Next fall, we'll evaluate the results. If it didn't work as we expected, we'll rethink what we did. The point is that senior administrators at my institution were willing to put money into a program that had the potential to recruit students at a lower cost. And if you can show that direct mail is an economical way to reduce recruiting costs, you can be a hero. Response rate doesn't equal success.
Response rate is only an intermediate measure of success.
The real measure and the only important one is how many students enroll. If you get a 15 percent response rate, great. But if only a few of those prospects enroll, not so great. If you get a 10 percent response rate and half of your prospects enroll, you could go into consulting. That would be success by anybody's standards.