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With so many different marketing options availabke, it's easy to overlook some of the most valuable solutions. To make a big impact in your enrollment efforts, PlattForm recommends these five must-haves for your budget.

The paper offers insights and guidance on the best marketing strategies for promoting adult education programs in a digital age, an analysis to help you determine which media will be most effective for your plan and guidelines for how to determine ROI.

Specifically, you'll learn:

• The four factors that determine your optimum marketing mix
• The importance of diversifying your marketing mix
• How the roles of marketing and admissions departments differ
• Tips on measuring the performance of your marketing efforts

There's no question that higher education budgets as a whole have been rocked recently by economic change. More institutions are looking for other areas of opportunity for growth. Many have turned to adult ground and distance education programs as an economically viable option to grow their overall student populations. In this white paper, Building a Successful Adult Education Program: Part 1, we offer three critical factors to examine before launching adult education programs. Want to learn more?

You procrastinated.

It’s ok. We all do it. If colleges offered a major in procrastination, well, nobody would graduate. But that’s beside the point. The point is, right around the time you need to kick your motivation engine into high gear, senioritis hits. Getting a job isn’t easy, and many students get caught up in the catch-22 of the job market these days.

It goes like this: You need a job. The problem is, that job usually requires one to three years of experience. So now you need an internship. Uh-oh. This internship requires previous internship experience. Wait-what?! Yep, go back and read that again. Some internships only hire interns who have already been interns.

“WHY?!” I asked my career advisor, as I drooped in the chair across from her, mostly due to insufficient sleep and the inability to feed myself effectively. She responded with a shrug of her shoulders “Because they can.”

As I found out, she spoke the truth. Many fields, including journalism, can require students to have a lot of experience even before they leave college. These internships are so competitive that if one candidate does not meet a company’s requirements, another candidate surely will.

The thing is, the school I went to did almost everything right. At the University of Kansas School of Journalism, they started in on lectures about making a resume, looking for internships and even joining LinkedIn as early as my sophomore year. The career advisor did guest lectures on making sure we see her early, because as she put it, “every spring the seniors come in droves, panicking because they haven’t yet gotten an internship.” Of course, we didn’t listen. Why would we, when notoriously difficult classes were throwing projects at us left and right with impossible deadlines? So I procrastinated, telling myself I’d get into the career advisor’s office as soon as I had time.

I procrastinated all the way through my junior year, mostly because I didn’t want to believe that college would be over soon. Not that I wasn’t busy. I had a full-time job through three years of school, but the whole job-search process was intimidating. So I put it off. I was never required to meet with my advisor, nor was I required to meet with anyone about my future. So I waited. I was never required to get an internship. So I banked on the idea that I would be able to sell my hard work ethic and spin it into some kind of entry level career.

Fast-forward to winter break of my senior year, and I’m pulling my hair out trying to apply for as many internships as possible because I just realized that a good entry level career in advertising just doesn’t exist. I’ve had the same job since I was 16, and I’ve never really put together a professional resume. So it’s really no surprise that by March I had exactly one response and one unsuccessful interview for an internship. My next course of action is to schedule an emergency meeting with my career advisor to find out just what I’m doing wrong. To sum it up in one word…um…everything.

As it turns out, I definitely should have met with my advisor sooner. Patty Noland, the Career Advisor at KU, is like a whirlwind with a red pen. By the end of the meeting, I had a homework assignment to first set up another meeting, then fix my resume and apply for a list of internships that she handed to me. It works. Two days later, I get a call from three of the internships I applied for, including Plattform Advertising, where I am currently spending my summer. Without Patty Noland, I may have never found an internship and I would have settled back into my job at a gas station.

But my question is this, why couldn’t the school streamline the whole process and reach out to each student individually?

In the current job market, students need as much help as they can get. From the administration’s point of view, it’s easy to let the students come to you when they need help. But from the student’s point of view, it’s hard to worry about the future when the present is already stressful. I have a few solutions:

First, make resume and professionalism courses required or more available. KU has a course based on creating a resume and searching for internships, which is taught by the career advisor. In hindsight the class is extremely useful, but it’s hard to make the class fit amongst all of your required courses and the ones that just seem too important to skip. Most students don’t think they need resume help, so they don’t worry about it until they really start looking for an internship. By making these classes required, every single student at your school will get a head start on their job or internship search.

Second, require students to do an internship. This doesn’t apply to all majors, but for the ones in which it does apply it is quickly becoming imperative. I would have absolutely hated to be forced into an internship while I was in school, but it would have made everything so much easier in the long run. Seeing that required internship on the curriculum may be intimidating to some incoming students, but if they are going into a field like journalism they must overcome that fear someday.

Third, don’t depend on one career advisor. It’s an understatement to say that Patty Noland’s office is stretched to the limit at KU, especially in the spring. Many of my fellow students agreed that just making an appointment is intimidating. It’s all online so you have to read through an online document that gives you detailed instructions on how make an appointment. There should be at least two or three advisors with whom you can schedule an appointment with just a few clicks. With the career office more open, you could schedule mandatory appointments for each student at least once a year to make sure they are doing what they need to do to succeed.

My point is this, why should it be so difficult for a student to receive guidance from the people who get paid to do so? I realize that it is the student’s responsibility to make all of the effort to succeed, but some students need to be pulled aside and told that they are doing something wrong by the people who know exactly what to do right. If internships are rapidly becoming required by employers, they should absolutely be required by your school. Instead of telling students what they should do, make sure they know what they have to do.

We may not like it, but we will definitely appreciate that discipline when we graduate with a job offer in hand.