The Role of Print, Web, and Social Media for Recruiting Students

Recruiting for higher education is a well-documented and practiced process; however, new social media venues of delivering information are changing the way some universities are reaching prospective students. Recruiting students for higher education has typically been accomplished by a variety of traditional methods, including print, Web, and campus visits. While these methods continue to be used, the existence of new social media including Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and message boards has pushed many universities towards recruiting in new ways. As we think about recruiting students into our programs, we are faced with many more choices than we have had in the past. We are also faced with students who are much more media savvy than previous students. There seems to be very little in the literature about the impact and usefulness of the newer social media outlet as recruiting tools. This study was designed to determine how effectively students perceive different recruiting methods (print, Web, and social media) as well as who helped them sort through all of the information to make their choices. First-semester freshmen in the College of Technology (CoT) at Purdue University were surveyed to determine how print, Web, and social media for recruiting are perceived by prospective students. They were asked what people influenced them during their college search and which forms of media influenced their decision-making process. This paper presents results of a Web survey conducted during fall 2010 and fall 2011.