We also look for evidence about the homogeneity of the audience. The more homogeneous the audience is, the easier it is to find and market to that audience. We help institutions identify niche programs. They may have available some niche courses or programs, but the audience may be so small that it wouldn't be a good risk for them to take.
In looking at this audience profile area, we don't consider any of these factors to be critical by themselves. It's important to look at all of them together. Sometimes you can have a very small audience, but if there are demand drivers that are going to push or pull individuals into that degree program at a high rate to advance in their career, then that may be sufficient to overcome the fact that the audience is small. You can get very high conversion rates out of a small group and we have, in fact, seen that happen. So the second area we look for is what we call demand drivers. One that I already mentioned is salary differential or increased pay. We look at opportunities for licensure or certification and we consider this to be actually the number one most important demand driver. If this degree is required for licensure and an individual can get it in a distance learning format, without having to go to a campus, then that's highly attractive for that particular audience.
Professional parity is another one. Maybe there is a new licensure requirement, but still there are people in this profession who do not yet have that particular certification. There is a natural incentive for them to want to seek that additional education in order to be on par with their peers or with new graduates.
We also examine how the audience can be accessed to successfully market the program. For example, where can we find lists and what key words are valid for Internet searches? Finally, we develop a complete competitive set for the program of other colleges and universities who offer this degree online, comparing their credits, admission requirements, program length, total tuition, and any residency requirements.
IMS Global: Is geography a demand driver? Sometimes in distance learning, we tend to think of our target audience being in the county or the state or the region where we're located. An example to the contrary, however, is the distance learning degree programs you promote through the University of Cincinnati. Enrolled students for those programs are located in every corner of the nation. Is that characteristic of most distance learning programs today?
GP: The only time I would think geography would be a driver is where we have certain employer groups or audiences that cluster around certain geographic areas. For example, if we're thinking about systems engineering, which is a master's degree program we recently assessed for one of our knowledge partners, certainly the defense industry is a heavy recruiter and an employer of systems engineers. Where we have large numbers of defense contractors and military bases, we would want to concentrate our marketing efforts in those areas. But if you are talking about an occupation like clinical laboratory science, then we have clinical laboratories all over the country. And where they are dispersed, the harder it is for individuals to get that kind of specialized education in their local communities. What we know about working professionals is that they really need and want the convenience of being able to study on their own time and not have to attend class on a regular basis, not have to work, go to school, and try to find a place to park on campus. They will pay for convenience because they need the education, they want the education for the reasons we talked about earlier, but even if they have the courses offered in their local community, in a traditional classroom environment, they will often prefer to take them online given the choice.
