WEBINAR @ 13th May, 2 PM (GMT+1)
What’s Stopping Progress in Higher Education?
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Let’s explore how Full Fabric can help you and your institution.
Let’s explore how Full Fabric can help you and your institution.
If you're running admissions at a business school or university, you've probably heard some version of this: "We need 15% more enrolments this year, but the budget's staying flat."
It's a frustrating position. You can't outspend competitors on marketing. You can't hire more staff. But the targets keep climbing anyway.
Industry research suggests nearly one in four applicants never complete their applications.
In institutions with poorly optimised systems, rates can climb even higher.
Think about that. These aren't cold leads. These are people who found your programme, decided it was worth applying to, created an account, and started filling in their details.
They've already demonstrated serious intent. And then they disappear.
For a programme receiving 1000 started applications with €30000 annual tuition, even a 25% abandonment rate means roughly €7.5 million in potential revenue vanishes before anyone on your team could even try to help.
You've already spent the marketing budget to attract these applicants. The cost of converting them is essentially zero.
Yet most institutions focus almost entirely on generating more leads rather than converting the ones they already have.
More than you'd expect.
Automated reminder sequences sent to applicants who haven't progressed within seven days can recover a meaningful portion of otherwise abandoned applications.
Research across the sector shows that targeted nudges consistently outperform generic batch communications. The key is timing and relevance.
A reminder about a missing document sent 48 hours after the applicant stalls performs better than a generic "complete your application" email sent to everyone at the end of the week.
The exact recovery rate varies by institution and context, but the principle holds: systematic follow-up recovers applicants that would otherwise be lost.
No extra marketing spend. No additional headcount. Just a few hours of setup.
When you dig into abandonment data, you'll notice it doesn't happen randomly.
Applicants tend to stall at predictable points, and each one tells you something different about what's going wrong.
This is often the biggest culprit. Applicants hit the document upload stage and suddenly the momentum stops.
Sometimes it's a UX issue: your portal doesn't make it clear which documents are required, or the upload process itself is frustrating.
Sometimes it's a content issue: applicants don't have the documents ready and don't know how to get them.
If you're recruiting internationally (and most European institutions are), this gets even more complicated.
Cross-border applicants have to navigate unfamiliar credential requirements, figure out transcript formats, and sometimes deal with document authentication processes they've never encountered before.
It's a lot to ask. And many just... don't.
Applications also tend to stall after the system sends reference requests.
The applicant has done their part, but now they're waiting on someone else, and that someone else might not be particularly motivated to respond quickly.
A few questions worth asking:
Abandonment at checkout usually means one of two things: sticker shock or friction.
Price sensitivity is what it is, but you can address friction.
Multi-currency support matters if you're recruiting internationally. Flexible payment options (instalments, deposits) can help applicants who want to enrol but can't pay everything upfront. Clear fee breakdowns prevent the unpleasant surprises that make people abandon at the last moment.
The encouraging part: each of these problems is fixable without adding budget or headcount.
You're not trying to generate new demand. You're just removing obstacles for people who already want to apply.
Here's a pattern you'll recognise: applications sit in reviewer inboxes. Committee meetings happen on fixed schedules, regardless of how many applications are waiting. Decisions that could take two weeks stretch to six.
Meanwhile, your competitors are making offers.
The relationship between decision speed and yield is direct and measurable.
Applicants who receive decisions within two weeks accept at significantly higher rates than those who wait six weeks or longer.
It makes sense when you think about it. A fast decision signals that your institution is organised, genuinely interested, and respects the applicant's time.
A slow decision signals the opposite. Fair or not, that's how applicants interpret it.
According to the GMAC 2025 Application Trends Survey:
More applications sounds like good news, but it also means more competition for the strongest candidates.
The institutions that move quickly don't just improve yield on individual applicants; they get first access to the best people in the pool.
Three changes make the biggest difference.
According to a McKinsey study, universities that implemented automation in their admissions process experienced a 30% reduction in processing time on average, with some institutions reporting improvements of 40% or more.
That's not a small improvement; it's the difference between making an offer while an applicant is still excited and making one after they've already accepted somewhere else.
Most admissions teams have surprisingly poor visibility into their own funnel.
They know the big numbers: how many applications came in last cycle, how many students enrolled.
But the journey between those two points? That's often a fog.
This matters more than you might think. Without real-time data, intervention becomes guesswork. By the time your batch reports reveal a problem, it's usually too late to fix it for that cycle.
The stakes extend beyond admissions.
In the UK, dropout rates reached their highest levels in 2023, with a 28% increase over five years according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. A 2024 UK study found that psychological strain was the most commonly cited reason, accounting for 29% of dropout cases.
Here's the connection: the patterns that predict application abandonment often overlap with factors that predict student dropout.
Institutions that can identify at-risk applicants during admissions are better positioned to support them from day one.
Imagine it's week four of an intake cycle.
Applications feel slow, but you're not sure if you're actually behind, which programmes are struggling, or whether the issue is lead generation, application completion, or yield.
With proper visibility, you wouldn't have to guess.
You'd see yield rates broken down by programme, intake, source, region, and application round. You'd know exactly which segments are underperforming and by how much.
For institutions recruiting across Europe, this geographic granularity is essential. Yield rates from Scandinavian markets often behave completely differently than those from Southern Europe. They need different engagement strategies and different timeline expectations.
And when you can see that application completion rates typically drop 15% in week three of each cycle, you can schedule proactive outreach for that window.
You're addressing the problem before it shows up in your final numbers, not explaining it afterward.
Here's a trap many institutions fall into: tracking metrics that measure activity instead of outcomes.
A 40% increase in applications sounds great until you realise completion rates dropped by half.
Record enquiry numbers are meaningless if conversion to application stays flat.
Website traffic shows interest, but interest doesn't pay tuition fees.
The problem compounds when leadership equates activity with progress. Marketing generates more leads. Recruitment hosts more events. Everyone hits their individual targets, and somehow enrolment still falls short.
Three numbers tell you whether you're actually on track.
If your current reporting can't give you these numbers in real time, that gap is probably limiting your growth more than anything in your marketing strategy.
When people talk about admissions automation, they usually frame it as a cost-cutting measure. Reduce headcount, eliminate manual work, do more with less.
That framing undersells the opportunity.
The real value of automation isn't doing the same work faster. It's doing work that would be impossible to do manually.
Personalised communication at scale. Real-time intervention when applicants stall. The ability to reach the right person at the right moment with the right message.
Without automation: Your team reviews application statuses periodically and sends batch reminder emails. An applicant who stalls on Tuesday might not hear from you until Monday. By then, they've moved on.
With automation: Applicants who haven't progressed in 48 hours receive personalised follow-up based on exactly where they're stuck.
You simply can’t deliver this level of responsiveness manually. Not at scale. Not consistently.
The global admissions software market is projected to grow from USD 1.5 billion in 2024 to USD 3.2 billion by 2033.
That growth reflects a shift in how institutions think about technology: not just as a way to reduce costs, but as a way to improve conversion.
Early adopters report meaningful reductions in operational costs, but the bigger story is usually revenue: the impact of improved completion rates and higher yield often exceeds the cost savings by a wide margin.
The institutions achieving the strongest enrolment growth share something in common: they've stopped treating admissions as an administrative function and started treating it as a revenue operation.
This changes how you think about everything.
Every touchpoint in the admissions journey either builds confidence or creates doubt.
Every delay signals something about your institution, whether you intend it to or not.
Every communication either moves applicants toward enrolment or lets them drift toward competitors.
When you think of applicant experience as a product, you start asking different questions. You map the journey. You look for friction points. You measure conversion at each stage. You iterate based on what you learn.
The goal of admissions isn't to process applications. It's to convert qualified applicants into enrolled students.
That sounds obvious, but many workflows are designed around task completion rather than conversion.
Review committees meet on fixed schedules regardless of application volume. Status updates require manual intervention. Bottlenecks persist because no one is measured on their downstream impact.
When you redesign workflows around outcomes, you ask: does this step move applicants closer to enrolment, or does it just make our internal process feel more organised?
Dashboards that tell you what happened last cycle are useful for planning.
Dashboards that tell you what's happening right now are useful for intervention.
The difference is between knowing that yield declined 5% last year and knowing that three specific applicants haven't engaged with any communication in 14 days and are at risk of accepting competitor offers this week.
If you're looking to improve admissions performance without additional budget, the sequence matters.
This is almost always the highest-impact, lowest-effort opportunity.
The applicants are already in your funnel. They've already demonstrated intent. Converting more of them costs you almost nothing.
Action steps:
Speed creates a virtuous cycle.
Faster decisions improve yield. Higher yield means you need fewer offers to hit targets. Fewer offers reduce reviewer workload. Lower workload enables even faster decisions.
Action steps:
You can't optimise what you can't see.
If you're not able to track completion rate, time to decision, and yield by segment in real time, start there.
This might mean upgrading your systems, or it might just mean configuring the ones you have differently. Either way, the visibility itself often reveals opportunities that more than justify the investment.
The most valuable automation isn't about doing routine tasks faster. It's about creating capacity for the high-value, human-to-human interactions that actually influence decisions.
Prioritise automation that triggers based on applicant behaviour rather than fixed schedules.
Someone who hasn't logged in for seven days needs different outreach than someone who logged in yesterday but didn't complete the next step.
Growth doesn't always require more resources. Sometimes it just requires using your existing resources more effectively.
The applicants you need are probably already in your funnel. They've found your programmes, decided to apply, and started the process.
The question is whether your systems help them become students, or whether friction, delays, and poor visibility push them toward competitors who made it easier.
Reducing abandonment. Accelerating decisions. Building visibility. Automating intelligently.
These aren't glamorous initiatives. They won't generate press releases.
But they're often the difference between hitting your targets and explaining why you didn't.
The growth is there. You just have to stop letting it leak away.
The development and maintenance of an in-house system is a complex and time-consuming task. Full Fabric lets you turn your full attention to maximizing growth and performance.
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