A Simple Yet Powerful Innovation to Higher Education Enrollment and Student Communication
As higher education reflects on a year of uncertainty and toward an oft-cited demographics cliff, the importance of
smart enrollment strategies and precise communication to students climbs ever higher. Carnegie believes expansive
research on student personality has uncovered a major opportunity for any school looking to increase yield and inspire the next wave of college-bound audiences.
Why is personality so important?
In a nationally representative student survey, we set out to prove that personality makes a difference when audiences consume different types of written and visual content. The theory was simple: Students remember and connect with communication that reflects their own inner personality. Our results (currently being prepared for academic peer review) showed a person’s score on an archetype is a positive and significant predictor of how well they rate both written content and visual images that reflect that archetype.
The reality, though, is that personality is very complex. In Carnegie’s research on the nine archetypes of human personality, the levels and intersections of personality reach literally millions of combinations. This would be impossible to segment or use in a strategic manner. Luckily, by using our national data we had the ability to consolidate this complexity into a general, accessible model. By using this motivation model, we can find a root to personality that is usable for message segmentation, enrollment strategy, retention, and more through a single, elegant variable in your CRM. We call this variable the
Carnegie Motivator.
What groups make up the Carnegie Motivator?
The three motivators are Strength, Vitality, and Creativity. While anyone could draw inspiration from each, humans gravitate toward a Primary Motivator. This baseline sets up the foundation of decisions and behaviors. Instead of asking students purely about what they do, this importantly keys in on
why they do it.
