What is a prospect in student recruitment?

In student recruitment, a prospect is a person the institution has identified as a possible applicant. The key point is that the institution did the identifying. Prospects include names from a search service the student opted into, attendees on a list shared by a college fair organizer, students recommended by a high school counselor, alumni referrals, and people who registered for a partner event but never contacted the admissions office directly.

That is the difference from an inquiry. An inquiry is a person who has contacted you, and the moment of contact is the moment of capture: a form, a message, a call, a card filled in at a booth. A prospect may never have heard from you yet. This glossary uses the terms in a simple order: prospect for people you identified first, inquiry at capture, applicant after application. A prospect who replies to an email or registers for a visit becomes an inquiry at that point.

Here is a hypothetical example. A small liberal arts college receives a list of high school juniors who said, through a search service, that they are interested in environmental science. Every name on it is a prospect. Over the fall, the college sends a short series about its field station and invites the students to a virtual information session. The juniors who register for the session become inquiries, with the session recorded as their source, while the rest remain prospects.

Prospect work is mostly about relevance and permission. Messages should match the person's likely interests and level of study, and you should hold the permissions each channel needs, including for any purchased or shared list. Record where each prospect came from so you can judge which sources lead to inquiries and applications, and remove anyone who asks not to be contacted, keeping that request on record.

Should prospects count in the funnel? Track them, but report them separately. Mixing prospects into the inquiry count inflates the top of the funnel and makes inquiry-to-applicant conversion look worse than it is.