A record-setting year

How I helped Marquette achieve its highest undergraduate enrollment since 1990 and its most diverse student population ever for fall 2019.

Published on Nov. 23.

The problem

We needed to convince high students and their parents that a Marquette education was worth $56,660 per year (source).

The opportunity

High school students rate college websites as the most influential information resource during their search (source).

They want to know:

1. Do you offer the major I want to study?
2. Can I afford to attend?
3. Will campus be a good fit for me?

To help them, I created or improved the following websites:

1. My Marquette
2. Find Your Counselor
3. Value of a Marquette Education
4. Explore
5. Choose Your Major quiz

1. My Marquette

The My Marquette website features 86 short videos filmed by undergraduate students that showcase different aspects of campus life, such as athletics, service, Milwaukee, and more.

My role

• Design and build the website using HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, and the YouTube API.
• Add links to other important admissions websites.
• Change the homepage to only load the four most recent videos initially to improve page load speed. Clicking the "Load More Videos" button loads another six videos instantly, which were preloaded in the background after the initial page load.

Results to date

• 11,964 YouTube views
• 22,811 pageviews and 18,665 unique pageviews

2. Find Your Counselor

The Find Your Counselor website allows students to find their college counselor based on where they attend high school and ask him or her any questions they have.

My role

• Design and build the website using HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, PHP, Isotope JS, and Mustache JS.
• Take the Undergraduate Admissions Excel spreadsheets, which have the data of which college counselor is assigned to which high school, and convert to JSON.
• Set up the website so it automatically links the states, counties and schools with their correct counselor webpages.
• Conduct user-experience (UX) testing with current college students to see if they could successfully find their counselor.

Results to date

51,403 pageviews and 31,828 unique pageviews

3. Value of a Marquette Education

The Value of a Marquette Education website uses typography and graphs to show why attending Marquette is a good investment.

My role

Design and build the website using HTML, CSS, JS, and Google Charts API.

Results to date

9,480 pageviews and 7,487 unique pageviews

4. Explore

Explore is the website for Undergraduate Admissions. It contains information on academic programs, touring campus, and applying.

My role

Before I started working for Marquette, my office worked with an SEO consultant to write meta descriptions for each program webpage to improve click-through rates. But when the Explore website was migrated to our new CMS, someone forgot to include the descriptions. I caught the error and added them back in. Example:

Before
Accounting Major, Majors and Minors, Undergraduate Admissions, Marquette University

After
Major in accounting at Marquette. Prepare for careers in accounting, finance, business, or law. Get your combined bachelor's and master's in 5 years.

Results

Traffic to program webpages from organic search traffic:

• Before SEO change (3/22/18 - 10/28/18): 773,023 pageviews, 593,582 unique pageviews
• After SEO change (10/28/18 - 6/5/19): 863,366 pageviews, 640,121 unique pageviews
• Improvement: +90,343 pageviews, +46,539 unique pageviews

5. Choose Your Major quiz

The Choose Your Major quiz asks high school students a series of questions and then recommends them a number of majors that may be a good fit for them.

My role

This quiz was created by my office before I started working at Marquette. I noticed that it was one of our top websites for pageviews and recommended we update it to better convert the traffic it was receiving.

1. Make the website mobile-friendly, so that high school students can take the quiz on their smartphones.
2. Survey college students to update the quiz with more relevant questions and answers.
3. Add a link to the end of the quiz to our Undergraduate Request for Information form to get prospective students into our system.

Results to date

8,808 visitors went to the form after completing the quiz since the improvements were made.

Collaborators

• IT Services
• Office of Institutional Research and Analysis
• Office of Marketing and Communication
• Office of Undergraduate Admissions

Overall Results

• Highest undergraduate enrollment since fall 1990
• Most diverse student population ever
• Second highest six-year graduation rate in university history

(Source)