Decliner Study (ADS)

The ADS was developed to examine the flip-side of enrolment: Why some students short-list your institution, may even visit your campus, and yet decline your offer and pursue higher education elsewhere. These applicants are a crucial target audience, and may represent a huge opportunity for recruiters; they know your institution, perceive strengths and weaknesses, and can tell you a great deal about key perceptions and misperceptions that are costing you conversion and enrolment.

Applicants who rejected your offer of acceptance
They researched your institution and were attracted by what they found. They applied to your school, perhaps even selecting you as their first choice. They represented a substantial investment of your recruitment efforts. But when the time came to make their final decision and choose where they wanted to go, they opted for another school. Why?

Why do some students apply to you, receive an offer – but then accept elsewhere? Find out directly from “the ones who got away,” with our customized Acceptance Declined Survey™.

Applicant Conversion Insights
Some of Canada’s leading colleges and universities have already benefited from the insight of our proprietary ADS — finding out straight from the students who seriously considered attending, who they preferred and where they came up short.

The ADS extends the market insight of our national applicant studies, examining the flip side of the recruitment coin: focusing not on why potential students apply to your institution, but why those same applicants may not ultimately enrol. Were you their second or third choice? Who did they prefer? Was there anything you could have done differently? Did it boil down to scholarship dollars? program offerings? extracurriculars? your campus tour?

Methodology:
Participating institutions will provide a set of email addresses for applicants who declined acceptance offers, or inquiries who did not in fact apply. Ideally, we recommend that this survey be undertaken in July or early August, when students have made their final decision but are likely still using the same email address, but this is a custom study and timing is at the discretion of the client institution.

Academica will issue customized email invitations to participants, including a login and password, inviting them to participate in the ADS study with several valuable prize incentives. They will also receive a reminder email, two weeks later, inviting them to start or continue the survey where they left off.

Benchmarking:
Part of the unique value of AS subscribers can select their own custom benchmark (consisting of from 3 to 20 other institutions), and will receive a custom report comparing institution-specific results to that benchmark, and the overall average.