My office has recently made the switch to use an outside company to provide the support, advising and technical services for our Online Masters of Business Administration students. The company, EMBANENT, is trained as WSU advisors and the workers are familiar with our programs here. They merely have the manpower to properly administer to the volume of current and prospective students that our program is seeing. With the growing boom of Internet schooling WSU Graduate Programs in Business has begun to offer the online degree, which has been received quite positively.
Before these two big decisions could be made (offering an online degree and then requesting a third party to provide support) we did our research. Through primarily syndicated research our office became aware of the demand that an up-and-coming market would provide. Our generation is looking more and more towards college online as a viable option and the studies have shown this. WSU has responded. However, once this program’s potential was seen we took things one step further. Embanent is a company that not only does support and advising after proper training, but they also market your program out to students across the nation. They are able to reach more of the target market than our team would alone. Research shows that students need roughly 8 interactions before they are willing to attend your university. With our small team we are unable to provide the high level of interaction that market research tells us we need to provide. Embanent can fill this gap for us.
These major decisions were a direct reaction from looking at the research telling our business that we needed to expand to a new market and do so with the proper amount of attention.
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