Your First Class Free: Using Tuition Grants to Increase Admit to Enrollment Conversion and Reach Enrollment Goals

In this live episode of Admit It!, host Dr. Alex Fronduto sits down with Jessie Richardson, Online Program Manager, and Mason Mulnix, Data Analyst, both from The University of Alabama, to explore their innovative SEM Conference presentation: “Your First Class Free: Using Tuition Grants to Increase Admit to Enrollment Conversion and Reach Enrollment Goals.”

Together, Jessie and Mason break down how their institution leveraged a tuition-grant model to lower barriers for newly admitted students, improve yield, and strategically support enrollment growth.



Host:

Dr. Alex Fronduto
Faculty Lead, M.Ed in Higher Education Administration & Associate Teaching Professor
Northeastern University

Guests:

Jessie Richardson, Online Program Manager, The University of Alabama

Mason Mulnix, Data Analyst, The University of Alabama

Transcript

0:09

Welcome to the Acro Admitted podcast, the podcast where we dive into the people, ideas, and strategies shaping the future of enrollment management. I'm your host, Doctor Alex Frandudo, the faculty lead of Higher Education Administration at Northeastern University. And today we're talking about the strategic enrollment Management conference that ACR held back in November 2025. I'll be interviewing a variety of presenters so we can discuss their findings from anything that they shared at the conference, for those that did not get to go to their session, or for those that weren't able to take time to go to the conference at all. I hope you enjoy hearing all of these different stories over the next coming months, and as always, if you'd like to be on the podcast, don't hesitate to reach out. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Admitted podcast. This is your host, Doctor Alex Ferdido. I'm excited to be here at the Strategic Enrollment Management Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I'll be doing multiple different episodes with a variety of presenters. Today, I am joined by Jesse and Mason who are presenting on your first class free, using tuition grants to increase admit to enrollment conversion and reach enrollment goals. Thanks so much for being here, Jesse and Mason. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. No problem. So obviously many of the people listening to this may have not gone to your session. They may have not even been at the conference. So let's start with just a brief introduction of each of you, who you are, you know, where are you institution-wise, and kind of where do you fit in that. So Jesse, do you want to go first? Yeah, of course. Uh, so I am an online program manager with the University of Alabama. I work specifically within OTide, which is our online division, um, and in my role, I work directly with colleges and I serve kind of their project manager where I am the in-between all the behind the scenes happening with that um department to make sure the student experience is as smooth as possible. I love that. And Mason, I am a data analyst for the business intelligence team at O Tide. And what that means is that we're everything data, but what that means in a broader sense, and what we like to say on the team is we try and make sure that the sacrifices our students are making to enroll with us are matched by the sacrifices we're making as an office. And that we're meeting our bottom line and that those two things never become mutually exclusive. I love, I love that explanation. And so, obviously, both of your roles are pretty unique, right? You're, you're not the typical presenters, right? When you look around, you're like, well, neither of you even said admissions into your titles. And so what brought you here? What made you be like, I want to share this information, you know, with the world, kind of, what was your thought process, even, you know, submitting a proposal? Uh, so I think the big thing is within our Office of Teaching Innovation and Digital Education where UA online is housed, we've done a lot of work the last 4 to 5 years on strategic priorities and what the future looks like for us. So we know we have a great academic profile of over 100 online degrees and certificates and programs, but A lot of our growth has been organic over the last 10 years. Online enrollment has grown over 40%, but what does that look like moving forward? So in 2024, we were tasked with a very big goal of growing to 8000 students by 2028, and we do not count our non-degree seeking students. So that removes about 1400 students that are in early college, so fact for high schoolers. We're not counting non. Degree seeking. So this is our true program enrollment, um, and it's, it's a big task and it's a collaborative task where data and analytics has been very integral into setting those goals and what it looks like. And I just thought kind of this behind the scenes because when you think of UA you think of football. There's a, there's a lot with the brand that we can capitalize on to a, to a degree, but the online adult. Learner is just totally different. So how are we going to get them enrolled online in our courses? And I think that's really important to talk about the timeline of what you're talking about. So let's look at online education as a whole, right? It was a novelty pre-COVID in some ways, right? There were still institutions doing it, some weren't doing it very well, to be honest, and there were some institutions that were doing it very well. There was like clear front runners, and COVID happened, and then everyone One entered the marketplace, right? And that obviously is going to hurt, hurt people that have numbers, even if you have a strong brand online presence, just people find something closer to them, even though it's online, people still choose. We know research shows that people are still choosing institutions that are close to them, even though location doesn't matter. And so, what was innovative of what you've done post COVID, right? So you've had obviously some challenges to reach that hefty goal. So what were some of the things that you tried to do? So, I think that we have made a lot of changes in regard to our services. Um, so over the last couple of years, we have, um, added entry term advisors, so that transition from our admission representative when you're submitting your app to that admin decision is a lot easier and then And once you're enrolled and you're a current student, that's where our student success coaches come in. We've expanded military grants, uh, from undergraduate only to, uh, graduate as of this fall. Uh, really happy for that. So that picks up the difference between, um, the TA benefit and the actual cost. Um, we have done a couple of third party services. Services, uh, like you will and Brainfuse to make sure that our online students mirror the services and resources typically seen on, you know, the student life side of campus, um, a main campus, and then I think one of the more interesting pieces is we've had these tuition grants which we're calling first class free since 2016. And we know that they've been popular, but we were limited in how we recruited and use those as an enrollment management tool. So now it's very strategic with our marketing materials, our recruitment officers. They are mentioning, Hey, did you know you may qualify for first class free? Uh, we went from 3 tuition grants to 5, and so we've expanded those out and allocated more funds. Um, so right now we have a back to Bama for a returning undergraduate student that did not complete their bachelor's. We have a Roll Tide reconnect for any UA alumni, whether that is online or main campus for their next degree, and Roll Tide referral, I think, is probably one of our best ones. Um, that's going to be for undergraduate or graduate, and a UA online current student or alum can refer you to get that first class free. And I think it's just good, it's just a good way to get out there and market it. A lot of admissions reps, this is their first, you know, big kid job, and so many of them are in our master's programs online, and they can actually serve as the referr. Uh, so it's just, it's, it's a great thing all around. Awesome. As someone that leads a higher ed program, so I understand that I have many, many students that work at my institution and others. So obviously, as you're saying, the data is playing. An important role. And so, you know, Mason, I look to you. Where do you fit in the mix? Is it looking just at numbers? Is it looking predictively? Like what, how are you making the decision? One, who you're giving it to other than some of the stipulations, and two, how likely they're going to be to continue, because obviously that's the important piece. Yeah, and I think this goes back to answering your question of um like, how did I become a part of uh this presentation in this conference. Uh, part of the initiative to meet the 8000 by 28 was very heavy emphasis on data-informed decision making and tracking how these different strategies were working. And so, uh, my team, we developed a structure, modeled it off of something that the University of Kentucky is doing on their main campus where we're bringing everybody together in the same room. Uh, from each of the departments that serve UA online, and we're doing standard things in every meeting where we're saying here's where we're at in the funnel for this upcoming, uh, term cycle. But then also of this we know we can't meet 8000 by 28 just by getting new students. We have to retain the ones we have. And so there we are looking at predictive analytics to figure out like who's at risk of dropping today, what are the strategies, and then really where I became involved with this was as a part of these routine meetings that uh. Um, our team has been running, we do what we, we call data focuses where we put open requests out to the 66 departments and, you know, we give them 1 per cycle of meetings. It's like, what's the one thing you want to know right now that you don't have answers to? And one of the things that came up was what are the impacts that these first time, uh, excuse me, 1st, 1st class free grants are having on our students' data and retention. So, um, That's, that's how I became involved and uh that's, that's where the data plays a role in all this. So, obviously I think in this scope, if we're thinking like enrollment management, I think looking at the idea of retention can have two words, right? retention through their entire program, graduation rate. Obviously, I think a lot of people will probably ask data requests of like someone does. Their first class free. Do they enroll in their second class? So what does that look like? Yeah, so, and I think it's important to acknowledge that we're talking about a non-traditional student population largely when we're looking at these online programs. Um, most of them are transfers, so we don't really. Uh, have a set number of credits we expect them to be on the hook for with us. Um, many of them are part-time, so they don't take classes sequentially, which can, which can be hard to calculate retention. So when we were trying to figure out what's the net impact that these grants are having on students' success, uh, we looked at. Two populations, the population of students that we awarded these grants to and the population of students that we didn't. Nice. And for the population that we did award these grants to, we said how many of them ever at any point came back or graduated with us. And then for the population that we didn't award. Grants to, we just said how many came back or graduated after their first term with us, and what we found was that of the population of students that we awarded the grants to, there was about a 3% higher retention persistence rate, whatever one you wanna call it, for the, the number of students that came back. And you know, by no way are we saying this is causation, it's just revelation, of course, um, but, uh, part of our presentation was saying, you know, if, if this were a causation. What would that look like and what would that mean for us meeting our progress towards our goals, right? I mean, and, and an increase is an increase, right? And even if it's also because of all the other things that Jesse was saying that we're adding these student services, we're trying to mimic the on-campus feel from student affairs, right? Again, it's not gonna be a 1 to 1 ratio, but even being able to say like all of these things combined is helping, I think is, you know, going to be advantageous to reach. Your goal. And so, obviously, you've pinpointed certain people. Is there any kind of metrics to that piece? Is there anything else that like, let's say I was like, oh, this sounds interesting, like what would you suggest to other people? Kind of what did you give as like strategic advice to people in the session? So, we had a couple of metrics that we wanted to measure this by. So, First, looking at admission to enrollment conversion rates, and I will go ahead and disclose that this change in the existing tuition grants to the new ones only took place this summer. OK, fair. And so summer and fall we look the same. We didn't lose. How about that? OK, I love that, and that's realistic though, right? So that's OK,-- which not everything is going to-- be perfect. A win is a win, but we know that we hover around a. 63 to 65% conversion from admins to enrollment when we look at the last two years. So if we see a few percentage gains over the course of the next three years, we may be able to, to make some correlations to, to this. So first we wanted to measure enrollment, uh, admit to enrollment conversion. We wanted to make sure that we were reviewing each grant within 10 business days. So just. Knowing that these are adult online learners, if they don't hear something from us, they're leaving. They're going somewhere else. Um, we have also worked on the back end to automate awarding to the student account. So as soon as we have reviewed, you are eligible, you are enrolled. Awesome. Here's that grant. You're not waiting for us. And then where Mason was able to dig in further is we wanted to look at the re-enrollment rates that he just shared. But he also wanted to look at this revenue generated, how we compare re-enrollment of students awarded grants versus not awarded grants, to look at our ROI and so I'll pass this over to Mason. Yeah, that was gonna be my answer if I had advice for other universities. I mean, a lot of what we talked about in the presentation are projections, but what we were actually able to measure, uh, in the two student populations is. And I like to phrase it as what did that 3% increase cost us? Uh, we actually gave out $770,000 to these students, and the actual tuition revenue that they brought back in was $4.74 million. Yeah, so that's not a small. And so general advice, it may seem simple, but it's, you know, isolate the populations that return at a higher rate and support those students. So that, that's the, that's the advice, that's the takeaway from this. Um, it was over several years, not just right, yeah, one semester-- you can increase by-- 56 times fall, fall 2019 through summer 2025. OK OK, that's helpful.-- That's good-- context, you know, they, they don't know exactly the data that you probably showed on the screen, so, you know, we, yeah, yeah, that's helpful, yeah. I like that context. And so obviously people are gonna be thinking, OK, there is that upfront cost in some way because you still have to run that class, you're paying faculty, you know, all of the infrastructure, um, there is this measurement, like you said, over time of kind of increased tuition revenue. Do you find that You know, you obviously presented this to higher leadership and was like, look at this great thing. I assume their reaction was positive. Was there anything else they asked you for? Like, were they just like, continue to do this? Like, what do you like, I would love to hear that reaction cause that's going to be helpful when you think about someone else. Even proposing this, saying like, well, I know that, you know, they did this and this is how they reacted and this is what they're doing next, and I think that that model, like you have been saying, you, you've taken taken meeting models from other institutions, so I'm just curious like what that kind of looked like, looked like. Yeah, I'm not as involved with the conversations around um You know, what, what to do next, those, those sort of things as it relates to these tuition grants. But I think what was the, the selling point for senior leadership at O Tide was the bottom line is we're only awarding these grants to about 2% of our population during a given term. And if assuming that 3% increase in retention occurs in that pop that 2% population of students, what that translates to is ultimately 7% of the enrollment growth needed for us to meet our goals. And so it's you're investing in 2% of the population and getting 7% of the enrollment that you need over time because there's a compounding effect with an increased retention rate, um, and so for For that reason, and there's still a gap, you know, you have to employ other strategies, whether it's new students or other retention strategies, but, uh, that 5% difference in, in terms of what you're investing in versus what you're getting out of it long term, I think was the selling point for senior leadership. Awesome, I really appreciate that. And obviously, you know, we were talking about this before we recorded, but for both of you, this is your first SE, and so it's kind of like an ending point too, I think others. We're always thinking like, OK, you presented even as your first time, and so you've had some days here, just generally, like, how has your experience been? Other people that might be thinking like, is this conference for me, especially if they're some type of, you know, what I'm referring to is like tangentially, obviously you're involved in enrollment management, but people may not fully see that connection. You know, has it been worthwhile? Like, you feel like you're getting things out of the conference? Absolutely. Uh, so my department went from program development to program development and enrollment management, uh, here recently. So this was a very important professional development piece for me, um, but bringing in what I think we do and do well by the collaborative efforts on data and And setting those strategic long-term goals. Um, I've enjoyed all the sessions. I have been pleasantly surprised by how many other-- online components I've been able to hear in the past day and a-- half. Awesome. And how about yourself, Mason? Yeah, I mean, I, I've been to software conferences before, and software conferences are great for learning software and hearing real-world examples on. You know, someone did this with data and it translated well to their business, but I think what I've gained from this is very nuanced perspectives on things related specifically to higher ed. And so one of my favorite things, I texted my supervisor about it immediately was, um, in another session, they were talking about, uh, looking at students as a revenue per student over their life cycle with the institution. And their argument was online students, you know, have, uh, they generate more, uh, profit per student than a main campus student. And so being able to get that kind of nuanced perspective of other people in higher ed has been really valuable for me. Um,-- and I think that'll-- that the argument of program development, right with us. I know, I love that. I mean, and it looks at, you know, credit hours, right, like understanding those nuances like you said, like. You can't just look at a student and be like they're gonna be here for 2 years and they're gonna enroll in 2 classes every, you know, semester or quarter, right? Like it literally, you kind of have to look at the numbers every single quarter and look at every student, look at the total number of billable hours, right, so that the finances is not as clear and so that's interesting to hear as well. Well, thank you both for being here. Thank you for talking. Thank you for presenting at SEM, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. You as well.-- Thank-- you.