How to make it rain at a recruitment fair (keep the Benjamins in your pocket and throw room and board).

This week, in a show of bipartisan ignorance and hand-wringing, the U.S. government is settling on a plan to bail the nation out of an insurance and housing crisis to the tune of $700 billion dollars.  That's $700,000,000,000.  At my current salary, it would take me over 1770 lifetimes to earn that much.  And while the numbers and pundits filled every possible nick and cranny in the airwaves, I had to focus on a much smaller number.  Rather, a number that I as of right now can't determine - the cost of recruiting one student to college.

For the second time in my university career, I have been named to my college's recruitment committee.  We met for the first time yesterday, and were charged with coming up with some standardized recruiting materials, working more closely with the university recruitment people, etc.  We've been given no budget, just a standing "ask and ye shall maybe receive" line, and all in attendance looked like they would have preferred to be eating live insects.  As we met, one very interesting question came up: what does it cost to recruit one high school student to our university?  And, to nobody's surprise, no one knew.  This is unfortunate, since recruitment is such a large aspect to our university.

Our campus arguably does a lot of recruiting activities.  We send small groups of people to high school football games to show a presence.  The university hosts career fairs and job fairs and majors fairs to help disseminate information.  We have a large bi-annual recruitment event, along with smaller traveling events that blanket the state.  And all of this undoubtedly adds up, but to what?  Where does or should the university break even?  How much is too much to spend to get that next student?

If you look around town, one might argue we're not spending enough.  We are the only school in our system that is not embraced by its community, nor by its local media.  Land at our airport, and you are immediately impressed by the advertising from a university 45 minutes away.  Open our newspaper in hand or online, and see schools in other cities dominating the bylines.  These problems would take more money than we have to fix, and our poor committee can't attempt to change the local culture at that level, and the funds maybe should come from advertising (but isn't that what recruitment is?).

We know we need to spend something.  The number of eligible incoming freshmen who are qualified to attend our university (along with the majority of schools in the state) is dwindling rapidly.  Our system recently mandated that we increase our enrollment and student credit hours by 2012.  To meet their figures, our campus needs to enroll 8 of every 10 eligible students.  LSU might be able to meet that number, be we certainly can't.  So we need to be more creative in recruiting.  This semester we have focused on non-traditional students and on-line degrees, and the numbers are promising.  But how many of those students came to us because we recruited them?  Common sense would say get your online degree at your local campus no?

When it's all said and done, I would propose slashing all the recruiting budgets to near zero.  Sure, have some recruiting brochures and some nice glossy pamphlets for when you need them, but for most of the efforts, just cancel them.  Funnel all that money into the scholarship program.  Because, ladies and gentlemen, in northeast Louisiana and around the country, students don't want to know about you, they want to know about your wallet.  For a vast majority of students, recruitment is as simple as sitting down with a university representative, and wanting in writing exactly what that student will receive if he or she attends that school.  They'll shop around, and whoever ponies up the best deal, they'll go there.  Many faculty can relay stories of students attending University A over College B for a few hundred dollars.  It's Jerry Maguire education economics, and for these students, it's their best shot.  Our campus serves the poorest of the poor; our region was poorer than Appalachia when last the numbers ran.  If your annual household income was below $10,000, you'd want to be shown the money too.

So what does it cost to bring a student in?  We hope to have our answer at our next meeting when the head of campus recruiting pays us a visit.  A horribly inaccurate estimate could be made by dividing the estimated annual recruiting budget by the number of freshmen, if the university would release such figures.  My guess is it's frighteningly high, a sea of money attempting to bring a handful students in with the tide.  But at some level our jobs depend on it, as does the livelihood of the university.  I find it somewhat off-putting that I'm worrying about the cost-benefit ratios of students trying to get a college degree.

And for one last swipe at $700 billion dollars?  This year it will cost a non-Louisiana resident student $5,000 in tuition to attend our university.  We can add $1,000 in additional fees, plus another $10,000 in room and board and other stuff.  So, $16k for one student for one year.  As the feds bail out the stupid and greedy, almost 11 MILLION Americans could come to our fair state, and earn themselves a four-year undergraduate degree.  Add that to the list of better things to do with 700 billion.