UNM freshmen recruits for sale - $300 each.
Of course, that's a low price compared to the national average of $500 to $600, which is what it costs to recruit a student to a flagship university, said Terry Babbitt, director of UNM's Recruitment Services Office. Compare what UNM spends to what private schools spend, and it's about $700 cheaper, he said.
It's that season, and UNM's recruitment officers are looking to bring about 3,000 of New Mexico's 18,000 high school seniors to the University. They've been tracking them since they were in kindergarten, said Mark Chisholm, director of UNM's Office of Institutional Research.
By mid to late spring, most high school seniors will have made their decision about where to attend college, Babbitt said. May 1 is the deadline for students to decide where they will use their financial aid.
In their junior and senior years, high school students each receive about 15 pieces of mail from UNM, Babbitt said.
The 250 brochures, postcards and letters compiled by the recruitment office and individual departments highlight UNM's academic programs, activities and support programs, among other things.
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But not all mail ends up in the hands of a prospective UNM student or his or her parents, Babbitt said. A lot of times it gets trashed because students don't want their parents to know they are getting information from universities they don't want to attend, he said.
Sean Barre, a Sandia High School senior, said he has received information from UNM, Trinidad, Baylor, Colorado State and New Mexico State universities.
"You get stuff from just random colleges, and it's just like, I will never go there, so I just don't even look at it," Barre said.
He hasn't done much college shopping, but the family hasn't exactly gotten information "hand over fist," said Caryn Barre, Sean's mother.
Right now, Barre is in a pool of about 150,000 prospective UNM freshmen, Babbitt said.
Once students express disinterest in UNM, he said they are removed from the database.
"We don't want to spend our money trying to recruit them unless they say they are really not sure," Babbitt said.
Students who haven't taken an ACT or SAT or whose high school hasn't added them to a list of pending graduates might be off UNM's radar, Babbitt said.
The recruitment office purchases the names of students along with their ACT or SAT scores for about 25 cents each and adds them to the database, Babbitt said. Thousands are purchased each year.
Working on a budget of about $900,000 per year, the office tries to recruit New Mexico students as heavily as it can.
"Our biggest problem with students is they know about UNM, but they don't know a lot about, say, the individual academic programs," Babbitt said.
