yYou probably are not treating all of your prospects the same now and you shouldn’t. To achieve the composition you need, you might have to work harder to get certain hard-to-acquire students over other students. Maybe you have a shortage of girls for 3rd grade, fewer athletes than you want or a dearth of students of color. You probably need to spend more time or take different approaches to get the number you need.
Full-pay families for most school fit into the category of “you-might-have-to-work-harder” to get enough. With limited resources, you have to decide where you need to spend more to get the composition that you are seeking. Of course, for most of us, it means maintaining a full-pay student body of about 70-85%. Because full-pay families have more choices and usually start out with higher expectations than others, you will probably need to do something different with this segment.
Some people will say that this is unfair. Let me remind them that independent schools are unfair. Why wouldn’t every child get a select type of education, not just the ones who can afford to pay for it or the ones that schools hand pick, not random, to receive this type of education. Independent school s are inherently unfair. However, a schools mission typically says that you are trying to educate individuals in a particular way so that they can go out in the world and make a difference. So although you can’t help everyone, your educated students will go out and contribute better to the broader society. This means that you have to have enough full-pay families to generate the necessary revenue. And as is the case for other segments that are hard to acquire, you may need to do something different for this group.
One of the keys to success with marketing to full-pay families is to understand fully their motivations for giving up their free public school options. During the Five Pillars workshop, we only focus on this important segment and ways in which we can be the most effective in marketing to them.