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Intertemporal Choice and Enrollment: Exploring the Influence of Latency on Enrollment Yield within the Recruitment Funnel

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2014, Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, Higher Education.
The higher education marketplace in the United States has changed. Competition has increased, and modes of instructional delivery have changed to meet demand, yet enrollment at post-secondary institutions in the United States has been declining. Students have not persisted through the pre-matriculation funneling stages of the enrollment process with the same consistency as they have in the past. The purposes of this dissertation were (a) to assess the period of latency between application and enrollment and (b) to determine whether students would be more likely to persist through the recruitment funnel if institutions altered their enrollment calendars. The researcher reviewed data from a single-proprietary institution comprised of multiple campuses located throughout the eastern and southern portions of the United States to determine the influence of latency, within the recruitment funnel, upon yield. Upon the exploration of nearly 4 years worth of data and more than 32,000 student files, the researcher was able to determine that increasing the number of start dates did not practically influence students’/consumers’ purchasing behavior at Career College. Furthermore, shortening the latency period did little to nothing to impact the percentage of students persisting through the recruitment funnel. However, the findings did reveal significant behavioral differences between traditional and non-traditional students. In summation, the findings revealed that students are essentially consumers who will act upon their desire to purchase products (e.g., a college degree) in a time frame consistent with their own immediate needs and opportunity costs, regardless of institutional efforts to influence them to do otherwise. In other words, latency is an institutionally controllable factor that does not appear to alter the course of enrollment yield among traditional students.
Penny Poplin Gosetti, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Ronald Opp, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
William Getter, D.P.A. (Committee Member)
David Black, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
110 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Guzman, G. A. (2014). Intertemporal Choice and Enrollment: Exploring the Influence of Latency on Enrollment Yield within the Recruitment Funnel [Doctoral dissertation, University of Toledo]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1408705075

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Guzman, Gregory. Intertemporal Choice and Enrollment: Exploring the Influence of Latency on Enrollment Yield within the Recruitment Funnel. 2014. University of Toledo, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1408705075.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Guzman, Gregory. "Intertemporal Choice and Enrollment: Exploring the Influence of Latency on Enrollment Yield within the Recruitment Funnel." Doctoral dissertation, University of Toledo, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=toledo1408705075

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)