Recruitment & Retention

EducationDynamics Drills Down on Online Prospect Data for Student Assessment Service

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/24/10

EducationDynamics has begun offering a new customized market assessment service for colleges and universities that helps them pinpoint new online student prospects. The "Online Student Market Analysis" consists of three components, one that identifies concentrations of potential students geographically and demographically; another that identifies subjects and degree-level preferences of prospects; and a third that evaluates competitive institutions.

The service comes out of the company's Market Research and Advisory Services division, which was formed from the acquisition of Aslanian Group, an adult student market research firm, in mid-July 2009. EducationDynamics also owns the Web site elearners.com, which provides information about online degree and certificate programs at 200 institutions that pay for inclusion in the site. The site claims between 750,000 and 1 million unique visitors monthly.

"Online education is a highly competitive, complex, and dynamic market," said Carol Aslanian, senior vice president. "The three studies that [make up] the 'Online Student Market Analysis' provide college marketers the ability to target their efforts to achieve a high return on investment. This is especially crucial information for schools contemplating whether to take traditional programs online, add additional courses or degrees to their existing online offerings, or commit to new online marketing approaches. Schools need to know what's worth investing in."

A company spokeswoman said the services are offered individually or in combination. Pricing, she said, varies, based on, for example, the number of degree majors that a school wants to research, the number of population preferences to be researched, or whether the assessment is regional or national. "Generally speaking, and to provide a comparison of sorts, the cost of the analysis is less than the value of one online student," she added.

Although the company said it already has clients for the new assessment services, it declined to name any owing to agreements it has with the customer schools.