A handwritten note to a prospective fall 2015 freshman from Alfred E. George, LSU’s associate director of enrollment management.
By Jerry Ceppos • Photos by Stephanie Landry
Increasing enrollment at LSU and other universities is important for lots of reasons. More students can mean more diversity, more top achievers and certainly more revenue when times are tough for state budgets. But the only way to attract more students is to stand out from the pack.
“We asked ourselves what we can do to create separation” from other universities, says one of LSU’s top recruiters, Alfred E. George, associate director of enrollment management.
High-school counselors would say, “Just reach out at a personal level—not an e-mail, not a packet in the mail,” he says.
That’s when George remembered his 1989 Montblanc fountain pen, then stored away in the attic of his Baton Rouge home. He decided that he and each member of his team of 20 would hand-write a sincere, genuine note to the most promising high-school students. In all, they wrote more than 10,000 notes to promising potential fall 2015 freshmen.
Alfred E. George hand-wrote nearly 1,000 notes to recruit fall 2015 freshmen.
George himself wrote 938 notes by mid-July, with a goal of 1,000. To achieve his quota, George estimates that he writes notes for an hour a day. He keeps track of his letters on a white board.
But achieving the goal wasn’t easy at first.
Problem 1: George couldn’t find nice stationery, so he ordered 10,000 pieces of elegant card-stock stationery with the LSU logo.
Problem 2: At LSU, “there was not a single pen that had purple or gold ink,” George says with genuine surprise.
So he ordered Uni-ball pens with purple ink for his staff until they convert to what he calls “the fountain-pen experience.” For himself and his fountain pens, he ordered gorgeous purple ink from Japan and several gold-tone inks. George owns nine first-class fountain pens—easy to rationalize because of his need to write those personal letters.
Oh, and he has 40 bottles of ink—plus notebooks full of beautiful practice handwriting resembling calligraphy.
Do the notes work? George doesn’t know yet. But his former boss, David Kurpius—who was in charge of enrollment management until his recent appointment as dean of the Journalism School at the University of Missouri—said he is sure that the notes personalize a large university.
George says the feedback has been positive. “Students have reached out to us after receiving the notes, many of which are displayed on their fridges at home,” he says.
In fact, feedback has been so good that it’s almost time to start on the next 10,000 notes—for potential 2016 freshmen.
Jerry Ceppos, a pen enthusiast, and dean of LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication
