CENTER VALLEY, Pa. — As director of enrollment management and campus strategy at Penn State Lehigh Valley, one of Kristy Hove’s major responsibilities is to guide students and their families through the college selection and application process. And it is a process. As part of Hove’s doctoral dissertation research, she sought to better understand how students ultimately choose a college.
She conducted a study focused on students’ criteria, with a checklist of traits students find most to least important during their college choice process. She presented her findings, “But Why? Decoding College Choice & Student Consumerism,” with two researchers from the University at Buffalo at the Northeast Association of Institutional Research (NEAIR)’s annual conference in November 2024. The co-presenters, Holly Klick and Carolyn Kidder-Owczarczak, discussed findings from their own research on why students did not enroll at their institution. The event, held most recently in Rhode Island, draws professionals engaged in institutional research at the post-secondary level.
Hove worked in institutional planning at Penn State Lehigh Valley prior to assuming the director of enrollment management role and can speak firsthand to the importance of this data. She said understanding students’ thoughts and selection process for college is important on several levels, including marketing and recruiting.
“I wanted to engage in a study as part of my [doctoral] dissertation research that could be used by practitioners in higher education,” Hove said. “I decided to focus on the 19 [Penn State] Commonwealth Campuses. Having worked at [Penn State Lehigh Valley] for many years, I wanted to look at something that could be useful to the University system as a whole.”
Students and their families were already starting to question higher education’s value during the pandemic when learning moved online, according to Hove, who said this ultimately drove her research.
“I really wanted to hear the student voice post-pandemic — what could we as higher education institutions learn from students?” she said. Hove received a small research grant from NEAIR to complete the project. A survey was distributed to first-year students at all 19 Penn State Commonwealth Campuses in 2023; approximately 1,200 students participated.
“I was able to extract important information about student-as-consumer attitudes,” Hove said. She held a series of Zoom-based focus groups after the survey results were compiled to take an even deeper dive and gain better insight into student responses.
The survey had two components: the first focused on which part of the selection process was most important to students — program of study/major offered, likelihood of getting a job after graduation and quality of faculty in the classroom emerged as the top three.
“This information coupled with what the students were telling me in the focus groups revealed that it was really important for them to see the direct connection between the college they’re looking at and the ability to get a job post-graduation," Hove said. "The amount of financial aid or scholarships available for students and the safety of the campus were secondary selection factors for most of the students."
One goal of the survey was to discern whether students see themselves as learners and/or consumers in higher education.
“Students are paying tuition and expect certain outcomes from that investment,” Hove said. “They still want to engage in the democracy of thought as learners, but they’re really looking at their ROI [return on investment] in a consumerist way. They want to build their skills for the job market.”
Hove and her co-presenters’ findings struck a chord with the attendees at the NEAIR conference, she said.
“We had a really great response. A number of people asked questions and several stayed afterward to discuss our findings. They wanted to talk about how to best use the student voice. How can we really understand where students are situated right now?” she said.
Hove’s said she hopes her research will ultimately influence how the enrollment management and admissions team approach recruiting students.
“I see it changing our mindset a little bit," she said. "We realize students are really looking for the ROI at colleges and asking questions like ‘what are the graduation rates?’, ‘what are the job rates?’ Students are inundated with mailers and emails — they don’t want to wade through the information for the high-level stats. We’re integrating more of this information into our campaigns — we’re hearing directly from the students.”
This research is particularly timely as higher education experiences significant enrollment challenges, according to Hove.
“We’re doing more strategic initiatives," Hove said. "We know there’s an enrollment cliff. We’re in competition with other institutions due to the way the pandemic changed how we deliver higher education. The question we’re asking ourselves now is ‘How do we bring students on board as both learners and consumers for the quality educational experience we want to provide to them?’”
The conference showed Penn State is not the only institution facing these challenges, Hove said.
“This was a way to go beyond Penn State and get the information out to a larger group of individuals," Hove said. "Many are facing the same issue — how can they make things better for their students to remain viable?”
Hove praised NEAIR’s work, as well.
“The organization has been around for a long time, and it does a great job of figuring out how can we remain viable and support each other with best practices,” Hove said.