MeetYourClass Alerts to Summer Melt

The Harbinger met with Jonah Liss, COO and Co-Founder of MeetYourClass, a tool originally designed for enrolling students to engage with their peers matriculating at a particular institution.  Today, MeetYourClass (MYC) has expanded to provide Admissions and Enrollment teams with compelling insights into the student decision-making process. 

Read on to learn how Jonah and the team can alert colleges and universities to the summer melt of their prospective incoming class.

The Harbinger (TH): Jonah, MeetYourClass has a, shall we say, “unusual”, background story. What sparked the idea for you and your co-founder?

Jonah Liss (JL):  When my co-founder Blake and I were freshmen at the University of Michigan, our entrepreneurial spirit led us to formulate a caffeinated beverage. While in high school, Blake and I had individually grown social media communities to tens of thousands of members. With our social media savvy and limited funds, we started running “Class of 2026” Instagram groups across dozens of universities – hoping to market our beverage without spending money on ads. However, within a few months, we had an epiphany. 

At first, we thought the communities would only reach the students already committed to a given university; however, the social media groups were being seen on average by ~25x the size of a given university’s incoming class. Beyond committed students, we found that the groups were also being seen by friends, siblings, parents, and, most importantly, students still on the fence about their college decisions. It became evident that students were not just using the groups to find friends, roommates, and future study buddies, but they were also using the communities to drive their enrollment decisions. From there, we dropped the caffeinated beverage idea and fully built out MeetYourClass.

TH: So you’ve gone from beverages to buddies! How do MYC community groups work with students today? 

JL: Well, when I applied to college myself four years ago, I found that the admissions departments did a very good job teaching me about the tangible aspects of the university (i.e. on-campus facilities, degree programs, extracurricular opportunities, etc.). However, no university provided much context into who I would spend the next four years of my life with, which surprised me since I was always told, “College is all about who you meet.”

At the earliest stages of the decision-making process, meeting people is important because it helps students determine where they will fit in best. At the later stages of the process, meeting people is important because the leap from high school to college is scary. Personally, I was more comfortable going into move-in day having met people who share similar interests and having a cohort of peers I could turn to with questions. Today, over 350,000 accounts have been created within the MYC community, enabling students to make connections all over the world and impacting their post-secondary decision-making process.

TH: Can you tell us how it works? How do students learn about MYC and decide to engage? 

JL: With 90% of Gen Zers using social media and a substantial portion on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, it's only natural for them to turn to these platforms to try and meet their class. We have found that, for a given university, upwards of 90% of the incoming class will organically find and engage with a “Class of 202[x]” group.

TH:  Are your prospective student pool of users primarily based in the US? 

JL:  Since MYC enables universities to build communities on the major social media platforms students already use daily, institutions aren’t limited to insights of just US domestic students. MYC interfaces with popular social media platforms all over the world, so universities can expand their understanding of students outside of their CRMs or beyond specific geographies.

One MeetYourClass user (above) expresses a decision change at the eleventh hour - giving enrollment teams realtime insight into potential summer melt. Another user (below) makes a commitment decision, even though one enrollment team might have been fairly confident months prior that the student would enroll at their institution.

TH: Does that mean that MYC can predict where prospective students will matriculate, based on their social media activity?

JL:  Social media is a relatively untapped gold mine for admissions and enrollment departments. It’s not just the power of community building – it’s the first-party data.

With MeetYourClass, we do not need to predict where students are planning to matriculate, they tell us directly. “I am not committed to University X, but it is my second choice.”

Here’s how it works: As a student, part of the profile creation process on MYC is listing where you have applied, been admitted, and are planning to commit. Students are willing to communicate their plans on MYC for two reasons. From an authentication standpoint, we manually verify every user on MYC, so it’s necessary for us to ask them for proof of application, admissions, or commitment for each community they join. More significantly, though, students want to communicate their matriculation plans as part of the socialization process. On MYC students can filter for students at each stage of the decision process, and such communications are at the crux of student-to-student interactions. As an example, if a student is committed and looking for a roommate, they will only want to connect with other students also committed to the university.

Since MYC organically attracts students, when they opt in, we verify their status. We then have an aerial view of their entire university decision-making process. MYC does not try to predict where a student will go based on data the university already has, we reflect the students perspective as a new, first-party data source.

TH:  As marketing and recruitment budgets grow tighter on campuses, does MYC offer any potential cost savings to admissions teams? Given many teams have access to or use several platforms or services to support marketing and recruitment, how might MYC be different from the tools already in use?

JL:  Students already use the major social media platforms daily, so they can be remarkably effective in helping them meet each other. There is just one major issue – social media communities can be difficult and costly for institutions to manage. And the general public typically only creates social media groups for the largest universities. When this occurs, the groups lack institutional-grade security and are often managed for monetary gain at the expense of students.

MYC saves college and university teams time and dollars - we can take on the management, moderation, security and growth of student-to-student social media groups. In addition, MYC can provide tools within these communities to help prompt student connections and find additional resources. In turn, institutions gain insights from millions of first-hand prospective student data points, and MYC can send information relevant to recruiting and enrollment efforts over to the university CRM and data visualization software directly. Our student sign-up process includes unique identifiers which tie MYC users and their internet social interactions to the identifiers in the university CRM. Due to the automation we have built across platforms, MYC saves costs relative to leveraging existing staff to manually manage these communities.

MYC is differentiated in its ability to deliver first-party data that universities cannot access elsewhere. Due to the natural growth of class communities from our plug-and-play social media integrations, MYC is the only system where students directly share their enrollment plans. As a young company, MYC is eager to mold our suite of products and services to the tools our institutional partners already use and to deliver our insights without adding extra workflows. 

TH: Hopefully the significant heat wave affecting the US doesn’t impact summer melt as well! How quickly could MYC offer insights to a college or university?

JL: Recent data states that summer melt affects between 10% to 40% of an institution’s expected enrollees. Schools consistently look for better sources to confirm if students will show up in the fall. MYC is offering a free data pull to see which prospective students have committed to other institutions (even if they have deposited at yours) for interested institutional partners. With our live-data dashboard, such insights can instantly be accessed upon the formation of a partnership.

TH: Jonah, we are truly impressed with what MeetYourClass has created. If an institution is interested in piloting all the aspects of MYC, what is the best way to learn more?

JL: It’s been my pleasure to share how we work to help students connect with each other and institutions through MYC. We are currently working with a variety of institutions to study the impact of the MYC on the admissions and enrollment process. We would love for more institutions to join our paid pilot program, so we’ve partnered with Harbinger Lane Consulting to introduce colleges and universities to our program for the upcoming admissions cycle!TH:  As marketing and recruitment budgets grow tighter on campuses, does MYC offer any potential cost savings to admissions teams? Given many teams have access to or use several platforms or services to support marketing and recruitment, how might MYC be different from the tools already in use?

JL:  Students already use the major social media platforms daily, so they can be remarkably effective in helping them meet each other. There is just one major issue – social media communities can be difficult and costly for institutions to manage. And the general public typically only creates social media groups for the largest universities. When this occurs, the groups lack institutional-grade security and are often managed for monetary gain at the expense of students.

MYC saves college and university teams time and dollars - we can take on the management, moderation, security and growth of student-to-student social media groups. In addition, MYC can provide tools within these communities to help prompt student connections and find additional resources. In turn, institutions gain insights from millions of first-hand prospective student data points, and MYC can send information relevant to recruiting and enrollment efforts over to the university CRM and data visualization software directly. Our student sign-up process includes unique identifiers which tie MYC users and their internet social interactions to the identifiers in the university CRM. Due to the automation we have built across platforms, MYC saves costs relative to leveraging existing staff to manually manage these communities.

MYC is differentiated in its ability to deliver first-party data that universities cannot access elsewhere. Due to the natural growth of class communities from our plug-and-play social media integrations, MYC is the only system where students directly share their enrollment plans. As a young company, MYC is eager to mold our suite of products and services to the tools our institutional partners already use and to deliver our insights without adding extra workflows. 

TH: Hopefully the significant heat wave affecting the US doesn’t impact summer melt as well! How quickly could MYC offer insights to a college or university?

JL: Recent data states that summer melt affects between 10% to 40% of an institution’s expected enrollees. Schools consistently look for better sources to confirm if students will show up in the fall. MYC is offering a free data pull to see which prospective students have committed to other institutions (even if they have deposited at yours) for interested institutional partners. With our live-data dashboard, such insights can instantly be accessed upon the formation of a partnership.

TH: Jonah, we are truly impressed with what MeetYourClass has created. If an institution is interested in piloting all the aspects of MYC, what is the best way to learn more?

JL: It’s been my pleasure to share how we work to help students connect with each other and institutions through MYC. We are currently working with a variety of institutions to study the impact of the MYC on the admissions and enrollment process. We would love for more institutions to join our paid pilot program, so we’ve partnered with Harbinger Lane Consulting to introduce colleges and universities to our program for the upcoming admissions cycle!

Want to learn more about MeetYourClass and how it could impact your admissions and enrollment funnel? 

Contact us at info@harbingerlane.com to get your complimentary prospective student Summer Melt Report and for information on early-bird discounts for the MYC paid pilot program for the upcoming cycle. Requests must be received by July 31, 2024.