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.