There is deserved attention these days to institutional web sites as a tool in college admissions. There can be no question that a highly functioning web site is critical to enrollment success. Granted many academic institutions have hurdles to surmount. Predictably over the next five years we will be seeing steady and significant gains in the quality of educational websites. Today I’m going to talk about one of the critical steps to producing a good web site – one that most colleges and universities would like to ignore (for good reason!).

When you speak with high school students, you hear a wide range of comments on how they use college web sites. Some use them very little, and only for the most immediate and practical information such as how and when to visit or apply. Others admit to bookmarking sites of their crush colleges and surfing them in their spare time. Somewhere between these two poles, and ranking very high on the priority list for many students is using college web sites to check out the majors they are interested in. They’ll say, “Yeah, I go on the site to see if they have my major. . . . I explore my major.” Things like that.

So now it’s time for us to be honest with ourselves. When we look in the mirror, we have to admit that the departmental descriptions are among the weakest areas of our sites. If you happen to work for a school where the departmental descriptions are grammatically written and not entirely opaque, then you are ahead of the curve. But a grammatical departmental description is still a far cry from what prospective students (and their parents) would like. They would like a description that clearly lays out the breadth and depth of a department’s offerings and how its approach differs from other departments they are considering. The don’t want puffery and they don’t want obfuscation. They want a departmental description that acknowledges their questions and is written to answer them.

Bet you’ve been ignoring this unpleasant truth, eh? With good reason. Departmental descriptions are the third rail of higher ed communications. As the jealously guarded turf of individual departments, they are extremely difficult to change. At some schools, departmental home pages even have their particular designs that depart from the main web site style sheets, as if when a prospective student visits a department he is actually visiting a separate institution.

Twice in my career I’ve been engaged by colleges to write for them a complete set of departmental descriptions. One time I was successful. One time I was not. In both cases it was an enormously laborious and expensive undertaking.

Reorienting departmental descriptions is truly an in-house project because it is so time consuming and potentially open-ended. But you can’t assign it to some eager 27-year-old writer in your communications department, no matter how brilliant and talented he or she is. Rewriting departmental descriptions means coming up against dozens of individual departmental chairs and deans. It means getting enmeshed in an overwhelming amount of institutional politics.

I don’t really know the answer. But it needs to be done. If you take your web site seriously as a central component in your admissions marketing campaign, you need to focus on the departmental descriptions because that is where many students turn first. I know you’d like to believe that they hit the prospective student button and go to the admissions page, but it’s often not the case. They want to check out departments and majors. We can’t keep rolling this one down the road. We need to tackle it. Show this to your President and see what he says.