6 Things You Might Not Know About CollegeXpress, the Platform Formerly Known as PC&U

Carnegie Higher Ed Dec 12, 2017 Carnegie Higher Ed Persona The Visionary Frontrunner

Carnegie’s CollegeXpress Platform is without question the most dynamic and powerful lead generation platform in higher education today. With unparalleled access to college-bound student data and the integration of channels to reach students (and their parents) in print, via e-mail, and online, there simply is nothing else like it.

As I talk with people around the country, I find there is a lot about CollegeXpress (CX) they don’t know. So, I wanted to offer a quick primer on some things you may have missed.

1. PC&U is CollegeXpress

A lot of people know CollegeXpress as “PC&U,” which, depending on your school, stands for Private or Public Colleges & Universities. PC&U was the original service when the platform launched as a magazine back in the ’80s. As it has evolved to include a website and other electronic outreach, the name CollegeXpress has taken hold. The PC&U magazine is still a big piece of the puzzle, as it gives schools advertising reach to hundreds of thousands of students, but the platform offers so much more.

2. It’s more than lead generation

It’s easy to focus on CollegeXpress solely as a lead generation platform. After all, the schools that participate receive thousands of qualified leads all throughout the year. But CX holds its own as an advertising platform too. There are more than 2.5 million students in our database, and the platform allows you to serve repeat impressions to segments of that group all year long.

3. CX Reaches 75% of next year’s class

Here’s a stat that gets people’s attention: when we analyze CX participating schools’ enrollment data, we typically find that the platform reached more than 75% of their enrolling students for a given class. That’s not a typo. Three out of four enrolling students at participating schools are influenced by CX.

4. CollegeXpress.com is one of the most trafficked college search websites around

CollegeXpress.com is the website that houses school profiles, scholarship information, and editorial content to serve students through their search process. Each month more than a half million—that’s 500,000!—students, parents, and high school counselors visit the site and engage with the content.

5. Schools reach segmented audiences

CollegeXpress isn’t a one-size-fits-all deal. Schools choose what students they want to target based on academic performance, geographic location, academic interest, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. The academic specialty segments include Health & Medicine, Science & Engineering, Business, Visual and Performing Arts, and Education.

6. And if that’s not enough segmentation for you…

CollegeXpress has a feature (CollegeXpress Connect) that allows schools to create custom e-mail campaigns targeting students by criteria they define, ranging from high school graduation year to academic performance to extracurricular interests and much, much more.

That just scratches the surface of what CollegeXpress can do, but it answers some of the questions I routinely get. Of course, if you want to know even more about CollegeXpress, let us know.

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