Employment Before Enrollment

• 75% were employed full time
• 6% were employed part time
• 3% were self-employed
• 5% were unemployed but looking
• 8% were full time students
• 3% Retired, in the military, or full time homemaker

Employment While Enrolled In their Program of Study

• 58% were employed full time
• 17% were employed part time
• 2% were self employed
• 3% were unemployed but looking
• 17% became full time students
• 3% Retired, in the military, or full time homemaker

The drop in full time employed students and the percent of those who had been looking for work can be explained by the rise in full time students and a significant increase in those working part time.

Employment at Graduation

• 67% were employed full time
• 5% were employed part time
• 6% were self-employed
• 18% were unemployed but looking
• 4% Retired, in the military, or full time homemaker

An additional 9% of students found employment upon graduation while 18% — many of whom were full time students — began searching for employment in earnest. There are also twice as many graduates who pursued self employment careers. 

Current Employment Status

• 74% are employed full time

Key Findings

• Email to a house list averaged:  a 19.47 percent open rate; a 6.64 percent click-through rate; a 1.73 percent conversion rate; with a bounce-back rate of 3.72 percent and an unsubscribe rate of 0.77 percent. 
• Response rates for Direct Mail have held steady over the past four years.  Letter-sized envelopes, for instance, had a response rate this year of 3.42 percent for a house list and 1.38 percent for a prospect list. 
• Catalogs had the lowest cost per lead/order of $47.61, just ahead of inserts at $47.69, email at $53.85, and postcards $75.32. 
• Outbound telemarketing to prospects had the highest cost per order or lead of $309.25, but it also had the highest response rate from prospects of 6.16 percent.  The highest response rate for a house list was also telephone, at 10.41 percent.
• Paid search had an average cost per click of $3.79, with a 3.81 percent conversion rate. The conversion rate (after click) of internet display advertisements was slightly higher at 4.43 percent.
• Response rates for B-to-B campaigns were generally higher than for B-to-C campaigns.  Lead generation and high-end average sale campaigns also had higher response rates.
• Nearly 60 percent of direct mail campaigns in financial services aimed to produce a direct sale.  The average response rate was a comparatively low 2.66 percent to a house list and 1.01percent to a prospect list.

DMA’s Response Rate Report Trend Report was conducted through a survey that was emailed in March and April 2010.  When the survey was closed, DMA had received 473 usable responses. Read more

Source: http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/dispannouncements?article=1451

• Fordham: $1,140 per credit
• Drew University: $1,165 per credit
• Sarah Lawrence College: $1,368 per credit
• Albertus Magnus: $1,137 (Spring 2010 per credit excluding fees)
• Columbia (CCS): $1,270 per credit
• NYU McGhee: $1,078 (Spring 2010 per credit excluding fees)

All five institutions offer adult undergraduate programs that closely match the degree programs offered by McGhee.

Among public four-year institutions, the lowest tuition is from Thomas Edison State College, a distance education only public nonprofit higher ed institution in New Jersey, charging $125 per credit for residents and $165 per credit for non-residents. This likely accounts for the school not having a physical campus. The highest tuition is also from a New Jersey public for profit institution, the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Tuition is currently at $378 per credit for residents and $788 for nonresidents.

(Note: Tuition stated is based on Web site information posted by the institution.)

What makes this particular initiative different from past reports is that the study will track the student’s undergraduate progress through graduation. This will allow for a better understanding of retention and stopout rates by including the student's progress at transferred institutions.

In the past, we have made assumptions that when a large percentage of students don’t graduate from the same institution where they first enrolled, the institution has failed in its mission. For adult undergraduates, this isn’t necessarily the case. For these students, things such as job relocation or financial burdens impact their ability to stay at one institution until graduation. A study of 12 institutions revealed that retention of adult undergraduates hovered around 50-70 percent. Not great when compared with traditional aged student retention of 80-90+ percent.

This new "retention" benchmark will focus less on stopout rates and more on the students ultimately graduating along with the careers they pursue afterward -- regardless of the number of institutions involved.

Read More or Visit AAU's Website at www.aau.edu

Adult Undergraduate Benchmarking Study (2008)

Additionally, 40% have “friended” a brand on FB and/or MySpace, 65% had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand, and 97% who interacted with a brand online are likely to recommend to a friend.

Data Source: Razorfish via AMA

Among the social media best practices mentioned in the Webcast include:

• Being effective is better than being popular -- number of followers or fans are not an indication of an effective marketing strategy
• Practice active listening -- this requires monitoring sites regularly. Acknowledge and thank compliments, address complaints timely, act to resolve issues right away
• Cross-sell, Up-sell
• Analyze by looking below the surface and finding actionable insights, not shallow sentiments -- OSD research will be testing filter tools to distinguish between valuable feedback and media noise because only about 20% of feedback will be actionable.
• Adapt and be ready to modify your approach and response at any time. Technology changes quickly. Yesterday it was all about keywords and search engine marketing. Today it is about social media. Tomorrow will surely be something else.

To listen to the webcast: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/playback/Playback.do?id=254zwe

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Women are more likely than men to have an opinion about recession-related advertising (64% vs. 59%). Of those with an opinion, women (42%) are more likely than men (31%) to say such ads make brands seem realistic. Men are more likely than women to say the ads make brands seem manipulative (49% vs. 39%) and they depress them and make them less likely to buy (20% vs. 17%).

 Young adults, aged 18-34 (65%), are more likely than those aged 35-44 (58%), 45-54 (62%), and 55+ (60%) to have an opinion about ads that reference the recession. Young adults are divided on whether such ads are manipulative (42%) or realistic (42%). Those aged 55 and older (22%) are more likely than their younger counterparts to say that the ads depress them and make them less likely to buy. Read more

Source: Research Alert

However, those who use mobile marketing are a desirable audience. They are tech savvy and more likely than non-users to plan to buy electronics within six months.

Source: Simultaneous Media Survey 14