Support your students’ desire to support you.
New students want to feel good about you.
I recently bought a new car (my first one in more than ten years. Rest easy, 2005 Honda Accord). Anybody who has done this knows that it can be a fairly tough process, with lots of options, sometimes options that are tough to compare apples to apples. On top of that you’ve just got that vague “it feels right” aspect.
After I made my decision, I realized that 1) I saw the car I chose everywhere, and felt a kinship with those drivers (tribalism — story for another post) and 2) When I saw the models I had declined to purchase, I immediately started recalling what I didn’t like about them. And if I saw a car I had considered and knew was better, but was more expensive? Clearly they overpaid, or wanted features I don’t care about. I had made the best choice, no doubt about it.
Once we make a choice, we want to feel good about it. Thinking about what we gave up can be painful. So our brains get to work justifying the choice after it is made. This is known as choice-supportive bias. And the more complicated or expensive the decision, the more we want to feel good about our choice.
Students will feel this same instinct. Once they’ve signed on with your school (or course, or platform), they’ll be hungrily looking for evidence that they made the right decision. A lot of schools tap into this, consciously or unconsciously, by immediately sending swag, or adding the student to a newsletter that promotes what’s going on at the school, or promoting prominent alumni. My graduate school did a phoneathon right after people accepted, to add momentum and weight to the event.
There are tons of other ways to do this. Even jabs like “they won’t teach you THIS at that other school.” It doesn’t have to be negative, though. It can be subtle. Just remind people of why they chose you, and why they made the right choice. Send out some stats that didn’t necessarily drive someone’s decision, but that they will feel good about. For a university, talk about percentage of first-generation students, or of Nobel Prize winners, or just people who inspire. For a skill-building course for a technology platform, remind them that the platform is growing x% a year, or that it’s the choice of game developers in an interesting niche.
You might also want to make sure you nail this in your first lesson. Before jumping into your curriculum, make them feel smart for choosing to be with you. Start with a brief review of all the things that makes you the best. It’s common for an instructor to establish their bona fides in the field, just be sure to add why they are teaching this course at this institution. “I chose to teach here because nobody is doing more than Awesome Academy to change the lives of students, and I chose to teach this content because it’s the field forward-thinking companies want to hire for.” Now the students feel smart just for showing up.
Yes, this is in some sense just marketing, but it’s done at a specific time. It’s not trying to drive the decision, it’s trying to make your students feel good about a purchase decision they’ve already made. Because they want to, you just need to give them the chance.
