Marketing your school wisely: paying attention to how you promote your school can save money, improve admissions and lead to a better incoming class

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2001 by David Vaczek

Choosing a college to attend is an emotional decision for students and parents, and in that respect is different from buying a CD player or a mountain bike. Yet Generation Y are a smart, motivated group, as discriminating in their college searches as any consumer shopping the aisles of a chain store.

In the 1970s, colleges began to think more like product and service retailers, seeking to convey the quality and value benefits of their institutions to more carefully targeted prospects. Yet in the buyers' market that still many institutions haven't mastered basic marketing principles and techniques that--enrollment officers and consultants say--help schools fill classrooms with the most promising students.

Research is often under-used, branding efforts seem frivolous when they don't stem from core values and are not sustained over time, and colleges too often invest faith in promotional tactics based on flawed underlying strategies. Colleges that don't spend enough on research, for example, won't find out why some students sought information from the school, but failed to follow up, or why that promotion of the new Caribbean studies track failed to meet its enrollment goal.

"People continually misunderstand this marketplace. With Generation Y, they are using past practices, or they are trying to be too `MTV,' falling short either way" says Steven Merritt, Villanova University dean of enrollment management.

"These students have worked hard in school, they are very close to their parents, and they are savvy consumers. They dismiss glitz and glamour out-of-hand" he adds.

Universities are investing more in Web technology to support enrollment, from systems for tracking promotion results to e-mail campaigns aimed at the burgeoning audience of teens online. But schools shouldn't ignore traditional outreach tactics that often make the difference when the student and parents finally weigh their alternatives around the kitchen table.

Following are the top 10 recruitment mistakes prevailing in higher education:

1. Promotion without the underpinning of strategy. Promotion tactics are just the vehicle for communicating the other "p's" that comprise marketing: product, price and place. In other words, start with a vision that stems from an understanding of the marketplace.

"Most schools throw tactical fixes at strategic problems," says Steven Kappler, Stamats Communications consultant. A school with a high adult population recently struggled with falling retention. The error lay in a program and operations structure that discouraged enrollees with day-time jobs. There were no night courses, no service-related areas of the school open after 4:30 p.m., and about 60 percent of the courses started too early at 5:30 p.m., Kappler says.

2. Spending too little on research. Research underpins strategy by answering questions such as what is the school's product, who are its competitors, and what messages work with its target audiences.

With a non-matriculant survey by phone, for example, a college could discover why students completed the application process but failed to show up. Schools may discover which teens are most likely to succeed by building a profile of "persisters" through a study of seniors or recent graduates.

"Higher education tends to base decisions on anecdotal wisdom and gut instinct. That works 85 percent of the time. The other 15 percent is the difference between making your class and getting the best students," says Kappler.

Adds Marketing Mentors consultant Dot Siegfried, emphasizing the need for research: "Schools are creating programs before finding out if there is a market for them. So they build a DeLorean when a Taurus will do the job."

3. Failing to define a clear, meaningful brand image. Colleges have rightly moved from the aggressive, yet rather empty, advertising of the 1980s (one consultant points to Penn State's "Making Life Better" motto as an example of a tag that doesn't resonate). Branding must stem from core values, or real differences in price, services and programs. "Vivid descriptors" deriving from the mission and the strategy and are used in school's advertising and publications help get the "mind share" that must precede market share, says Kappler. Liberty University's "Big Man on Campus" recent ad campaign, for example, forcefully communicated that students who believe in a Christian God and favored a Christian-oriented curriculum will feel most at home at the school.

4. Emphasizing fluff over substance. While brand advertising can fail to convey real information, colleges' printed materials and Web sites must provide the substantive, detailed information that students look for today. View books that are long on art but short on descriptions, and shallow Web sites without course information, or links to other relevant sites, turn off students and parents. Teens, for example, want to know--besides details on courses--about the opportunities to win awards, or in postgraduate fellowship programs, says Villanova's Merritt.