Private School Admissions: Breaking Down the Data

The private school admissions process is increasingly competitive, requiring smarter strategies and more innovative tools. Whether yours is a small parochial elementary school or a large independent high school, data analysis can play a critical role in understanding applicant behavior, identifying growth opportunities, and ultimately driving admissions. Admissions officers who use the power of data to make informed decisions can optimize their time and efforts and make a greater impact on their school’s success.

Private School Enrollment Trends

For more than a decade, the private school industry’s share of all student enrollment remained relatively stagnant. But starting in 2020, that began to shift. According to EdWeek’s evaluation of U.S. Census data: from 2019 to 2020, the share of students attending private schools grew by 3.4 percent. From 2020 to 2021, it grew by 5.9 percent. And from 2021 to 2022, it grew by another 1.8 percent. Federal data lags behind year-to-year changes in enrollment, but the most recent National Association of Independent Schools Trendbook showed similar trends over the last few years.

What key factors prompted families to reevaluate their schooling choices? We have some insight:

• COVID-19
  Private schools offered in-person learning sooner and more consistently during the pandemic. Families’ experiences during that time have continued to positively impact enrollment.
• The expansion of school choice programs
  The data on this is still uncertain—with many states reporting the majority of usage by families already enrolled in private schools—but the promotion of these programs has kept non-public education top of mind and made it accessible to more families.
• Political motivations
  Parents across the political spectrum are seeking different educational experiences for their children due to shifting policies impacting their local public schools.
• Safety concerns
  Some families prefer private schools due to safety and discipline issues in public schools. 
• Cultural and religious preferences
  Families often choose private schools that closely align with their values and beliefs.
• The quality of education
  The program variety, smaller class sizes, and overall experience offered by private schools remain significant draws for families.

This trend is small, and many private schools still struggle to reach their enrollment goals, but it does create an environment ripe for admissions teams. crucial for schools looking to attract the right applicants.

Now is the time to be strategic, nimble, and data-driven to take advantage of opportunities this environment provides.

Now is the time to be strategic, nimble, and data-driven to take advantage of opportunities this environment provides. If you can tap into those interests and concerns, especially where they fit your school’s unique differentiators, you can continue that upward enrollment trend.

Baseline Admissions Metrics

Let’s start with the basics and then look beyond typical admission metrics to capitalize on this growth potential.

The Applicant Funnel

Most schools are already marking the admissions journey by multiple stages, from initial inquiries to final enrollments. Monitoring the applicant funnel can reveal where prospective students encounter friction in the process and help schools develop targeted strategies to improve conversion rates.

Example: If you note a drop-off trend after application submission, you might need to evaluate the effectiveness of your outreach and if the next step in your process is too cumbersome.

Funnel traffic is an easy indicator of areas that need improvement. Taking it a step further, Blackbaud Enrollment Management System™ offers admissions officers the tools to more easily analyze this data, providing actionable insights into applicant behavior. With features designed to optimize application tracking and communication, schools can enhance their efforts at every stage of the funnel. Whether it’s addressing specific drop-off points or optimizing communication strategies, data-driven insights ensure smoother transitions and higher success rates.

Inquiry Source and Demographics

Knowing where your inquiries originate and the demographic makeup of your “best-fit” students is critical to refining your marketing strategies.

• Inquiry source analysis allows schools to pinpoint effective channels—such as social media, websites, referrals, or events—and allocate resources to the most influential areas. You can start with a simple question on the inquiry form, “How did you hear about us?” But there are more sophisticated ways to get accurate, granular data, such as tracking pixels on social media and a marketing automation platform on your school website. When you know which channels drive interest or aren’t performing as well as they should be, you can focus efforts there.

Example: If you’re not seeing a lot of referrals from current families, you may need to dig into why. Is there a satisfaction problem? Do you need to formalize a referral program?

• Demographic analysis further complements this by offering insights into the makeup of your applicant pool. Factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, location, sending school, and financial sensitivity provide valuable information that can guide targeted outreach efforts.

Example: If you see that full-pay applicants who live in a neighborhood that’s farther away tend to drop out of the process because of the distance, you might consider adding a transportation option.

Pinpointing successful marketing channels and understanding the preferences and needs of specific demographic groups enables schools to craft messaging that resonates with potential applicants. It also reduces unnecessary expenditure on less productive recruitment efforts.

Applicant Scoring

Develop an applicant scoring system that ensures your team can objectively assess candidates based on set criteria, such as academic performance, extracurricular involvement, and teacher recommendations. This system enables admissions teams to rank applicants and focus on those who are most likely to thrive at their institution, optimizing decision-making.

Regardless of whether your school is full or if you’re doing rolling admissions, it’s still a valuable exercise to evaluate your applicant pool with a consistent set of measures. A structured approach to evaluating applicants can greatly enhance and streamline the admissions process. That objective data can also help determine if that student will thrive within your community or not.

Yield and Selectivity Metrics

These are arguably the most important means to measure the health of your admissions process and can help you identify factors that influence a family’s decision to enroll..

• Selectivity: Track the percentage of applicants whom your school accepts. This helps you understand the health of your applicant pool.
• Yield: Track the percentage of accepted students who ultimately enroll. This helps identify factors that influence a family’s enrollment decision.

You want your selectivity percentage to be low (we accept 10% of our applicants) and your yield to be high (of those acceptances, 90% enroll). Schools can use this information to refine their admissions criteria and outreach strategies.

Leveling Up Your Analysis

Those are the basic metrics for all admissions officers. If your enrollment management software isn’t providing that data in dynamic, shareable dashboards and customizable reports, it should be. What other insights could help you take your admissions process to a higher level?

Proactive Retention Analysis

Most teams are doing reactive attrition analyses by asking families why they made the decision to leave the school. That’s important data to collect, but it’s often too late to salvage the relationship. You should be looking at the data you already have to proactively retain students.

Your Student Information System (SIS) and Learning Management System (LMS) hold valuable data that can help identify students who may be at risk of leaving—PROACTIVELY. By leveraging that data, you can analyze things like academic performance, attendance, financial holds, or even family engagement to identify at-risk students early.

Blackbaud’s SIS, LMS, billing, and enrollment software are all on the same platform, fully integrated and thus able to aggregate various data. That data is already there and we’re developing an “at-risk” student tool to alert teachers and administrators of students in need of extra support BEFORE they make the decision to leave.

This proactive analysis enables your team to implement targeted interventions to support those students and improve retention rates. It also helps admissions predict where there might be gaps in enrollment and further refine recruitment efforts by creating profiles of students who thrive at your school.

Student Performance Analysis

This is a little different than some of the individual student data measured for retention, because you’re analyzing academic outcomes for various GROUPS and considering data points that you captured in admissions alongside academic information.

Just a few of the interesting ways you could group student performance in Blackbaud’s solution:

• Average Grades by Sending School—This is a clear indicator of where you might want to focus recruitment efforts.
• Academic Performance by Interest—Are kids in the science club doing better or worse overall than kids in the music program?
• Average Grades by Sports Team—Do kids involved in a particular sport excel or struggle in academic areas?
• Average Grades by Incoming Grade Level—Do students joining your school in 2^nd grade do better than students who start in 5^th, or vice versa?

Recently, a former admissions director shared an interesting story. At her all-girls high school, Blackbaud’s software helped them identify a trend around full-pay students coming from a specific feeder school. They were behind in math. Based on the information surfaced, they were able to formalize an extra coaching course to help those students succeed, and those girls graduated at the highest level of math offered at their school! That’s a meaningful outcome for everyone involved—because they analyzed the data.

By understanding patterns and analyzing data trends, you can make more strategic decisions about which applicants to prioritize for future acceptance and even understand how to better support different groups already enrolled.

Future Best Fits

The reality is, there isn’t just one story. There isn’t one profile of a specific kid who will fit your school. Children are multifaceted and a diverse student body makes for a better learning environment for everyone: faculty, staff, and student alike.

Visibility into your data can help identify the various types of mission-fit students and can help you articulate how they thrive at your school. In other words, the data can inform the stories you tell, helping you genuinely connect with and serve a wider variety of candidates.

Unlocking Insights for Transformative Results

In today’s competitive educational landscape, data-driven admissions are no longer a luxury—they’re a necessity. From understanding enrollment trends to optimizing applicant funnels and tailoring marketing strategies, private schools have much to gain by leveraging robust data analysis tools. Blackbaud’s K–12 solutions provide the insights and features schools need to excel at every stage of the admissions process. By embracing data analysis, admissions directors can ensure their institution remains ahead of the curve, attracting and retaining the best-fit students.

Ready to transform your admissions process? Book a demo today or reach out to a representative to learn more about Blackbaud and take the first step toward achieving your school’s admissions goals!