There’s a ghostly figure circling the corridors and quads of British universities. We know they’re there, but we don’t know why. Meet the stealth student.
Around 60 per cent of students who accept a firm university place each year are so-called “stealth” students, according to figures from Uniquest. And before the pandemic, more than 90 per cent of offers from Uniquest member universities were made to these ghost applicants. Institutions know who they are – but that’s all they know about them.
And what they don’t know is crucially important: why they applied, what attracted them to the university and what expectations they have of the course and campus they’re about to study on.
This is a big problem for universities. If you don’t know what your future students’ expectations are it’s easy to disappoint them – and then to lose them. And if you don’t know why you’re so popular among certain applicants, it’s even harder to reach the future students who might want to apply to your courses but don’t already know about your institution.
To make matters worse, universities think the proportion of stealth students is rising – but they can’t actually be sure. Despite the huge sums that the sector has invested into following prospective students through the applicant journey and gathering data around them, an unquantifiable number still slip through the net. “The very nature of them being stealth or ghost students means that we don’t know how many are actually out there,” says Tom Greveson, Chief Executive Officer at Vepple.
And the reason they know there’s so much they don’t know is because they’ve invested in marketing systems and are now very good at reporting on their own data. “The tracking of marketing activity is becoming more sophisticated all the time and the sector is absolutely doing its best to keep up, but the desire for privacy and anonymity is also increasing, you know, people don’t want to hand over their data for nothing, so that gap gets wider and it just continues to get harder and harder to reach the audiences we’re trying to attract.” says Jonny Harper, our Chief Technology Officer.
According to Elliot Newstead, Associate Director of Future Students at De Montfort University, students have always behaved in this way but the process of researching a university online makes it easy for students to remain anonymous. “We go to hundreds of careers fairs and exhibitions and you see students that would fit this mould. They are happy lurking in the background and slide in at the corner of your stand to grab a prospectus. They almost make a sliding motion which is funny to see, and this is replicated online: you get students happy to consume information but they don’t want to engage in conversation.”
The pattern is repeated elsewhere: the student community forum The Student Room reports that around 80 per cent of its users are ‘lurkers’, who do not post or comment on forums but still use it as a resource. They’re not posting themselves, but we do know that they’re reading and being influenced by the conversations between fellow students and university applicants taking place online.
Breaking through this barrier matters for universities: without this data on so many potential applicants it’s hard to work out what information they need but are lacking, what content helped pique their interest, or what attracts them most to the university.
One of the tactics De Montfort University uses is to offer livestreams on its website to encourage engagement with university representatives. It has also invested in The Ambassador Platform for a peer-to-peer approach in which applicants can join group chats with each other and with existing students who can share more information about life at university from their own experience.
Another option is to invest in a platform which offers a more personalised way to engage with the university, such as Vepple, which allows universities to build an emotional connection with prospective students through the sharing of personalised, visual and interactive content. The data this produces shows what is of most interest to a prospective student body, as well as gathering information about what prospective students want, and when. “Our trends analysis gives customers advice on very specific bits of content,” says Tom. “If you can share the peaks and troughs of when students are looking at accommodation options, for example, then we can understand when to feed that information to our students at the most critical point in the recruitment cycle. It’s this insight and data, as well as the capabilities of the platform itself, that our customers really value.”
With universities facing a major financial squeeze and future students bracing themselves for higher fees, the battle for student recruitment is reaching a fever pitch – and it will be won by those with the most information about their applicants.
