative material against internal perceptions and biases. Prospective students used diverse terminology, but their responses took 3 primary forms that were clear in their direction and behavioral intent.
It’s all about relationship, community and identity. Knowing how prospective students viewed the process of applying to college, parameters were made for a series of workshops to analyze their needs against organizational values. If needs and values don’t match, an opportunity exists for improvement.
Co-facilitating the ecology
By modifying the concept of a UX card sort, workshop participants were able to engage with the thought patterns, impressions and needs of their stakeholder base. This also meant being aware of their own biases and temporal constraints. Clearly the system of education has not changed, but the ecology it operates within and that influences its stakeholders has shifted drastically. The capture here is a recreation of the map done in person with color-coded cards, string and tacks over an 8’x8′ area.
Synthesis
Once the ecology had been framed and insights from both internal and external groups had been understood, an approach to understanding prospective student’s influences pre, during and post recruitment was made. Using an Influence/Time method afforded clarity as to which human parties held degrees of sway over a potential student. By synthesizing the ebb and flow of their influence over time the ability to shape concise solutions was made possible.
What we found by synthesizing insights into an Influence/Time model was that, quite probably, the stress and tension exhibited in the students’ initial narrative evaluations had an origin outside of the educational ecology. They were generational and social pressure passed down by parents and guardians that internal teams were left to grapple with, whether that grappling was financially motivated (get the best deal for my child) or whether a parent wanted to remain in control (I’ll still make these decisions for my child). All of this hinted at something unresolved, not with the students, but with their degree of preparedness for life and living that had been enabled or disabled. Conflicts between internal systems for enrollment, payments and the like continued to butt against worldviews that were attempting to get the best deal or some degree of a certain future when those promises could not realistically be made.
Creating Solutions
Help was needed for both parents and students.
Programming would be implemented and exist as a series of preparedness services for students who, though academically sound, may lack the skills necessary to navigate housing, bills, etc. One scope offering included an Air BnB concept for juniors and seniors to transition them away from dorm living into community housing, creating additional housing for ever-greater incoming student populations services would be offered to assist parents with similar life-navigational needs like career services and financial planning to stem the tide of need and address generational lack of efficacy.
Sum
Novum is an example of perpetual design and leadership applied to complex organizational value offerings and stakeholder needs. Though parties will come and go from the newly established processes, it will never be “done”. As with any design, it exists as a tether between worlds, delivering continual value, reshaping, reforming and informing as it goes.