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Why Onboarding Your Students Matters
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When people start their education, it is very important that you as a university make sure to welcome your students by integrating them into your institution. Several studies show that more than 35% of students have negative associations with the education that they are attending. In most cases, these negative associations are already created in the very beginning of the education. For that reason, we will now take a closer look at onboarding, and how you as a university can use this to increase student satisfaction.
Before moving on, let’s have a look at what onboarding means. Some of you might have heard about onboarding in connection to onboarding employees into a corporation. More specifically, it means to give the employees a great start and help them integrate into the corporation. However, onboarding is equally important when talking about integrating students as well. This is both academically and socially.
In order to onboard your students properly, it is relevant to have a look at what the students find most important when they start a new education. It can obviously be very individual from student to student what matters to them during the first days of onboarding. However, in the following we will elaborate on some of the general concerns that appear again and again when we analyse student data.
Social Life
Research shows that more than 50% of students are concerned about their social life prior to starting at a new university. For that reason, it is important that you do everything you can to ensure that the students will get to know each other and make friends from the beginning. A way to do so is to make sure that there are a lot of social activities both at the institution and outside of the institution. In that way, the students will get comfortable with the university, but they will also get a chance to meet in a more relaxed setting. This also embraces the fact that some students like to party while others might prefer to simply talk in a more quiet setting. For that reason, make sure that there are different activities that will include everyone at some point. When talking about getting comfortable with the university, it is very important that the students get a tour of all the places that are relevant for them. This means that they will need to know where the library, the IT support and the cafeteria are placed but also where the different rooms for their different classes are placed. In that way, you prepare the students in the most optimal way to navigate at your university.
Facilities at Your University
Another thing that is very important to the students, as this is a part of their first impression, is the overall facilities at the school during their first days. This is everything from making sure that there are enough seats for everyone to the food you serve on the first day and how kind the lecturers appear. From our data, we actually see that a huge part of students care a lot about the food that is served to them on the first days. For that reason, it can be a good idea to prioritise spending a little extra money on this. However, it is important to mention that it is not each of these things in itself that makes a difference, but it is all about the overall impression that the small things contribute to.
Structure
When students are starting at a new institution, a lot of things are new to them and for that reason many students prefer to have a clear schedule of what they can expect from the first days. This means that it is beneficial to send out as much information to the students as possible before they start. This can create a feeling of comfort for the students. In addition to this, you have to make sure that you plan everything for the welcoming days and that the students know where to turn to if they have any questions during the first days.
Student Counseling
One thing that we will always mention in relation to student satisfaction is student counseling. Our data from StudentPulse shows that during the onboarding phase more than 30% of students being asked if they want to get in touch with a student counsellor said yes. For that reason, we recommend that you make sure to remind the students that the student counsellors are there to help the students at any point during their education. It is very important to remove the barriers between student counselors and students, and this is done when you get your students to open up to your student counselors about how they are doing.
Did I Make the Wrong Choice?
When a student has been accepted into an education, statistics show that more than one out of five students are having big concerns about whether they made the right decision or not. This wondering will in many cases still be there after the students start. For that reason, the goal is to support and guide the students and give them the best basis for either confirming or denying that they made the right decision. In case, a student finds out that they did not make the right decision, because some students will, make sure that you will guide them towards a different education or even another institution if that is what the student needs. Because keeping students at your university, who are unsatisfied, will not create a great student experience.
Another important factor to be aware of, study shows that students with parents who do not have a higher education are more likely to drop out during their first semester. This once again supports the fact that it is important to make sure that you give these students a proper onboarding to make sure that they feel like they belong and that they made the right decision. We see the importance of this as when students of higher risk of dropouts have passed the first semester, the imbalance in dropouts is reduced significantly.
The Best Student Experiences
At StudentPulse, our mission is to build the best student experiences. This is done when universities make sure to support their students and ask them how they feel as this is the only way to actually know for sure. In case you need help creating a student survey to ask the right questions at the right time, feel free to reach out to us for a free StudentPulse survey to see how we can help you give your students a great student experience.
