Your Higher Education Marketing Link of the Week… Alma College: Transfer Credit Evaluator… 6 May 2022

Alma College Welcomes Potential Transfer Students with Easy-to-Use Pre-Application Credit Tool

Alma CollegeAlma CollegeHow can a college help potential transfer students even before they apply for admission?

Create an easy-to-use tool that lets them find out which individual courses will transfer from a long list of other colleges and universities, both 2 year and 4 year schools. In a higher education world where differentiation is difficult, that sets Alma apart from other colleges and universities.

Most colleges and universities still make potential transfer students wait until after they’ve applied and been accepted to find out which of their previous courses will count at a new institution. That’s not marketing smart. A few schools do offer early pre-application evaluation. Few do it as well as Alma College.

The Alma approach opens with the usual disclaimer that the tool gives “unofficial” results at this early stage. There’s also the common rule in bold: “All courses satisfying a major or minor requirement must be approved by the respective department chair in all cases.”

Once past that language, the evaluation tool appears with these 3 quick steps:

  • First pick a college or university where you have earned credits.
  • Then pick a major academic area in which you took a course. No need to scroll through a long A to Z list of every course that might transfer.
  • Then select the individual course that you’d like to have apply to your Alma degree.

Complete that simple process for each course at any number of colleges on the list. You’ll see a total of “Estimated Transferable Credits” building as you move through your courses. Even if you have, for example, 30 credits in your first year at two different schools it won’t take you long to learn which of them will transfer and how many total credits likely will apply to your Alma degree.

If you really do want more transfer students to enroll, show potential students how serious you are and add something as easy as this to your website.

Speed on mobile… better than most in higher education

Google PageSpeed Insights measures the transfer credit evaluation page time to first view on a mobile phone as a good 2.9 seconds, well below the recommended 5 seconds. Complete interactivity also is a “better than most” higher education pages at 8.3 seconds.

This week the main change to obtain a faster download speed is identified as “Serve images in next-gen formats.”

Website Carbon Calculator… a rare “Hurrah!”

We continue with carbon calculator index reports. Thanks again to Gerry McGovern and his efforts to reduce “world wide waste” for the referral.

The Alma results gets a rare accolade: “Hurrah! This web page is cleaner than 60% of web pages tested.”

See the carbon use details for Alma and test your own home page at “Website Carbon Calculator.”

Follow the Link of the Week…

Experience a transfer credit site that shows how to truly demonstrate an interest in new transfer students at the “Transfer Credit Evaluation Tool.”

Recommend a future Link of the Week

Always eager to get recommendations of websites that dare to be different… or just do something ordinary in a special way. Write a comment with link here or send me the link at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com.

Top Tasks Website Content Group on LinkedIn

Join 889 professionals interested in creating top website content on the Top Tasks: Higher Education Website Content group on LinkedIn.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *