College is an unforgettable experience. However, not all student experiences are created equal. Some students have the opportunity to enjoy their college life more than others – and this blog post is about enhancing the university experience across the board! Here are four ways to improve campus life for college students.
1. Help Students Meet a Variety of People
For many university students, their arrival on campus is their first time to be around a diverse group of people. It is an opportunity to meet people from different backgrounds and cultures. Helping students make connections with the student body as a whole means giving them opportunities to interact with students outside of their social group—and this will lead to more meaningful friendships!
2. Host Novel Events and Experiences
You want the university experience to be unforgettable. The stories students tell and the images and videos they post online are invaluable recruitment tools. However, you don't want to offer the same old boring events all the other colleges are hosting. Think about things like root beer keggers, collaborative cook-offs, and other events that are outside the box and build a sense of community.
3. Offer Mental Health Support
Since COVID, students have been dealing with a lot of new stressors that their young minds struggle to process. Mental health support has always been a need for college students, but this is truer now than ever before. Provide counseling services, student-to-student support groups, and other mental health resources to meet the needs of your student body.
4. Embrace Technological Solutions
While we might not be in remote classes anymore, there is still a lot technology can offer students. Think beyond Zoom and Google Classroom and look into building a proprietary online platform. This can be anything you want or need it to be, from online classroom spaces to social hubs for your university.
Remember: Current Student Experiences Are Your Future Recruitment Tools
Incoming freshmen have plenty of friends who are juniors and seniors in high school. And these freshmen live their lives online. Every experience they have on campus is documented, the good and the bad. You need to make sure they are as good as possible to maintain your image in the minds of prospective students.
For help with recruitment, allow StudentBridge to help you increase your virtual campus visits. We will help you replace paper campus maps and tailor your website to the changing needs of prospective students. For a primer on what to do with virtual tours, read: 5 Steps to Getting Your Virtual Campus Experience Just Right.
