In recent history, Pierce has suffered in enrollment. Classes are canceled every semester due to low student registration, and the student body has been stagnant in growth for the last five years.
The student registration portal does not help the enrollment issue. Students become confused when they are trying to register for a semester at Pierce. They scramble as they try to navigate through the homepage on what to click, and often end up unsuccessful, leading potential students to flock to other colleges’ sites.
Pierce should update its school homepage to be more attractive and user friendly to lure students and increase enrollment numbers.
Pierce has utilities on its homepage for students to find where to enroll, how to pay for classes and access a student portal. However, the utilities are placed too close together.
The Santa Monica College and Mission College homepages have the “clickable components” buttons positioned with enough space between them to make it easier to navigate the site. Pierce has all its buttons bundled close together, causing the site to look cluttered and making it easy to get lost.
The homepage is also not user friendly for mobile users. It doesn’t convert to a template like it does for Santa Monica and Mission. It zooms too close when logging in, and zooming out makes the font too small.
The school should also start sending relevant reminders for upcoming deadlines and events that will let new students stay on track for enrollment requirements. Applications like “Modo Communicate” can set up “push notifications” and “in-app banners” that will ensure students will be seeing these updates.
These reminders don’t have to be plain text. Instead, they can have rich, creative pictures or quick videos similar to what can be seen on Snapchat. These measures can serve to make students feel as if they are already part of the campus community.
With these changes though Pierce’s website, we will have more student enrollment.
To attract and retain students, Pierce needs to make itself more appealing and accommodating to interested students. Simple changes to the Pierce College website can be a remarkable beginning to some much needed alteration in the college’s image.