One of the great distortions in the selective college admissions process is the extent to which young people who desire entry to highly selective institutions treat the process like a prestige commodity purchase. They know that getting into a top school is not one of life’s necessities. No, it is a highly desirable bauble – an all important confirmation of one’s status in a materialistic and prestige-driven community.

There are two problems with this – one obvious and one perhaps a little less obvious. The obvious problem is that in treating the college selection process like a prestige commodity purchase, young people obtain a distorted view of the institutions they are considering. They tend to look at the wrong things – for example, the opulence of a dorm room on the college tour – and overlook important things that will actually impact the quality of their experience once they get to college.

The less obvious problem is that in taking a consumerist approach to college admissions, young people actually diminish their chances of getting in. The admissions officers who function as gatekeepers generally do not live in super-affluent communities, are not highly paid, and recoil from the thought that their institutions are little more than prestige commodities. The worst thing you can do if you actually want to go to one of these institutions is to telegraph through word or deed that you see entry as primarily a glittering prize.

None of this is particularly new or earth-shattering, but I’d like to add an additional thought. Although admissions officers recoil from the idea that their institutions are nothing more than prestige commodities, their marketing products – the elaborate viewbooks and on-line animations – can (inadvertently) reinforce that perception. With skill and savvy, it is possible to use your marketing to do the opposite – to undermine the commodification of higher education and convey a sense of an authentic educational experience. What a wonderful New Years resolution that would be – to make an effort to be conscious of and resistent to the role marketing plays in the commodification of higher education. Happy New Year to all. I hope it offers many opportunities to make a difference in our lives, families, and communities.

1. You can learn about colleges from a summer visit. I mean, I guess you can if by “college” you mean the buildings, the proximity to a major airport, and the comparative skill of the admissions staff. But if you want to understand a college, you need to visit when classes are in session. How else will you be able to meet current students and understand the student culture?
2. It is valid to judge an institution of higher education based on the impression you draw from the student tour. This is one of the most ridiculous things I hear in the course of my work. It astonishes me how many well-meaning and supposedly sophisticated parents buy into this. But no, it is not valid to cast judgment on a college based on your experience of the tour. Think about it – even the smallest college has resources and social groups you won’t fully discover in four years on campus. If you want to conduct a good college selection process, you need to keep an open mind and understand that an institution of higher learning is more than just the tour.
3. You are shopping for a college. No you’re not. If you are in the market for a highly selective institution, they are shopping for you. Time to get a little more humble. Your accomplishments are not as special as you think.
4. You could be happy anywhere. Not true, actually. Usually students say this to justify spending a lot of their time focusing on reach schools and being indifferent to their targets and safeties. The savvy college shopper takes those latter two categories seriously understanding that, at the end of the day, he or she may end up at one. And, no, if you don’t take your targets and safeties seriously, you could in fact end up at someplace you will not like.
5. The prestigious schools are good at everything. It’s amazing how common this one is but, of course, it is not true. Even the most prestigious schools have inconsistent quality in certain programs and majors. If a program, such as electrical engineering or philosophy, is truly important to you, you should not simply assume it will be well-covered at the prestigious college of your dreams.
6. All the top schools provide the same generous need-based financial aid. In fact the differences between even top colleges on financial aid awards are substantial. The problem here is that the fine-print is so confusing that it is simply impossible for even the most informed and diligent consumer to figure these differences out. If need-based financial aid is important to you, it will be necessary to apply to a good number of institutions and understand that at the end of the day you will be comparing varying financial aid packages as part of your admissions process.
7. The food is o.k. at colleges. It’s not. At most place it sucks. You will quickly tire of the food, and if eating a healthy diet is important to you, you will be seriously challenged. The gyms are not universally so great either.

Her question gave me a chance to collect my own thoughts about where I think we are today and where I think we are heading as a system of higher education. These thoughts are recounted here. Cynic alert: Don’t read any further if you are hoping for a rosy forecast.

The first thing that seems clear is that there will be no abatement in the applications arms race among highly selective prestigious institutions nor any curtailing of their fee increases. So long as the gap between rich and poor in this country does not diminish, and so long as the top institutions offer a path for entry into the elite classes, then those very classes will continue to bid up the value of education at one of the top ranked schools. Yes. Shockingly that means that tuition at these top schools will continue to grow faster than inflation and the gap between well-endowed institutions and others will continue to increase.

Granted, the size and affluence of the US elite classes has shrunk as a result of the Great Recession. The elite institutions will build global markets as a way to offset a downturn in domestic demand. This will keep competitiveness at top institutions high. Anyone who is hoping that Harvard or Princeton will become significantly easier to gain access to is going to be disappointed.

Top public flagship institutions will hitch their wagons to the fate of the top private institutions. The trend we have already seen of the virtual privatization of flagship public institutions will continue.  Here as well tuitions will rise and the top publics will come to look more like the top privates. There will be little effective public advocacy at the state level for social access to top public institutions, which was, during a better day, the anchor-stone of the public university system.

The vast majority of students in this country will be consigned increasingly to assembly-line, Walmart-style education – large classes, less contact with faculty, more on-line and remote content, and fewer opportunities for genuine intellectual contact. Community college enrollments will continue to grow.

So, actually, to answer her question – there will not be any sort of crash or major correction within higher education. Many of the trends we see around us will continue. It is a sad fate for the US system and, of course, doesn’t bode well for our country’s global competitiveness. I would like nothing more than to look back on this post five years hence and be forced to admit I was wrong. But I’m not holding my breath.

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I conclude from this that there’s significant unmet need among independent schools for marketing tips. I don’t get nearly the same level of traffic for my college and university posts.

I’m a little shy about all of this because I wrote that entry back in 2009 to be provocative. I didn’t intend it as the final word or any sort of a comprehensive take on independent schools marketing plans. I really wanted to make a point about the growing obsolescence of traditional viewbooks (which independent schools in the U.S. do have an unhealthy attachment to).

So how do I feel now that  this one entry has had a consistent readership over two years with an average read time of 5 minutes? I went back and read the post and I’m still basically comfortable with the advice presented therein. The entry is far from comprehensive, but I don’t think there is anything that is fundamentally wrong. If an institution followed that advice they could in fact dramatically improve their market position.

Two years on there is one major caveat. What I’ve learned in the intervening time is that the mainstream of independent schools (at least in the U.S.) are wedded to a model of website production that locks them into falling short of the goals set out in the post. The independent school industry has grown dependent on certain high-volume industry specific providers for their websites: finalsite, SilverPoint, and WhippleHill. There are strong and valid justifications for hiring one of these firms. They offer a turn-key service to overworked communications staffs. They understand the independent school industry. And they are familiar with the school back-end data-bases. However, all of those firms, perhaps because of high-volume approach they take, are weak in the area of brand messaging and positioning. The sites all look the same. They are competent. They serve essential information well. But they are poor vehicles for conveying a brand platform.

To follow the advice set out in my post, a school would need the skill and self-confidence to build and manage a web-site outside the prevailing model. There are examples of such schools around the country but they are the exception. Unfortunately, the schools that are most in need of a marketing turnaround are just the ones with the greatest tendency to hire one of these three firms. So the advice from 2009 stands, but if you are going to follow it, be prepared to part from the fold in your approach to your website.

Except for those obsessive types who follow Jacques Steinberg’s blog in the New York Times and post on College Confidential, does anyone really care how the top schools fare in their admissions efforts?

Yes and no. It is indeed true that for the foreseeable future we are dealing with a selective-college consumer market of an overall fixed size. Let’s leave aside the potential of international growth. The domestic market for prestigious private colleges is, and will remain for some time, static. There is no growth among the number of 18-year-olds. The recession has pulled out from the game middle class families who were stretching beyond their means to send their kids to these schools.

The selective schools themselves are approaching a point where all of their sophisticated marketing efforts cancel each other out. Most of the schools have become fairly adept at marketing. They are approaching stasis

What all of this means is that the selective schools are playing a zero-sum game. One school’s advance is necessarily another school’s retreat. So this is something worth paying attention to. Certainly how a school does with the recruitment of one individual class matters not at all. But if through inattention or poor management a school slips in the quality or selectivity of their class over several years, it is worth taking note. Such trends diminish the equity value of the institution, as the market will quickly note and respond accordingly.

• The site should be well-organized.
• Navigation should be clear.
• The design should be fresh and reasonably consistent across the site.
• Content should be timely and up-to-date.
• Design should be fresh.
• The messaging should be clear and direct and help visitors learn about what is special about your institution.
• The search tool should be effective.

Herein lies the problem.

Without intending to, this consultant has given us perspective on what is wrong with college, university and private school websites.

All of these things are important. And they are all secondary – they are means to an end and not the end in itself. When you approach your website ask not seven but a single question. Here’s the question:

What story does my website, through the experience it offers the visitor, tell about my institution?

Good websites are damnably complex. They need to solve all the issues the consultant laid out in his list. But college, university, and independent school websites don’t only fall short on this list of criteria. The most important way they fall short is the big picture issues. Even if they meet all these criteria, they don’t tell a story about the institution. (At least not a positive story. Some of the worst websites tell the opposite story from that any marketing professional would ever want to tell about his institution.)

Please. I am not talking about “stories” at the top of a website. I am not talking about theme statements, or rotating banners, or Flash animations (which I suspect the consultant had in mind in bullet point 6). No. I mean that the total experience of the site, as the visitor moves around stopping at various spots, absorbing content, and interacting with the site features, should tell a story about the character of the institution.

If you want to understand the shortcomings of  your own website start by asking this single question. If you are involved in a website development project, always keep this question front and center. What story does my website tell? What story do I want it to tell?  All the bullet points in the world are irrelevant if you are not using your website to project a compelling image of your institution.

Why haven’t independent schools figured out what most everybody else has – that good design, high quality writing, and excellent photography are effective without over-the-top production.

One reason schools have not is the herd mentality of private school administrators. These folks tend to be risk adverse and not particularly expert in communications. Both combine to result in a tendency to ape the elaborate practices of the school down the road.

But I suspect there is a deeper reason as well – this is the price-point. In most large markets, the lifeblood of successful independent schools is wealthy families. Indeed, in many of the most successful areas,the public schools are reasonably good, and the private-school market consists of affluent families who will stop at nothing to give their children every advantage in the high stakes American education game.  The viewbooks reinforce the sense of outsized privilege that has come to mark this sector.

The irony – it goes without saying – is that the leadership of the independent school movement would deny just this sort of elitism as a goal. In their communications they strive to convey egalitarianism. If schools want to close the gap between their values and the image they convey with their overwrought viewbooks, they should rewrite their budgets – cut back on the production qualities of their viewbooks and direct  resources to the quality of the in-house staff responsible for marketing and communications. There is no solution to the clunky, overwrought independent school viewbooks other than more intelligent, professional in-house communications savvy.

My initial feelings are ambivalent. I think Sewanee’s rhetoric about moving away from discounting strategies and focusing instead on need is excellent. Here is President John McCardell striking exactly the right tone on CNN. However, excessive reliance on tuition discounting is really an internal dysfunction. Couldn’t Sewanee have fixed that problem without cutting tuition? Wouldn’t it actually have been more progressive to keep tuition high so that the institution has more revenue to pour back into need-based aid?

Clearly, Sewanee is banking on the publicity value of this move. An uncomfortable moment in the video comes when the names of overlap schools roll tacross the screen in big block letters: W&L, UNC, Rhodes, UVA, Vanderbilt, UGA, (and then, in a weird afterthought) Harvard. We all know what’s going on here – these are (save the last) schools to which Sewanee currently loses prospects. It is hoping it can get attention from a kid looking at Vanderbilt with this move.

Herein lies the problem. Sewanee exists in the shallow edges of the prestige college market. My own read on that market is that it has lost none of its vitality at the center. Applications are up at virtually every highly ranked institution in America. Affluent families have lost none of their passion for high-cost, high-prestige institutions. But less affluent families are radically rethinking their ability to fund an expensive private education. The market is becoming more stratified.

I would love to see the market research that Sewanee conducted before making this move. It seems that they are banking on the existence a middle-class market under the elite tier that can be swayed by news of the lower sticker price. But I’m not sure that a $40,000 sticker price moves that market. Or that such a market actually exists. And in exchange, isn’t Sewanee hurting itself with the high prestige market that still sees value in the cost of a Vanderbilt education? It is honestly too early to pass judgment. We can all return to this issue three years from now and see how Sewanee is doing. I wish them the best and will be eager to see how this plays out.

We all know that on one level the inflation doesn’t impact the school’s ultimate admissions performance. That’s because the growth in applications doesn’t reflect a larger number of candidates, just a larger number of applications. Nowadays students are sending out more applications, but at the end of the day each only ends up at one institution.

At the center of this new dynamic is the Common Application. Originally developed to streamline the application process for high school students, The Common Ap today holds powerful sway in the private college admissions process. The “Common Ap” makes it relatively easy to submit applications to many institutions. One way that institutions grow their applications is to fall in line with the “Common Ap,” eliminating or reducing the amount of supplementary information they require.

There are a lot of thoughtful, civically-minded people who understand that this application arms race doesn’t make much sense. The total pool of high ability students participating in this process is of fixed size. All the schools are really doing is competing among themselves in a sort-of shallow glamor contest. There are a lot more useful things they could be doing, for example, developing support systems to facilitate academic success for economically disadvantaged kids. Who really cares if a student at New Trier High School who is already applying to Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania, Tulane, University of North Carolina, Northwestern, and University of Illinois, also applies to University of Chicago, University of Washington St. Louis, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and Colgate?

Decry it though we may, the application arms race will without question continue. It will not reverse. Indeed, it will only grow more heated in the next few years. This is because the intensity among upper-class families in this country for getting their children into a top-ranked school is only growing. And the families who play this game look at college acceptance rates as top indicators of the relative value of different high-prestige institutions. They reason that if school A has an acceptance rate of 23% and school B has an acceptance rate of 26%, then school A is the better investment. Sad but true.

So if you are the president of a prestige private university looking out for your bottom line you’ll tell your admissions director to do everything possible to grow your admissions pool. We can all wish it weren’t that way, but we’re not going to see any reverse any time in the near future.

One thing specific to the independent school sector is heavy reliance on high-volume, independent-school-focused vendors. Schools like to hire the same folks who did the work for the other independent schools down the road. To some extent, this is a natural and valid tendency – there are strong arguments in favor of hiring a consultant with prior segment experience. But independent schools take this tendency to an extreme. They overwhelmingly work with the same group of independent school vendors. The results are predictable – most of the work that independent schools produce is broadly similar and fails to differentiate the institutions from their (ahem, sorry to mention this unpleasant reality) competitors.

I am working now in one of the large, robust East Coast independent school markets. Their are a handful of “top-tier” schools and beneath them many other schools jockeying for position. Tuition hovers around $30,000 per year. Within that market, there are several dominant marketing vendors – the viewbooks and websites for many of the schools are produced by the same firms.

I mean the same firms. Not similar firms. When one of the top-tier schools gets a new website or viewbook, the other schools seem to take this as a sign of approval and get on board. How crazy is that?

On some level, the goal for these schools needs to be about differentiation. Yes, I guess it’s helpful to have a family resemblance to top-tier institutions but it’s definitely not sufficient. If these schools are to thrive, they need to develop a distinctive presence.

Here’s another point – if you want to look for really good examples of educational marketing you don’t look to top-tier institutions. Prestige plays such an overwhelming role in perceptions of quality that top-tier institutions have little pressure to market themselves well. (In this way, the dynamic is exactly the same as in the higher education sector.) In most cases, top-tier independent day schools have mediocre websites and bland viewbooks. But just because a top-tier institution has blessed a particular vendor, the other schools in the category believe their problems will be solved if they also sign up.

It will be interesting to see if, in the new more challenging economic landscape, more independent schools will have the courage to break from the pack. Opportunities certainly exist. The herd mentality of the sector creates ripe opportunities for those with the courage and conviction to swim against the current.