Date: 4/12/2010
Dear Reader:
At our Summit on Enrollment and the Economy in early March, we had the pleasure of speaking with Rob Grabill, a chaplain at Dartmouth College, the coach of the New Hampshire boys' high school championship soccer team, and most importantly former director of the Pemigawasset boys’ camp for 25 years. Rob shared his thoughts on the language and messages teenage boys find interesting and compelling in the college choice process.
I’m writing to pass along some of what we learned from Rob, and also from the two focus groups our research partner Kevin Menk conducted with teenage boys and the parents of boys.
We have mounted videos of the focus groups on our website and are making them available to our clients and friends only. Feel free to gather your staff, make some popcorn, log in, and watch these as a group. Each session is two hours long, broken up into 20-minute segments. I think you’ll agree they are well worth carving out a block of time to watch.
In addition, we've mounted a 13-minute video of Hardwick-Day principal Carol Stack's interview with Rob about getting through and creating appeal for boys. You won’t need a login for this one.
Finally, Rob wrote a thoughtful summary that pulls it all together.
While communicating with boys was a feature of this Summit, we focused most of our attention on the economy, which as we predicted is having a greater enrollment impact in this cycle. I’ll summarize those discussions in a subsequent mailing.
This will be a theme we carry through Summer Seminar, and I hope you'll register for that here: http://www.thesummerseminar.com.
Warm regards,
Jim
