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A New Day For Educational Marketing

By Mark N – February 22, 2010

People used to say to me, when they found out what I did for a living, “why do these colleges and universities you work for need to market? Many are already highly selective. Why does a school with a surplus of interest need someone to help them with their marketing?
I would explain to them that there was not a school in America, with perhaps a single exception, that did not want to be something other than it was. A school with a strong, traditional preppy culture wanted to be more bohemian. A school with bohemian culture wanted to be preppier. A school with little diversity wanted to be more diverse. A school with a great deal of diversity wanted more non-diverse, i.e. “white” affluent students. And every single school wanted to ascend to a higher rung on the prestige ladder. Regardless of how esteemed they were, they were restless to achieve the prestige of the school above them.
This restlessness has been part of higher education institutional culture for the past twenty years. Things have never been good enough. There has always been a rung to grasp that is just out of reach. I, along with an industry of consultants, analysts, and ad men, have sprung up to help colleges and universities get to the next level. Because prestige is a zero-sum game – one institution’s gain is another institution’s loss – the work has been never ending. So long as everyone else is restless and striving, there is no way for an institution to avoid playing this game. The rules of the game are set beyond the boundaries of a particular institution. One ignores the game at one’s peril.
Today we find ourselves at an interesting juncture. There is no evidence that the core dynamic of the prestige higher education market is changing. Indeed, if anything, the class system among colleges and universities is becoming more entrenched. What is changing is the marketing environment. Just as in other sectors, the ability of middle-class families to finance a prestige lifestyle though debt has diminished. This means that the total size of the market for prestige institutions has shrunk. Financial aid resources at institutions are stretched. Colleges are beginning to face the reality that they may be unable to finance their aspirational dreams of a few years ago. They may be forced to make unpleasant trade-offs.
Are we passing from an era of aspiration to an era of consolidation in educational marketing? The constantly expanding market of the past twenty years led everyone in higher education to dream big. Today, things are much more challenging. It is essential that institutions execute well and think clearly and cogently about the nature and capacities of their markets. Can they really invest $1/4 million to shift their campus culture from preppy to bohemian? Can they really focus so intensively on the next rung of the ladder or do they need to make certain they are is secure on their own rung?
If in fact we are passing into an era of greater clarity and rigor in educational marketing, I for one will greet it with open arms. There’s been far too much silliness, extravagance, fantasy, and slip-shod thinking in the marketing of institutions the past 20 years. We’ve had our own bubble mentality. I’m ready for the serious times to begin. Let’s work with realistic budgets and realistic appraisals of our place in the market. Let’s treat resources as if they are limited and rationally tied to outcomes. Let’s use realistic metrics to measure our performance and assess our marketing efforts. The basic game is not changing, but times require far more professional, skillful execution. I, for one, am eager to jump into this new environment which will test what we’re truly made of as we have not been tested before.

People used to say to me, when they found out what I did for a living, “why do these colleges and universities you work for need to market? Many are already highly selective. Why does a school with a surplus of interest need someone to help them with their marketing?”

I would explain to them that there was not a school in America, with perhaps a single exception, that did not want to be something other than it was. A school with a strong, traditional preppy culture wanted to be more bohemian. A school with bohemian culture wanted to be preppier. A school with little diversity wanted to be more diverse. A school with a great deal of diversity wanted more non-diverse, i.e. “white” affluent students. And every single school wanted to ascend to a higher rung on the prestige ladder. Regardless of how esteemed they were, they were restless to achieve the prestige of the school above them.

This restlessness has been part of higher education institutional culture for the past twenty years. Things have never been good enough. There has always been a rung to grasp that is just out of reach. I, along with an industry of consultants, analysts, and ad men, have sprung up to help colleges and universities get to the next level. Because prestige is a zero-sum game – one institution’s gain is another institution’s loss – the work has been never ending. So long as everyone else is restless and striving, there is no way for an institution to avoid playing this game. The rules of the game are set beyond the boundaries of a particular institution. One ignores the game at one’s peril.

Today we find ourselves at an interesting juncture. There is no evidence that the core dynamic of the prestige higher education market is changing. Indeed, if anything, the class system among colleges and universities is becoming more entrenched. What is changing is the marketing environment. Just as in other sectors, the ability of middle-class families to finance a prestige lifestyle through debt has diminished. This means that the total size of the market for prestige institutions has shrunk. Financial aid resources at institutions are stretched. Colleges are beginning to face the reality that they may be unable to finance their aspirational dreams of a few years ago. They may be forced to make unpleasant trade-offs.

Are we passing from an era of aspiration to an era of consolidation in educational marketing? The constantly expanding market of the past twenty years led everyone in higher education to dream big. Today, things are much more challenging. It is essential that institutions execute well and think clearly and cogently about the nature and capacities of their markets. Can they really invest $1/4 million to shift their campus culture from preppy to bohemian? Can they really focus so intensively on the next rung of the ladder or do they need to make certain they are is secure on their own rung?

If in fact we are passing into an era of greater clarity and rigor in educational marketing, I for one will greet it with open arms. There’s been far too much silliness, extravagance, fantasy, and slip-shod thinking in the marketing of institutions the past 20 years. We’ve had our own bubble mentality. I’m ready for the serious times to begin. Let’s work with realistic budgets and realistic appraisals of our place in the market. Let’s treat resources as if they are limited and tie them to outcomes. Let’s use metrics to measure our performance and assess our marketing efforts. The basic game is not changing, but times require far more professional, skillful execution. I, for one, am eager to jump into this new environment which will test what we’re made of as marketers.

Posted in Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice, Trends.

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The Time To Act On Social Media Is Now

By Mark N – February 14, 2010

I’m going to start with a higher-ed marketing horror story:

I recently conducted several focus groups of college-bound high school students. One topic I explored was preferred sources for college information. Generally these students – who were affluent, well-educated, and bound for top schools – were suspicious of social media websites such as Unigo, College Confidential, and College Prowler. They questioned the reliability of the comments. Most had visited campuses and felt these visits gave them much more reliable first-hand information.

But one student told a story that should send a chill down the spine of anyone working in college communications. She had received a viewbook in the mail that had totally struck a chord. She spent an hour pouring over it. At the end of the hour, the school had moved to the top of her list. The viewbook completely sold her on the institution.

Then she went to a social media website to check out the school. There she read not one but several comments that completely altered her view. Students wrote that this particular college’s community was socially narrow and homogeneous. All the students did in their spare time was drink. As quickly as the viewbook had built a positive impression, these comments tore it down. She crossed the school off her mental list.

No sooner had she finished her account than two students added that they had the same experience with other name-brand colleges. What a horror story! This shows you the force and speed with which third-party comments can derail years of costly, time consuming marketing effort. And there is not a college in America that can assume it is immune from this impact.

Social media sites have such enormous potential to derail a college’s formal marketing efforts that schools should act now to confront this new reality and not wait until such sites grow in reach and sophistication. This is one communications trend where colleges cannot afford the luxury of being late adopters. Colleges need to define a new communications staff position for social media marketing. They need to build expertise in this area. And it needs to be in-house expertise.

What should this communications staffer do? The first step is obvious: inventory all of the institution’s social media involvement surveying the style and substance of comments. Next, develop a social media marketing plan.  I have written before about the limited ways in which most colleges and universities engage with social media. They view it as a new public relations channel, using Twitter and Facebook to circulate news about events on campus. These are not good uses of social media and in the long run will have virtually no impact in the higher education social media space.

The real direction for social media presence of an academic institution is to raise the intensity of positive participation on social media sites by an institution’s fans so that they will outweigh the inevitable naysayers. This will be accomplished by means of social media strategies that are less centralized and more organic to the culture of an institution. You cannot take the old paradigms of public relations and marketing and apply them to social media. A social media strategy needs to build positive presence by leveraging positive feelings among members of the community – faculty, students, and administrators. These should not be paid spokemen for the administration. They should be people who participate of their own volition in a voice and style  in which they are comfortable. A social media communications staffer should to be the facilitator for this activity, not the chief spokeman.

There is little time to waste. The impact of social media on the college selection process will grow quickly. At this point, colleges can make a relatively small expenditure to stay out in front of the social media revolution. Those who do not will find themselves at risk, playing a costly game of catch-up down the road.

Posted in Door No. 2, Marketing Research & Practice, Social Media, Trends.

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Telling Stories

By Mark N – January 31, 2010

It happened again – somebody at a university started lecturing me that the great secret to success in recruitment marketing is telling stories. Stories convey the reality of the student experience like nothing else. If I’m going to be successful as a marketer, I need to tell stories.

As always, this pronouncement is made as if it is a rare and precious truth. This university official has hit on a brilliant concept: only if you present your institution by way of stories, will it be successful.

Maybe I’ve been doing this too long and I shouldn’t be so jaded, but what can I do? I’ve been hearing the same line about stories for fifteen years now – at conferences, workshops, and client and prospect meetings. It may be true but it’s certainly not rare. Everyone tries to tell their story by means of “stories.” Rather than being exceptional, this is the default approach to higher ed marketing. It is not a closely guarded secret, nor unfortunately, is it an approach that by itself will differentiate an institution.

Why don’t stories work? If you work at an institution and are immersed in the institutional culture, you know that there are some student stories that exemplify your institution. You know that student A coming from background B and having experiences C,D, and E with the help of faculty F, G, and H has gone on to do I, which is exactly what your institution is all about.

The problem is that a high school student looking at your institution doesn’t understand your culture and is not able to see your story as representative of something distinctive. To a high school student, this is just another story, of which there are far too many in college promotional materials. So big deal, you’ve got a successful student. How is the prospect supposed to connect that story to his own experience? He just sees it as a story of a successful student. Of course, he says, colleges profile successful students in their promotional materials. They’re not fools. But high schoolers don’t trust college marketing materials – they view them as self-promotional and one-sided. Stories do nothing per se to break through this skepticism.

Here’s the truth that I would have liked to say when I was talking with this university marketer but instead bit my tongue. Of course you’ll use stories (du-uh). We in educational promotion have a limited set of tools to use in assembling our materials and student profiles are one of them. There is nothing mind-shattering about that. But telling stories or not has nothing to do with success or failure. As a tool they are no better or worse than others. It all depends on how you use them.

What university marketing people sometimes miss is that because your culture is not known to prospects outside the institution you need to go through a creative translation process. You need to go through a challenging and difficult process of developing an aesthetic direction using words, images, tone, and interactivity that translate your culture into something that can be desired by someone who does not understand it. If you tell a good story, but use lame or conventional taglines and images for conveying it, it will have no power. The results of this aesthetic translation process are much more important than the particular tools you use – be they stories, or a single, running third-person voice, or testimonials, or whatever. There is no single formula whereby one tool, say stories, is better than another. It all depends on the distinctive image that you develop to convey your message. Developing this image is hard work, but all effective marketing depends on it. Once we’ve got the image, it’s easy enough to figure out the place of stories in it and make them work for the benefit of the institution. So don’t tell me about stories. If you want to arouse my interest, tell me about your positioning and what your creative strategy is for building your image in the outside world. That’s a story that will get me excited.

Posted in Design Aesthetics, Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice.

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The Dumbbell

By Mark N – January 17, 2010

For at least 15 years, critics of American higher education have pointed to its dumbbell configuration – at one end there are “Walmart institutions” providing a mass-market educational experience with large classes, adjunct faculty, low retention rates, and no selectivity to the vast majority of American undergraduates. At the other end are prestige institutions providing a luxurious education marked by small class size, high retention rates, high selectivity, and lush campus resources to a small  elite.

In truth, however, it’s been hard to fit the realities of the American higher education landscape into the dumbbell model. Where, for example, do you put the private, regional liberal arts colleges of the northern Midwest? Or the many smaller, high quality public institutions like my client, UMBC? We can now see with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, that in the recent past the growing class disparities in the American higher education system were masked by middle class families’ belief in and financing through debt of access to luxury education for their children. What occurred in higher education is similar to what occurred in other parts of the economy: a sizable fraction of the population who could not genuinely afford a luxury lifestyle bought into the fantasy fueled by debt that they in fact could. This impacted luxury education just as it impacted markets for luxury homes, clothes, and vehicles.

The future will not be so rosy. What we are seeing with the current economic recession is widening and calcification of the dumbbell structure. In fact, the highly selective institutions are doing quite well. Applications generally are up. It is true that many have suffered significant hits to their endowments. But looking down the road it is clear that the competitive culture and high demand among the affluent classes for a highly selective prestige institution will not abate. In fact, it will grow. Five years from now, the arms-race of gleaming new dorms, gyms, and marquee professors will once again be in full swing.

The saddest aspect of the growing disparity between “Walmart” and luxury institutions is the erosion of access in the public higher education system. Almost every day there is another article about public flagship universities raising fees and looking to recruit more affluent students in order to raise revenues. Steve Brint wrote an excellent overview in last week’s Washington Post.

What I find ironic about the current trend in American higher education is that the affluent classes have built a system where a disproportionate fraction of public and private resources flow to them yet they refer to it as a meritocracy and its products as meritocrats. Most members of the class surrounding higher education, who are generally liberal, somehow believe that their children achieve in this system due to merit. In fact, two alternate education systems have been built – one that provides large amounts of coddling, resources, and hand-holding to children of the privileged classes and another that provides a mundane and blunt education to everyone else. The SATs and other “standardized tests” reinforce this system.

What’s the bottom-line? The rest of the world will look on us with a chuckle as our place in the global education-based economy erodes. The class calcification that is occurring in our educational system is a distraction from global competitiveness. We are using our system to reinforce a class elite rather than educate our population.

What is the answer? For me, the most obvious point of attack is to focus on science and math education. One of the characteristics of the luxury educational system is that it is predominantly weighted toward verbal skills because it is in this area that the different child-rearing styles of the cultural elite and other classes is most pronounced. It is virtually impossible for a young person, no matter how bright, from a non-privileged background to compete in the area of verbal skills with the cultural elites. If we are to have any hope as a society it needs to be based on math and science skills, since these are taught in a style that makes them more accessible to intelligent young people regardless of class background.

If you are a member of this elite and want to work for broader access, focus on the quality of math and science instruction in your school. Lobby to have entrance requirements that are weighted toward verbal skills – such as entrance essays and the three sections of the SAT – overturned. If you work at a college or university, understand that you are part of the problem if 2/3 of your students major in non-science and math areas. (Why do we need all these humanities and social science majors anyway?) Understand that the widespread fleeing from technical disciplines in luxury institutions reinforces the dumbbell structure. Although a focus on math and science doesn’t seem that it would address class disparities in education, it is in fact our most important leverage point.

Posted in Access, Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Trends.

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The Role of Tag Lines in Educational Marketing

By Mark N – January 1, 2010

I’m not categorically opposed to tag lines. I would never say that under no circumstances should you ever use a tag line. I’d be tempted. But if I said that I’d be more than a little hypocritical since I’ve employed tag lines in several projects, like here, and here.

I am puzzled by the significance that some institutions place on tag lines. Many institutions seem to believe that a tag line is a major strategic component and an organizing principle for a brand platform. This, to be blunt, is a mistake. And it is a mistake that ensnares institutions in processes that are costly and time consuming without leading to significant marketing gains.

A tag line is not a brand strategy and it is certainly not a mission statement. A tag line is an element of creative execution; similar to a photograph or an illustration or to the style you use to write your copy. It is produced at the creative implementation phase when you come to execute your strategy. For example, let’s suppose that you have developed a brand strategy that says you should emphasize an urban, hip style. In that case, you would choose a photographic style that advanced this brand image, for example, you might employ a style of digital photography that looked like it was captured on an iPhone. And you would write a tag line that used vocabulary and cadence to capture an urban, hip sensibility. As with the photograph, the style of the tag line would be as important as its substance. And you would certainly not place too great weight on the tag line. It would be one element among many – your colors, fonts, photos, writing style, interactive programming, design – for conveying your image and advancing your brand.

A brand strategy is distinct from the elements of creative execution. It is not colors, fonts, photos, writing style, interactive programming, design or the tag line. It is the conceptual engine that undergirds and drives all of these. The brand strategy, along with the competitive research you have conducted, will tell you whether you should employ a tag line in your particular competitive situation. But you actually write the tag line as part of creative execution.

Processes where committees of high-level administrators sit around weighing the strengths and weaknesses of alternate tag lines are misguided. And institutions that invest major resources testing tag lines as if their fortunes in the marketplace depended upon them are wasting time and resources. Ultimately, these are ways for communications firms to make money and for administrators to feel they are being productive, but they are not conducive to genuinely effective marketing.

It is vital that institutions be clear on what’s important to a brand strategy. A brand strategy is conceptual. It is an idea, or small set of ideas, that drives marketing execution across all platforms. It needs to be distinctive and connect with audience desires. It is not a tag line. A tag line is a potential outgrowth of a marketing process but does not play a role in the strategic phase itself. Moving discussion of the tag line back into the brand strategy development phase, and placing more weight on it than it deserves, will distract you from the real work at hand. If you’re involved in a branding process and are spending time discussing a tag line, your process has been derailed. Go back and start over. Forget about the tag line until after you’ve got your strategy. And maybe forever. There are plenty of great brands with no tag line at all.

Posted in Branding, Door No. 2, Marketing Research & Practice.

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No Room For Integrated Marketing at CASE V

By Mark N – December 15, 2009

I’m returning from the CASE District V conference. I spent a lot of time attending the web track – as opposed to the communications track, which was separate. I know it’s not a good idea to over think this bifurcation. I’m sure the organizers reason that there is so much interest in the web that it deserves its own track alongside the older communications track.  But the bifurcation doesn’t send a very good signal for those thinking about the integration of web and non-web communications. During one session, an attendee asked a question about coordinating print and web communications and the presenter, after strongly agreeing that such coordination was important, shrugged his shoulders on how to achieve it.

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make this integration happen for folks but I can’t. Many of the impediments are structural, involving professional skill-sets and administrative turf. Since there are so many different kinds of institutions with different administrative structures, personalities and history, there is not a single solution. But here is a place to start:

If you are responsible for big-picture messaging at an institution, you need to understand that neither your print folks nor your web folks should be developing your core strategic idea. Rather, it should be developed independently and prior to implementation of major print or web projects.

I sat through several presentations where either a web team or a print team described their process for developing core messaging for an institution as part of their work. Regardless of the quality of their thinking, all suffered from prioritizing the specific medium in which they worked.

For example, a team from mStoner described coming up with a set of institutional differentiators that they would use to develop a web site. Because web sites are non-linear and can easily handle multiple features, they were comfortable boiling their list down to five or six differentiators. And it was o.k. if a few of the differentiators were generic. There was no discussion of any kind of hierarchy. That’s because the non-linear nature of the web doesn’t require, or even well support, hierarchical messaging.  Their work required lists that that they could sort and rearrange as they built the site so that’s what they developed.

A team from the print firm Philographica talked about how their process resulted in a story that they used to drive development of a viewbook. Their solutions were premised on the linear nature of the reading experience. They wanted to tell a story that a prospect or donor would follow.

I mention these firms because I think they represent the best of our industry. Both do really superb work. But regardless of the quality of their work they are not in a position to drive major messaging for an institution because the media in which they execute the message tings their processes. And the same holds true for in-house teams. You can never assume that a print team or a web team can develop core strategic messaging with the idea that the other branch will simply adopt it. And it’s even worse to have one team produce the messaging with the assumption that it’s o.k. if the other team simply ignores it.

I suspect a lot of creative folks who work in these areas will say that I’m clipping their wings. But the opposite is the case – I’m freeing them up to do what they do well. It is better to tap creative talent by giving them the strategy and challenging them to find a way to implement it in their particular medium. But better or worse it is essential. Maybe in the future CASE District V can add a track on strategy that goes cross-platform.

Posted in Branding, Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice.

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The College Admissions Process Fantasy (part II)

By Mark N – December 12, 2009

Last week, I wrote a post entitled “The College Admissions Process Fantasy (part I). What I was trying to point out is that the standard, accepted, by-the-book process for applying to college that you read about in U.S. News and World Report and elsewhere is only really pursued by a sub-set of mostly affluent college-bound high school students.

The reason I wrote this post is because I wanted to caution those involved with marketing an individual institution from falling into assumptions that did not apply in their case. In the back of my mind was a large research study I had read which was competent and very expensive but was premised on this standard model in ways that made it useless to the institution that had purchased it. This is a widespread problem: the whole industry of consultants and designers of educational marketing campaigns presume a process that is often not accurate. And it’s not just consultants. Many admissions offices make management decisions based on the standard model when in fact it doesn’t apply to the circumstance of their institution. It is very important for institutions to develop an accurate picture of how students actually find their way to their institution.

Before I leave this topic, I need to make one further point. It’s not just admissions offices, consultants and mainstream media who mistakenly overestimate the proportion of college-bound students who pursue the standard model for getting into college. It is also high school students and their families themselves. The fantasy of how you get into college has pervaded mainstream culture. It’s something you see on T.V. There are many students and parents who get seduced by the fantasy even though it is really not suited to their financial and cultural resources.

A disproportionate number of the families who get distracted by the college admissions fantasy are of-color or immigrants but it is certainly not exclusively so. Many middle class families (as opposed to upper-middle-class) also waste time believing in the steps of the standard process. There are many more cases of this on the East Coast than on the West because in the West the prevailing assumption is that students will attend a public and often local institution. The mythology of going away from home to an expensive private college is much stronger in the East.

So here’s the tricky part – if you’re marketing an institution that doesn’t fall into the standard admissions process model, you still need to take it into account. There may be key moments in the admissions process when your prospects will not be thinking of you. They will be pursuing other more prestigious options that at the end of the day will not pan out. During those moments, you will not be able to get them to pay attention by competing with the fantasy. They don’t want to hear about you. They want to believe that the process is going to work out for them. A lot of your business is done at the end of the game, once the fantasy has burst.

This is an extremely tricky dynamic. There is not one simple solution in every case. What is really required is an enormous amount of detailed research of your specific admissions circumstances so you can understand all the forces at play. The college admissions process fantasy may not work well for your institution but because it has pervaded our culture to such an extent it needs to inform your strategy.

Posted in Access, Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice.

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Private Colleges and Financial Aid

By Mark N – December 9, 2009

As is well known, private colleges use financial aid in two ways: They use it to defray costs for families unable to pay and they use it as a discounting strategy to attract students who would not otherwise attend. Clearly, the first has a virtuous motive. Just about everybody associated with any U.S. private college takes as part of their institution’s mission to extend educational benefits to students of diverse economic backgrounds. There is a self-serving aspect to this, but even it is virtuous: private colleges, especially elite private colleges, understand that their claim to broader cultural significance is diluted if they provide educational benefits only to a narrow economic band  of students. They need students of diverse economic backgrounds in order to make their institutions work. They use financial aid to help enroll them.

What I want to focus on is the unintended but damaging consequence of the rhetoric that institutions use to promote need-based financial aid. Colleges reach out to students of modest means fairly aggressively, telling them that they should not rule out an expensive private education, that with financial assistance they might find that a private higher education is doable. Sometimes institutions even tell students that upon comparison they may find that the financial aid given by private institutions is so generous that they are a less expensive option than public institutions.

Without question, these claims are true in some cases. In some cases students are given such generous aid by private institutions that they can attend for less cost than local public institutions. But in how many cases? Five percent or ten percent of the students of modest backgrounds pursing higher education? What about the many students who do not end up in the private college and university system?

I spent the last week in the company of students of modest background who were all living at home while attending a local public institution. Their determination was impressive. Many travelled long distances via public transportation to attend classes then returned home often to work a part time job or attend to other family members.

In a majority of cases, these students had heard the promotional rhetoric from private institutions and had responded. They had applied to many private institutions and in every case they had been accepted at several. I met some students who had been accepted to extremely highly ranked schools, the kinds of schools that upper middle class kids kill to get into.

These students were all disappointed to ultimately learn that the financial aid they were offered was not sufficient to enable them to attend the private institution of their choice or indeed any private institution. They had waited, waited through the spring and into the summer after high school graduation to get a clear picture of their financial aid offers. Several had tried to negotiate with colleges at which they had been accepted. At the end of the day, they were forced to accept that they would not be able to attend a private residential college and had enrolled at their local commuter option instead.

The dreams of these young people were bruised during the college admissions process. As high school seniors, they learned the sad truth that the benefits of our society are not apportioned fairly. Being economically strapped creates significant barriers to achieving mainstream success, even if you think you are playing by all the rules. For these students, the rhetoric of the private colleges was hollow. Resources turned out to be insufficient to makes their dream of attending a private residential college a reality.

Granted, I do not know the details of these students’ individual stories. I’m sure that if I spoke with the private colleges that offered these students aid, I would hear another side – I would hear about parents with some net worth who were unwilling to support their children. They would tell me the students’ records were not so good that they merited generous financial aid. But that doesn’t really mitigate the point that in total the private colleges don’t have nearly the wealth necessary to serve a significant fraction of students of modest means who are ambitious and seek a quality higher education.

And so, I would suggest that private colleges and universities in their quest to recruit students of diverse economic backgrounds to their campuses moderate their promotional rhetoric. Granted, in some cases students who receive generous financial aid awards will find that attending a private institution is more doable than attending a local public. But in the majority of cases that is not the case. I suggest that private colleges and universities put some sort of balanced helpful statement on their websites and in their brochures:

If you believe that our institution is a good fit for you, then we encourage you to apply. You should not let concern about financing your education hold you back. Our institution provides generous financial aid to families of students who are unable to meet the full cost of a private higher education. In 2009, we provided more than $_ million dollars in need-based financial aid.

However, if you depend on financial aid to attend college, you should also know how important it is for you to explore all your options, including state colleges and universities in your local area alongside more expensive private institutions.  Talk to your parents in advance and get a sense from them of the kind of support they think they can provide. This is the best way to put yourself in position to weigh all your options and ultimately choose the higher education path that makes the most sense for you.

I hope that a few admissions officers at private colleges who work with students from disadvantaged backgrounds read this post. Yes, it is important to promote your institution. But it is also important to give these students a reality check, even if it means promoting your own institution less intensively. You will be doing these students a service.

Posted in Access, Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education.

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The College Admissions Process Fantasy (part 1)

By Mark N – December 7, 2009

There’s a wide-spread fantasy in higher education. Call it propaganda,  social construction, miyth – I don’t care what you call it. The fantasy I’m talking about is the prevailing idea about the process for getting into college.

You can read about this in any one of hundreds of college guides on the shelves of Barnes and Noble. One place to read about it that has significant influence is in the U.S. News & World Report Annual Guide to Colleges. Others are the college admissions coverage of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

If you work in the industry, you are well aware of the contours of this process:

Talking with friend, families and guidance counselors and with assistance from third party sources and institutional communications, a student assembles a choice list in spring of his junior year (sometimes earlier and sometimes later).

With help from his family, he visits several schools on his list – usually in spring of his junior year, summer between junior and senior years or fall of his senior year.

Assuming he does not apply and is accepted in a binding early-decision process, he applies in the winter of his senior year of high school and is informed where he has been accepted in the spring. If he is interested in several schools to which he has been accepted, he visits two or three during the yield phase.

Ultimately he selects one school to attend.

This is not a fantasy for all college-bound students. It is reality for many of the folks who buy the books at Barnes and Noble, read the New York Times and end up attending one of the more highly selective colleges or universities. Indeed, if a student realistically hopes to attend one of the most highly selective institutions, he better had better conduct his selection process in this way or he will be at a decided disadvantage.

For the students who attend most of the higher education institutions in America, this process is not the reality, it is only a fantasy. They do not pursue this path toward college admissions for a variety of reasons based on culture and class. Although the New York Times presents this process as if it were the national norm, its true penetration in regions outside affluent enclaves of the Northeast and Mid Atlantic is small. There is less of it on the West Coast than on the East. Most students in the Midwest, South and Southwest do not engage in it. In reality, even in the Northeast and Mid Atlantic, only a minority of college-bound students conduct the college search process in this way.

But the fantasy has infected the entire higher education admissions industry including admissions offices and the army of vendors who support these offices with marketing services. Here are examples:

  • College admissions offices time their marketing campaigns based on the model of the selective college admissions process. They reach back into fall of the sophomore year and extend into spring of the junior year based on assumptions about prospect behavior informed by the fantasy.
  • Colleges spend considerable time and resources developing a viewbook which they mail out to students in the junior-to-senior transition period on the fantasy-based assumption that a large-scaled piece of messaging mailed at that particular juncture will impact admissions performance
  • The major research firms offer research services to colleges and universities that are based on the premise that students are engaged in the fantasy.

If you want to do truly effective higher education marketing, you need to remember that in the majority of cases the process is only a fantasy. The services that vendors offer to you may not be a very good fit for your actual prospective students’ cultural and class circumstances. The general model of how to recruit students to your institution may not apply.

Instead, you need to start with fewer assumptions about the way students conduct the process and find out for yourself how your students actually do it. You need to be skeptical of the broad prognostications offered by major consulting firms at professional conferences about trends and practices among college-going cohorts. You need to take with a large grain of salt the recommendations of consulting firms as to how to conduct your recruitment marketing. The recommendations probably don’t apply to your case. And they are not reality-based. They are infected by the fantasy of the college selection process, which is much more pervasive in our national culture than it has any right to be given the relatively small percentage of students for whom it is reality.

Posted in Access, Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education.

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The One Thing You Must Hire an Outsider For

By Mark N – November 29, 2009

If you dig marketing and you work at an educational institution you need to be creative – you will never have all the resources you require to do things the “right” way.  If you want to do great marketing, you’ll need to take unconventional approaches to gathering information and assembling talent. I know. I’ve been there.

(On this point, I want to send major props to Robert Moore, Managing Partner at Lipman Hearne. Recently on the CASE Communications Listserve, someone asked for recommendations for commissioning a research study. Rather than reply with a recommendation or a plug for his own firm’s services, Robert responded with a helpful suggestion about starting off with free, readily available research before incurring the cost of commissioning one’s own. That’s really helpful advice for someone working with limited budgets. I will attach the complete body of his e-mail to this post in the comments section for folks who want to read it.)

One of the things you will need to judge is which marketing services you absolutely need to hire outsiders for and which you can do in house. I’m a consultant, so of course I see the value of hiring outsiders but I also understand how resources are strapped. I know that institutions can’t afford to hire consultants for everything they would like.

If you’ve got limited dollars and are constrained in how much you can use outside talent, here’s the one absolutely essential marketing function for which you must hire an outsider. This is the one that simply cannot be done in house:

writing the marketing strategy

If you’ve got in-house talent, you can do the viewbook and the web site yourself. Maybe you’ll outsource specific tasks, like having a freelancer do just the writing or the design. You can be creative with the research. Maybe you’ll combine readily available tools like the ones Robert Moore mentioned with work of a dedicated volunteer committee. But the one thing you can never under any circumstances do yourself is write the marketing strategy. Not if you want it be effective. No way, no how.

The reason no insider can ever produce an effective marketing strategy is because in order to produce one you cannot be inside the institutional bubble. For this task, you need the perspective of an outsider.

Why? Anyone who “does strategy” will tell you that 90% of designing a marketing platform boils down to cutting away unnecessary fluff and relentlessly focussing on the one or two points that have the potential to make a difference. You just can’t do that in an organization. Your lens is too clouded by the politics and priorities of the internal culture to be able to write an effective marketing strategy. For that, you need an experienced outsider, someone who will take the time to understand your organizational priorities and dynamics but will retain the perspective of an outsider. That’s what he or she needs to cut away the fluff.

What put me in mind of this was a conversation with a past client. We had worked together to increase applications to an engineering school at a medium sized private university. We were both reflecting on how easy it turned out to be to increase apps by 20%. The story there is one of clearing away clutter and focusing on the core message that prospective students wanted to hear. It turned out that within the competitive frame of this engineering program, many students were drawn by prestige, of which the larger university had sufficient quantity. All the prospects needed to know was that the engineering school was a going concern. That would be enough to open the flood gates. Our marketing strategy was very simple, basically all we wanted to do was depict cool engineering projects. We stripped away as much of the institutional rhetoric about points of differentiation as possible since virtually all of these reflected internal priorities that did not resonate with students. That’s all it took. In short order we grew applications by 20%. But an insider could never have had the guts to pursue this approach. He or she would have been too invested in the institutional rhetoric to give it the necessary hair cut. It wasn’t rocket science but it did depend on an outside perspective.

So if you want to do great marketing in an academic institution, accept that you’re going to need to look for creative combinations of internal and external talent. But keep in the back of your mind that when it comes time to write the marketing strategy, you need to tap outside professional help. This is the one thing that no organization can do for itself – not if you dig marketing and want to achieve genuine and lasting gains for your organization.

Posted in Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice.

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