Dwindling Enrolment: Is Social Media the Answer to Student Recruitment?
Dwindling Enrolment: Is Social Media the Answer to Student Recruitment?

Summary/Abstract: Around the world, the competition among universities to recruit stu-dents has intensified in recent years. With more and more educational institutions entering the market globally, the recruitment rivalry across these institutions has taken new dimensions. This has compelled universities to utilise all means at their disposal to reach prospective students– and that includes technology and, by impli-cation, social media. Both students and universities have objectives and expectations when it comes to social media usage, and it is, therefore, important to establish a set of guidelines regarding the use of social media during student recruitment. The main aim of the study is, therefore, to propose a set of guidelines so that universities can effectively use social media during student recruitment. The study was conducted in Mauritius, where there is a high concentration of higher education institutions so that the findings could be adapted by other universities due to the global usage of social media. As an exploratory study, the research focused on the public universities in Mauritius. Out of 49,497 students who registered in all higher education institu-tions in Mauritius, 25,390 were enrolled in the four public universities in Mauritius (Participation in Tertiary Education 2021, 2022:1). This clearly shows the need for the public universities to utilise social media appropriately to reach prospective students and obtain their share of students from the market. A qualitative approach was followed in this study, which is exploratory in nature, with eight university adminis-trators from public universities, who were interviewed by means of semi-structured in-depth interviews. In addition, a total of 32 first-year students from public univer-sities participated in focus group discussions. The data collected were then subjected to thematic analysis using the Braun and Clarke procedure. The findings revealed that in all the public universities in Mauritius, the administrators face challenges to effectively use social media for student recruitment due mainly to the fact that they are unsure of which social media platforms and features to use; they lack the skills and resources to run a social media campaign and are not trained to create so-cial media content. Prospective students, on the other hand, showed a preference for their social media platform to be Facebook. It was also found that the types of infor-mation and content which students would prefer to obtain on social media include career advice, course curriculum, courses on offer, eligibility, fees, payment facilities, and procedures, amongst others. Based on all the findings, a set of guidelines was proposed.

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