Student Recruitment in the Time of COVID
How four UTeach programs worked to recruit students during a pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to pivot rapidly to new ways of doing just about everything, UTeach programs in particular faced various operational and logistical challenges. One of the most pressing challenges was how to recruit new students to UTeach secondary STEM teacher preparation programs, when in-person interactions were limited or not an option at all. Effective recruitment is essential to the ongoing success of any teacher preparation program. Effective recruitment during a pandemic is still essential.
Many of the 46 UTeach programs across the United States used classic techniques from before COVID: emails to students, visiting intro STEM classes, social media, emailing classroom teachers to let their graduating seniors know about UTeach, and so on. During the pandemic, some programs, through collaborative work via a working group organized by the UTeach STEM Educators Association (USEA) — and on their own — came up with innovative spins on old approaches, as well as new techniques altogether.
Social Media
UTeach at The University of Texas at Austin hired peer mentors to enact a multi-faceted social media campaign, including registration deadline reminders and profiles of students and faculty, informed by and adapted according to insights revealed by deep dives into engagement data.
Aaron Koehler, UTeach Austin Program Coordinator for Recruitment and Advising, says,
97% of all UTeach students said that they felt like program deadlines and opportunities were well communicated. I think that’s a direct testament to us posting an important dates graphic at the top of each month. We also posted scholarship deadline reminders on our Instagram story — which usually averages around 150 views per post — so I think that was a particularly effective way to avoid contributing to the email burnout that students cited experiencing, especially near the end of the semester.
Most programs used email as a recruitment tool but were cognizant of email burnout as a potential pitfall. UTeach Austin’s peer mentors drafted weekly emails for students, each tailored to feature a specific benefit of UTeach, from internships to community building. Says Koehler: “I think that wide net of topics really helped to show that UTeach has something for just about everyone. About 17% of new students who enrolled in their first UTeach course in Fall 2020 mentioned email as how/why they heard about and registered for the first course.”
Virtual Events/Tools
Because in-person recruitment events like class visits, freshmen and transfer summer orientations, and other college fairs were unavailable, many programs pivoted to innovative virtual presentations.
Elizabeth Goldberg, Master Teacher at UTRGV UTeach at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, says,
Our big recruiting event each year is the summer Entering Freshman Orientation Fair. Because the fair was canceled due to COVID, we decided to partner with the College of Sciences and University College to let incoming College of Science and undeclared majors learn more about the UTeach program as well what they could expect from their major, their college and university life.
We hosted a Zoom event and invited the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Student Success to speak to the students about ways to be successful during their first year at UTRGV. We then placed the students into breakout rooms by majors where we had current UTeach students answer questions about their major, why they chose UTeach, and advice they had for the new students. Each breakout room was moderated by a UTeach Master Teacher. After the UTeach students answered the questions, we then let the incoming freshmen ask questions to the UTeach students in an open Q&A. After the Q&A, we had academic advisors from the University College and our UTeach program share advice and answer questions.
The event was really successful. We had more than 50 students attend and they received some really valuable feedback on how to be successful in an online class. Although we are not sure exactly how many students who attended the session actually signed up for the Step 1 class, we had almost 120 students register for Step 1 in the Fall semester! That’s with all our sections being offered online. Not too bad for a pandemic.
Tim McKenzie, Master Teacher at UABTeach at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, says,
“Normally, UABTeach recruits at the student Expo during new student/transfer orientations. With the orientations in a virtual format, UABTeach re-created this brief information session with weekly Zoom sessions. New students were privy to a UABTeach page on their orientation Canvas shell with information about the sessions and received email reminders one week prior to their orientation and the day of the information session. UABTeach faculty held these sessions every Wednesday during the summer at 10am and 2pm. On the day of their official orientation/registration students received a reminder email to register for the first UTeach course.”
Similarly, UTeach Austin offered Discover UTeach orientation sessions, with student-hosted Hangouts afterward. Koehler reports that about 42% of new students in the fall registered because of these offerings.
“A particularly heartwarming aside is that there were a few students who attended multiple offerings of the daily info sessions over the summer either because they had a question that they didn’t before, wanted to talk about student life on campus, or just because they were bored and wanted a familiar group of folks to talk with for a bit,” he says. “Even with all the uncertainty and unfamiliar territory we all were traversing, the freshmen still had the same basic anxieties (dorm food, student orgs, etc.) that they would have had before. That realization helped us immensely in fine tuning our approach to how we hosted any sort of gathering.”
Mary Urquhart of UTeach Dallas at The University of Texas at Dallas says,
“Thanks to ideas from other UTeach sites shared in the USEA Recruitment Working Group over the summer, we also explored a UTeach Dallas Flipgrid featuring current students and graduates in email and orientation chat. Voices of alumni and current students have been important in UTeach Dallas recruitment for years. Thanks to the USEA network we found new digital ways to capture and share these voices.”
Strategies that will stay, post-pandemic
In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has equipped UTeach programs with new recruiting approaches that they will carry forward after the crisis has passed.
“More digital presence and digital recruiting will stay with us, especially ways to capture and share the voices of UTeach Dallas students and alumni,” says Urquhart. “Their testimonials are so much more powerful than anything a faculty member can say, even an incredibly talented and passionate group of Master Teachers!”
“I think relying on email campaigns more, rather than our traditional physical mailers will be one of the biggest changes, as it was a great way of registering people who wanted more information,” Koehler says. “Having the metrics to see who actually opened — and more importantly — uniquely engaged with the emails was crucial too, and both of those things are something that pieces of mail just don’t offer. Others that come to mind are video testimonials through Flipgrid and including those in follow-up emails after formal presentations, as well as offering virtual information sessions along with in-person ones.”
“Constant contact and over communication seem to be key to getting students enrolled in the UABTeach program,” McKenzie reflects. “Emails briefly outlining the program, encouraging attendance at info sessions and reminders about registering for the first course will be utilized for semesters to come.”
While we all look forward to the day when we can emerge from our home offices and do the important work of preparing secondary STEM teachers in person, it’s heartening to see how programs have seized the opportunity to adapt, refine, and adopt new ways to recruit students in the face of seemingly overwhelming obstacles. Combined, these four programs recruited more than 250 students to the first course in the UTeach course sequence at their universities. They’re proving that it’s possible to make meaningful connections and persuade students to try out teaching within the virtual context.
