Challenge
Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit wanted to improve its recruitment and enrollment processes, build relationships with desired prospective students earlier and help them pay for their post-secondary education.
Results
- Raise Me's micro-scholarships ease the financial burdens of students' higher education journeys by offering gifts for good grades
- The solution allows higher education institutions to connect with prospective students directly and as early as ninth grade to form relationships and boost recruitment
- It increases student awareness of higher education institutions that offer programs and scholarships that align to their interests
Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit needed to improve recruitment and raise enrollment numbers. Staff saw the value in establishing relationships with prospective students and their families earlier, and addressed all these issues with Ellucian Raise Me, a unique and class-leading concept that allows higher education institutions to go beyond traditional metrics like GPA and standardized test scores to optimize recruitment. Joel Bauman, Senior Vice President for Enrollment Management at Duquesne University, helped turn this vision into reality.
A private four-year institution in Pittsburgh serving 8,000 students, Duquesne University is the only university in the Western hemisphere sponsored by the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or Spiritans, a Roman Catholic order founded in the early 18th century. In June 2021, the university adopted Ellucian Raise Me to attract more students and offer greater enrollment incentives.
Raise Me is an enrollment and student engagement solution that incentivizes good student behavior through micro-scholarships and allows direct contact from higher education institutions to students. Students log in to Raise Me and create a profile, then provide details such as their transcripts, intended fields of study, and experiences. Raise Me automatically matches them to institutions with offerings that match with content in their profiles and displays those institutions' pages. This allows students to compare opportunities and choose those that best align with their efforts.
With Raise Me, institution staff, typically in the recruitment and admissions office, can search for students who meet the criteria that matter to them and indicate student success in higher ed and beyond, such as high GPAs, success in extracurricular activities, or volunteer work. They can then reach out to a prospective student while the student is still in high school, as early as ninth grade, building a relationship with prospective students by introducing them and their families to the micro-scholarships and academic programs they have to offer.
Raise Me also provides institutions with data-driven insights. It automatically generates a "Likelihood to Apply" score based on several factors — such as the student's profile data, institutional outcomes, and US census data — that help recruiters assess the probability of a student applying.
Between 2022 and 2024, Raise Me's impact grew significantly. Student participation has grown from 2% to 11%. In the same time period, the total amount of Raise Me micro-scholarships awarded by the school has nearly quadrupled from $97,344 to $378,536.
Recruiting Well-Matched Students with Ellucian
Like many higher education institutions, Duquesne University has its own philosophy and perspective of which types of students they wish to attract. And since it's the only higher education institution in the Western hemisphere sponsored by the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, they bear a responsibility to uphold Spiritan goals as well. While academic performance is important, they also value students with a willingness to engage with the wider world and improve their community. These criteria help to form their enrollment philosophy.
Bauman and other staff at Duquesne University can achieve this with Raise Me by using segmented targeting to reach specific groups for recruitment, such as students excelling in a particular subject or succeeding in AP courses. This feature can be tailored to any institution to meet their preferred recruitment and enrollment goals.
"We look for things like 'Are they active in community organizations or in family support prior to enrolling?'," Bauman said. "We wouldn't know that in the past, but with access to micro-scholarships and the Raise Me solution , students self-identify and give us that resumé of their high school career."
Helping Families Afford Higher Education with Raise Me
Duquesne University aims to attract top students to meet strategic enrollment needs while ensuring high school students and their families receive clear affordability messaging — a key priority for parents, according to their research.
"Access to micro-scholarships is a core, frontline, front-end tool and solution to support student concerns about affordability," he said. "By supporting the access to micro-scholarships [and information] about learning about affordability, preparing to fill out a FAFSA, preparing to fill out a college scholarship service profile, and then pushing it, we doubled the submissions of College Scholarship Service profiles in the last year as well.
"And we attribute that to the support of Raise Me."
Bauman said that parents and students find Raise Me to be a positive surprise and they recognize it as both an opportunity that supports the student journey and a source of scholarship funds to different schools.
"We like the reaction, which is a very positive one on the families' side," he said. "Families that find out about it from us are really grateful and pleasantly surprised, and engage more because of the opportunity."
Bauman said this ultimately leads to stronger affinity with students' families, since the more informed and more frequently in contact with Duquesne University the students' families are, the more the relationship builds.
Wielding Raise Me as an Enrollment Tool
Raise Me serves as a strategic enrollment tool, bridging the gap between students and institutions while easing financial barriers through micro-scholarships. For Duquesne University, Bauman views it as an essential resource identifying and engaging prospective students early.
"We want to increase the pool of qualified applicants who see Duquesne University as their first-choice school before they ever apply," Bauman said. "We try to influence and get that awareness early on so there's a high affinity [with the student].
"The Raise Me solution also helps us to find students we wouldn't know were interested in us."
Bauman shared an example of a high-achieving science student from Miami who Duquesne University discovered through Raise Me – someone they might not have reached otherwise.
"We know the longer a student is involved and engaged with a college, they're likely to do better," he said. "Early engagement and early support and doing the work that the college is supporting through the micro-scholarships makes them more successful and makes the better match."
