Effective Postgraduate Student Recruitment Strategy: Identifying the Prerequisites

Abstract

The increased accessibility to higher education, coupled with the heightened aspirations for lifelong learning among working professionals have significantly raised the demand for postgraduate degrees in the country. Stiff competition among institutions of higher learning has driven education providers to run universities as structured business entities, where the postgraduate programs offered in the respective institutions are adaptively designed, skillfully packaged and tenaciously marketed. This paper examines the basic prerequisites of expectations and perceptions of potential students for enrolment in the University’s postgraduate programs, with the aim of acquiring a better understanding of the students’ perception and expectations as a first step in fostering effective branding of the University. A simple online survey was conducted for data collection over a short period of a week, to gauge the response for a number of basic questions. Considering that the University is relatively young in terms of provision of postgraduate programs (20 years), the survey was necessary to identify the salient aspects in outlining an effective recruitment strategy for sustained enrolment of postgraduate students. Besides, the means by which respondents prefer to explore the University and the programs available was identified, along with their preferred choices of tokens upon registration as new students at the University. In a nutshell, the survey shed light on the general recognition and identification of the University, as well as the potentially effective outreach channel and manner to improve the chances of successful new postgraduate student recruitment. A close-loop marketing and recruitment model was also proposed in support of a greater sustainable student enrolment system.