February
Feedback: Financial Aid Calculators
Stephanie Geyer of Noel-Levitz, in her helpful comment on this entry (also see this great entry at UBrander), has provided two excellent examples of providing prospects and their families with a window into your institution’s financial aid system–without trying to create a fancy calculator!
Bob Johnson turned the E-Expectations study results into a sort of contest, recognizing schools that offer 10 of the top 15 web gimmicks features that the study identified as being most important to incoming students. Topping the list were financial aid and tuition calculators. For many institutions (WWC included) this is simply an impossibility–there are too many small grants and scholarships and human decisions built into our financial aid process to allow for the creation of a calculator.
It doesn’t help that WWC doesn’t discount heavily because our price is already very low–we don’t have any big, instant scholarships to throw at nearly every student to apply. This was a conscious branding decision. Instead of using the psychological tricks of perceived value from a higher sticker price and delivering tuition-funded scholarships, we’ve opted for a more transparent “what you see is what you get” approach. Call it anti-marketing. Done right, it really resonates with our niche audience. The problem is that all too often, instead of transparency, we’re obscuring our financial aid information because it lacks pizzazz compared to our competitors who blatantly buy students. A financial aid calculator is the friend of the sticker-price-spinster, allowing them to create an illusion of transparency and simplicity, and that’s one place where WWC is falling down. Our financial aid program and sticker price is very simple compared to a lot of schools, but we can’t offer the illusion of simplicity precisely because it is simple!
Fortunately for WWC and others, the bottom line is that prospects want to know about how much an education from your institution will cost. If you can deliver that information in a helpful, personable way, then you win. It doesn’t take fancy Web 2.0 calculators with pop-up video podcasted student blogs. In fact, the less barriers you put between the visitor and the information they want, the more likely you are to make an impression.
Here are Stephanie Geyer’s two excellent examples:
Arizona State University
Lawrence University
I really like what Arizona State is doing. Not only do you get the facts, but you also meet actual people. Look at both sites and notice how much more powerful the facts and figures are when given to you about a real person at Arizona State rather than Lawrence’s hypothetical family of four. Using a conventional approach that tells a story, makes an emotional connection, and provides information in a clear way will deliver what prospects are looking for just as much (if not more) than a calculator, so for those of you losing the Bob Johnson/Noel-Levitz Challenge: you can still win the students.
