The IT Nerd

More than nine out of ten high school students say they use a higher education institution’s website to guide their college research process, still many find the navigation of these websites frustrating. This is according to the 2023 E-expectations Trends Report: Attracting, Engaging, and Enrolling High School Students, a study developed by Modern Campus and based on research conducted in partnership with Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL). This report provides insight into what high school students expect from colleges, and sheds light on how colleges and universities can attract, engage and enroll prospective students.

The bi-annual study explores the online expectations, experiences, behaviors and priorities of high school students across the United States in the process of searching for college. With the college search process now beginning early in high school for many students, this 2023 report presents many findings by high school year, showing how student behavior changes as they approach graduation. 

Despite higher ed websites being the top used resource for finding information, navigating them and finding the right information is still something that high-school students find frustrating. They expect and want these websites to be easily navigable and show personalized content. And as a result, despite their wide use, students indicate concerns around how helpful the websites truly are. About one in five 10th-grade and first-generation students said they do not find higher ed websites helpful.

The report also explores how high school students plan and research for higher education, what tools they use to gather information and what influences their journey and decisions. The study found that campus maps and virtual tours have been gaining influence in students’ decisions to enroll for a college/university.

Additional Key Findings:

• The top three things about college websites students find frustrating: Hard to find information, confusing directions and hard to navigate
• 93% students use a college or university’s website to get information
  • 58% use a search engine to find a college or university website 
  • 56% like or expect websites to show personalized content 
• 50% take a virtual tour via college websites
  • 73% feel likely to enroll after taking a virtual tour of a college or university
  • The number of students who feel likely to enroll after taking a virtual tour has been consistently increasing for the past three years
• 73% students’ parents/families help them with college planning

To explore the 2023 E-expectations Trends Report: Attracting, Engaging, and Enrolling High School Students in greater detail, visit https://resources.moderncampus.com/2023-e-expectations-trends-report-attracting-engaging-and-enrolling-high-school-students-rnl. 

Report Methodology/Respondent Profile

Between January 16 and February 20, 2023, nearly 2,000 high school students from all over the U.S. were invited to participate in the online survey. No personally identifiable information was collected. 

More than half of the respondents were in 12th grade, around three fourth were continuing generation and one third were from far west.

More than half of the respondents were female.  

Modern Campus today announced the launch of Melody™, the industry’s first low-code web design tool purpose-built for higher education, and deeper personalization capabilities of Modern Campus Web Content Management (Omni CMS). With these additions, Modern Campus stands alone in the higher education market as a leader by enabling the next-generation web experience that modern learners expect and modern higher education marketers and web administrators desire.

Higher education institutions are adapting quickly to transform their institution to meet the digital needs of modern learners – often with limited resources – and their web and marketing teams are no exception. Despite the need to offer a web experience that differentiates their school in a crowded market and attracts and converts prospective students with high efficiency, they often must settle with pages built from a few generic templates or investing resources in costly web design services. As a result, higher education web pages don’t often match the expectations of modern learners, which are shaped by their experiences with leading consumer sites and apps. 

This is why Modern Campus created Melody, a low-code tool for its next-generation web content management solution, which dramatically reduces the time and effort needed to create beautiful higher education web pages. Schools can build web pages without having to involve the IT team, without extensive knowledge of coding or programming languages, and without needing to use system tags.

Additional enhancements to its support of high-quality website design, Modern Campus is also launching:

1. Deeper website personalization capabilities – enable higher education institutions to dramatically increase the engagement of website visitors by providing highly personalized content. Whether their goals are to attract new students, engage with alumni, or reach any other target audience, institutions can now turn website visitors into contacts, by importing external data from CRM or SIS systems and build targeted segments. For instance, a college can target out-of-state high achievers by showing dynamic content to website visitors based on their geolocation and high school GPA by importing external data from Ellucian Recruit or Salesforce. 
2. Modern Campus Design Studio – a new set of services to handle customer web design projects and the Melody design library. These services will highlight the latest design elements available to Modern Campus users, and act as an agency to provide front-end web design support and design consultation, support with accessibility compliance, and web design modification for customers experiencing resource constraints.

Modern Campus is obsessed with empowering its 1,200+ higher education customers to thrive when radical transformation is required to respond to lower student enrollments and revenue, rising costs, crushing student debt and administrative complexity.

The Modern Campus engagement platform powers solutions for non-traditional student management, web content management, catalog and curriculum management, student engagement & development, career pathways, and campus maps & virtual tours. The result: innovative institutions can create a Learner-to-Earner Lifecycle that engages modern learners for life, while providing modern administrators with the tools needed to streamline workflows and drive high efficiency.

Modern Campus Web Content Management (Omni CMS) enables a next-generation web experience that attracts and engages modern learners with rich personalization – and enables modern marketers and web administrators to do big things with limited resources.