My team launched a new revenue-generating initiative to support academic institutions, and better serve student users throughout the college admissions process.

Millions of students use CollegeVine.com to get recruited by their dream schools. Admissions teams use the CollegeVine recruiting network to grow their enrollment by connecting with and admitting these high-intent students.

The development of this business unit allowed institutions to grow their enrollment, reduce their cost of enrollment, and improve operational efficiency.

Key business outcomes:

• Enabled CollegeVine to scale up to 50+ college partners in the first 12 months (fastest ever in higher ed)
• Drove 25,000 applications for college partners in the first full recruitment cycle
• Reduced recruiting expenses for colleges (cost per enrollment) by 50%
• Enabled up to 20x operational efficiencies for admissions offices.
  i.e ~5,000 connections on CollegeVine translate to as many enrollments as ~100,000 leads from traditional sources

My team launched a new revenue generating initiative to support academic institutions, and better serve student users throughout the college admissions process.

Millions of students use CollegeVine.com to create profiles, research schools, and learn from experts to discover their dream school. Using the CollegeVine recruiting network, admissions teams can find and connect with these high-intent students actively looking to build relationships with their best-fit school.

By developing this business unit we made it easier for admissions teams to enroll their ideal class faster, more efficiently, and with fewer resources.

At the launch of our recruiting network, admissions officers had to search for and message individual students. This created a substantial amount of friction and made it difficult for them to achieve specific recruiting goals. After receiving this feedback, my team developed a campaign builder that allowed admissions teams to connect with thousands of students at once.

As the lead designer, I drew on user interviews to conceptualize and prototype an easy-to-use interface that drove powerful outcomes for recruitment teams. The filter UX enabled admissions teams to utilize more than 50 variables for fine-grained targeting of specific admissions goals, while the built-in visualization features enabled easy adjustments and tweaking of campaigns.

Key business outcomes:

• Drove a 15x increase in the pace of student<>college connections
• Enabled 10+ colleges at risk of rollover to hit the full connection quotas specified in their contracts
• Drove a six-figure increase in monthly recurring revenues

Following the release of the CollegeVine Recruiting Network, we found that the majority of the users (college admissions) wanted to spend less time searching for and messaging individual students. They had trouble reaching specific recruiting goals and were frustrated by the amount of friction there was finding and connecting with high-intent students.

My team created a campaign builder to enable admissions teams segment their target students and initiate relationships at scale to help reach recruiting goals. 

CollegeVine helped pioneer a reverse admissions model (direct admissions) for our student members. In this model, the colleges “applied to students” - sending them conditional offers for admission and scholarships after reviewing their CollegeVine network profile.

For students, the reverse admissions model reduced stress and saved hours of unnecessary work, while allowing institutions to reach new students who may not have otherwise applied.

Our user research found that other direct admission offerings were time-consuming for enrollment teams and resulted in low enrollment rates from students. Colleges focused on sending offers to students with exceptional academic profiles but were missing critical information that would allow them to build relationships and increase their chances of enrollment.

Students on CollegeVine can opt-in to have their data-rich profiles submitted anonymously to colleges for review. Admissions teams work from an application queue to review profiles and make offers to students who have the highest likelihood of matching and enrolling in their institution. To improve on the poor efficiency of other direct admissions offerings, we collaborated with data science to develop an affinity model that predicted a student’s likelihood of applying and enrolling.

Key Business Outcomes:

• Enabled 3,000 student acceptances during the first recruitment cycle (pilot)
• Students received $53.5 million in scholarship offers during the first recruitment cycle

In response to increasing popularity of the direct admissions from Colleges and Universities, we introduced a direct admissions feature on CollegeVine. This was a revenue generating business unit from day one and of IPO-worthy strategic importance.

Our research found the existing format of direct admissions was time consuming and resulted in low-yield enrollment rates from students. Colleges focused on sending offers to students with exceptional academic profiles, but were missing essential information about them to build relationships and increase their chances of successful enrollement.

Students on CollegeVine can opt-in to have their data-rich profiles submitted anonymously as applications to colleges. We collaborated with data science to develop an affinity model matching students to best-fit, high-chance colleges. Admissions teams could then work from an application queue to review profiles, and make offers to students who have the highest likelihood of accepting and attending their institution.