Learn how a powerful marketing tool, a college net promoter score, may hold the key to increasing higher ed enrollment.
By now, we all know that higher education in the U.S. is facing enrollment obstacles. Even though enrollment numbers show modest recovery after years of steady decline, other factors such as federal and state policy changes, public scrutiny of higher education, and affordability concerns threaten recent enrollment gains, especially among key student groups. Today’s students are increasingly questioning whether the value of a college degree outweighs the costs and risks of obtaining it.
Corporate brands understood long ago the power of tracking, harnessing, and leveraging their biggest advocates: satisfied customers. One of the tested tools to harness the power of the satisfied customer is the net promoter score (NPS). Now colleges and universities are applying this market research tactic to their strategic enrollment management and advancement planning. Does it work?
First, let’s start with the basics: What is NPS and how is it calculated?
What is Net Promoter Score for Colleges and Universities?
Frederick F. Reichheld first introduced the concept of the net promoter score in his paper, “The One Number You Need to Grow.” In short, a net promoter score reflects the likelihood of increasing yield through positive recommendations. By simply asking, “How likely are you to recommend this organization to a friend, or colleague?” institutional and business leaders can calculate overall satisfaction rates (i.e., NPS) and identify what Reichheld calls promoters.
To assess NPS, respondents are asked to rank their likelihood on a scale of zero to 10. Those who answer nine or 10 are considered promoters. Those who respond with a seven or eight are considered passively satisfied. Finally, anyone who answers six or below is considered a detractor. The final net promoter score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
While Reichheld introduced NPS to the corporate world, it’s been slow to take hold in nonprofit and academic settings. However, in recent years, more colleges and universities have embraced the concept, as NPS has proven itself as a tool for uncovering valuable alumni insights to improve advancement and student success initiatives.
Tap into other promising, research-backed improvement practices with our 2025 Trends in Higher Education report.
Why Your Competitors Might Not Be Using NPS
In the nearly 25 years since its debut, NPS endures as a valuable piece of any marketing tool kit. With relevance still in check, why isn’t NPS more widely adopted in the higher education sector?
College and university marketing teams, broadly, most likely have some awareness of this metric. However, many institutions have yet to incorporate it into their greater community whether due to skepticism, unfamiliarity, or a lack of knowledge about how to apply it within their established practices.
Admittedly, in higher education, determining a target NPS can be challenging. It’s not enough to know what your score is — you also need to know what it should be to promote long-term success. However, in times of uncertainty, some challenges remain worth the time and energy, NPS included. For higher education leaders looking to embrace a new competitive strategy, here are some insights for folding NPS into your overall marketing planning.
- In many cases, any score above zero is considered good, because it means you have more promoters than detractors. Among all industries combined, a score of 50+ is considered above average, and 70+ puts you among the best of the best. The highest possible score is 100, but achieving that is rare and, for most, nearly impossible.
- Ultimately, what constitutes a good NPS is industry specific. For department stores, the average is around 58. The average in the hotel industry is 39. In higher education, using our proprietary database of alumni surveys, we found the average NPS to be around 32.
Strengthen your student yield with the SEM planning steps in our guide, 5 Ways to Enhance Strategic Enrollment Management with Data.
How to Identify Potential Alumni Promoters and Improve Your College Net Promoter Score
Hanover has created a unique multi-year dataset using alumni surveys of nearly 40,000 respondents. In these surveys, we asked participants a wide range of questions about their college experiences, their relationship to their universities, and their post-graduate experiences. Included in the survey is the same question used to figure out NPS: How likely are they to recommend the institution to others?
So, what did we discover? Our data shows 53% of alumni are promoters, 26% are passively satisfied, and 21% are detractors. Of course, it’s not enough to simply know how many promoters or detractors you have. The strength of any metric is rooted in your ability to act to improve your enrollment and advancement strategies.
Fully leveraging the potential of the NPS measurement requires going deeper by asking and answering questions such as:
- What factors are most likely to influence alumni to become promoters?
- What might cause others to be detractors?
- How can we apply these factors to our long-term enrollment and fundraising strategies?
It’s also important to understand what factors are most likely to affect whether your alumni graduate to become promoters. In our research, we found 15 variables that have the largest impact on whether graduates go on to become promoters. Here are the top five factors:
- Reputation for academic quality
- Institutional reputation
- Overall experience
- Campus atmosphere
- Academic experience
Reputation and quality of experience are the top predictors of an alumnus becoming a promoter.
Armed with this kind of data, institutions can determine where to concentrate their strategic efforts to not only ensure quality student experiences, but to produce alumni who will go on to support the institution post-graduation, whether through donations or by promoting it to prospective applicants.
Improve your higher education marketing success strategies with expert advice in our pre-recorded webinar, Utilizing Research to Enhance Marketing Strategies in Higher Education.
How College Net Promoter Scores Can Help Institutions Boost Enrollment and Raise Funds
As simple as the NPS may sound, it can reveal significant and actionable insights for colleges and universities in terms of their enrollment and fundraising endeavors. Moreover, it allows institutions to identify alumni who are active brand promoters. Those promoters can help their institution through three specific channels.
- First, promoters can directly supply funds to an institution through alumni donations. While this seems like a given, there’s more to it than simply targeting would-be donors. In Hanover’s alumni research, we’ve learned that the most common driver for donors is a desire to give back. Those who donated in hopes of helping future students access a wider pool of financial aid, helping to stabilize and even improve enrollment, were 15 percentage points more likely to become promoters.
What does this mean for colleges and universities? By targeting donors based on their stated reasons for giving, institutions can identify alumni who are most likely to act as promoters and play a valuable role in their recruitment and marketing efforts.
- Second, promoters can serve as ambassadors of their institutions and improve application quality as well as quantity. Name recognition wields incredible power. Highly ambitious prospective students apply to the universities they believe are most likely to ensure their success and help them realize their career and earning potential. In other words, the more successful your alumni are, the more attractive your institution looks to potential applicants — especially those pursuing similar career paths to your greatest success stories.
- Finally, promoters can improve student yield by influencing prospective students’ decision to enroll at a particular institution. When it comes to closing a sale, corporate brands learned long ago that the success stories of their current and past customers were more persuasive than any other sales pitch. For institutions, incorporating alumni promoters adds authenticity and credibility to your recruitment efforts.
Create a more nimble student recruitment plan with tips from our pre-recorded webinar, Higher Ed Enrollment Unlocked: Strategies That Work Now.
It’s Time for Higher Education to Leverage the Power of NPS
If colleges and universities hope to overcome their ongoing enrollment struggles, they must embrace new ways of demonstrating their worth to potential applicants who not only have a wealth of options from which to choose, but who might very well be questioning the value of a college degree.
By incorporating NPS scoring into their recruitment marketing repertoire, higher education institutions provide themselves with a ready-made stable of ambassadors who can prove their alma mater’s merit not only through words, but through their own successes.
