Everyone can name the big, nationally known universities that have raised their profiles dramatically over the past couple of decades: Boston University, Drexel University, New York University, Northeastern University, and the University of Southern California, to name a few. Others might know smaller institutions that have either honed great reputations in their markets or are on the rise—places like Ball State University, Portland State University, Texas Christian University, the University of Toledo, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Higher education has scores of top-drawer institutions, but universities like these have that certain something right now that others are striving for. Through strong leadership, a focus on excellent programs, or being attuned to something in the zeitgeist, they have created a perception that they belong at the top of the heap.
If a college wanted to join their ranks, how would it do so?
Some contend that good reputations are often built on a degree of luck (say, a basketball team that goes to the Final Four), accompanied by some opportunistic marketing. Others see it as a long slog in forging public perceptions of a college’s programs and mission.
“It’s one of those things that you really can’t bottle,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. Some colleges break out for clear reasons, he says—they have a program suited to the economic times, or they are located in a hot city, or they receive favorable publicity from some unexpected quarter. “Other people find it for reasons that are much harder to justify.”
“The question is not whether you can become a desirable institution, but whether you can remain one.”
Here we outline some principles of slowly and sustainably building a perception of greatness, as identified by experts in higher education.
First, some caveats: “Quality” means different things to different people. A small liberal-arts college in Iowa might be a destination in the eyes of a high-school graduate from a Midwest farm family. But the son or daughter of a well-to-do Boston family might consider an Ivy League institution the only choice. If students want to marry religion with their education, they could see quality in Baylor or Brigham Young. Those interested in the environment might look to Warren Wilson College.
Also, when considering which institutions to feature, we sought to get beyond rankings. Although they play a strong role in public perceptions of quality, rankings can be fairly static and require vastly different institutions to be assessed by the same metrics.
“There are no real models,” says Larry D. Lauer, vice chancellor for government affairs at Texas Christian University, whom many consider a guru of higher-education marketing. “While academic institutions seem to be alike in many ways, they have completely different sets of circumstances that require each of them to figure out how they are going to build their reputations in ways that are feasible for them.”
And while many experts agree that the principles here are sensible and straightforward, they also acknowledge that institutions on the whole don’t stick to them.
“Colleges could create this whole package: Here’s who I am, here’s what you get for it, here’s how we communicate it, and here’s how the leadership drives it—and yet institutions don’t do it,” says Richard Staisloff, a former chief financial officer at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, who is now a college-management consultant. “That is the fascinating part.”
Playing to Your Strengths
High-quality institutions pay attention to what George Keller advised higher education nearly 30 years ago: They have identified unique or distinctive strengths in their programs and put resources into those, perhaps at the expense of others. Mr. Keller, a well-known scholar of higher education, who died in 2007, argued that this was a prudent strategy in the financially challenging times of the 1970s and 80s—a perspective that may be even truer today than it was then.
Eva Klein, a higher-education strategic-planning consultant, says the advent of the Internet has only added to the importance of this strategy. In earlier times, a college had a largely captive local audience. Now, increasingly, students have all sorts of options. “If you can get Peter Drucker on the Internet, why would you want a mediocre marketing instructor?” she says.
She points to the University of Toledo as one institution that has focused on a few areas, including renewable energy (especially solar), biomarkers in medicine, transportation logistics, and advanced manufacturing. The university already had strong programs in these areas and determined that they would be among the most relevant to the local business community and future business trends. Its solar-energy programs, for example, have joined with local energy and research companies to collaborate on a carbon-neutral tech-business park.
“If we tried to follow in the footsteps of the University of Michigan, we could work as hard as we can for the rest of our lives and never catch up,” says Lloyd A. Jacobs, Toledo’s president. “So we’re convinced that we have to chart our own course, and we believe that means being better and deeper—selecting certain peaks of excellence to strive for.”
Some colleges have gotten mileage out of the distinctive way they deliver education. Ball State University’s immersive-learning program, which requires students to complete projects for practical experience in the off-campus world, stands out. Northeastern University’s required cooperative-education program, long a central part of its mission, is in demand at a time when students want practical skills from a college education. For the fall of 2010, the university got 38,000 applications for 2,800 slots (one measure of demand, if an imperfect one).
Many colleges have been reluctant to focus on just a few strengths. “They don’t want to pick favorites,” says Mr. Hartle, of the American Council on Education. The process “can be challenging on a university campus where all parts of the institution want to believe that they are equally important parts of the whole.”
But Richard A. Hesel, a principal of the Art & Science Group, a strategic-planning and marketing firm in Baltimore, suggests that even elite universities can end up diminishing and diluting the impact of all of their programs by refusing to highlight a few.
“You are in a stronger position if students perceive superb quality in three or four fields,” he says. “There is this kind of spillover effect. They know you are strong in three or four fields, and they assume that you are strong across the board.”
Putting a Face at the Top
Nearly all of our experts agree on one thing: Colleges can either thrive or founder on the basis of their leaders. Mr. Staisloff, the consultant, calls college leadership the No. 1 factor in determining institutional success.
“There is an element of clear, strong leadership that is not going to take no for an answer,” he says. “They are leaders that are willing to point the way. Instead of saying, ‘We’re going to try to get buy-in and bring everyone along,’ they say, ‘That’s where we’re going—let’s go.’”
These leaders have some balance of charisma, vision, and sometimes aggressive self-confidence. Everyone would think of Michael M. Crow at Arizona State University, Scott S. Cowen at Tulane University, Nancy Cantor at Syracuse University, and the legacies of Stephen J. Trachtenberg at George Washington University and the late Constantine N. Papadakis at Drexel University. But there are many lesser-known yet effective leaders: Mr. Staisloff points to Kevin J. Manning, who has helped raise the profile of Stevenson University, near Baltimore. Once primarily known as a career-oriented two-year institution for women, under the name Villa Julie College, Stevenson rebranded itself with a name change, expanded its campuses, and sponsored a big-name speaker series, while retaining its appeal as an institution that sends graduates into jobs.
“Did they have good people around them? Absolutely. Did they have a foundation to build on? No question,” Mr. Staisloff says. “But they had the vision and the willingness to drive it. There are some leaders who have a sense of the vision, but they can’t drive it. They are too vested. They want to keep being president.”
Jeffrey Papa and Tom Hayes, executives with the college-marketing firm SimpsonScarborough, point to the 20-60-20 rule about organizations as a major stumbling block: While 20 percent of employees will be enthusiastic about organizational change and 60 percent could be persuaded to go along, the remaining 20 percent will resist no matter what—and those could be longtime, tenured faculty members. “The people who don’t make the transition moving forward are the presidents who spend too much time and energy trying to persuade those 20 percent who are never going to change,” Mr. Hayes says. “At some point you have to give the get-on-the-train speech: We love you people, but we’re going.”
Some of the most effective leaders have also had a lot of time in the chair, or have a long history with the college, or continue policies that were established before they arrived.
Consider Eugene P. Trani, who retired last year after 19 years as president of Virginia Commonwealth University (and who said he had never taken a sick day until quintuple-bypass surgery led him to give up his post): Under his leadership, enrollment grew by nearly 50 percent, annual-gift totals went from an average of $11-million to $58-million, the endowment and other investments increased from $64-million to $427-million, and the university opened new buildings and colleges. Or David E. Shi, at Furman University: As both an alumnus and longtime president, he helped a relatively conservative Southern college play a part in the hot higher-ed trend of sustainability—and he brought attention to Furman in the process.
Many presidents stay at institutions for less than five years, however, and a mission or branding reboot often follows the arrival of a new leader. “Faculty and staff are saying, This too shall pass,” Mr. Hayes says. “You’re not going to have the internal commitment to someone you see as just another carpetbagger.”
Hot Town, College in the City
Call it the Richard Florida Effect: Mr. Florida, a professor in the school of business at the University of Toronto, has become well known for his controversial yet resonant theories about a “creative class” of Americans who, he argues, congregate in vibrant cities. Is it coincidence that “hot” colleges—New York University, George Washington University, the University of Southern California, to name a few—are located in coastal urban areas that Mr. Florida might approve of?
“There was a time when New York was not such a hot city, and I think one of the reasons that NYU took off was because New York became a very hot city,” Mr. Hartle says. GWU “consciously made an effort to make itself more visible based on the fact that it was just a couple of blocks from the White House, and that if you were interested in government or politics or foreign policy, you couldn’t find yourself in a better location.”
Portland State University has taken on several projects that help tie it to the crunchy culture of Portland, Ore.—including planning a landmark green building that will be shared by the university and local businesses, and developing partnerships with the Ford Motor Company and the local utility company to support experiments with electric cars. (A local beer company even named a pale ale, Portland State IPA, in honor of the university’s green efforts.)
Jerome A. Lucido, a professor in the school of education at the University of Southern California and director of its Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice, says people often complain that the latest generation of students are materialistic and selfish. But he finds that they are also energized by social issues and problems. Diverse cities, he says, provide a “laboratory” for problems facing an increasingly global society.
“I know a lot of students who show up at the doorsteps of USC and see the city as a major part of their education,” Mr. Lucido says.
Luanne Greene, who directs the campus-planning studio at the architecture firm Ayers Saint Gross, in Baltimore, says students often say they “like the safety of the bubble of the campus, but they want to be able to control their access to and engagement with the city.”
Colleges outside cities might have to embrace their own settings, an approach that has worked for Green Mountain College. The Vermont institution was financially troubled as recently as eight years ago, but it found a niche in emphasizing its programs in agriculture and the environment in its rural setting. Students with environmental sensibilities and significantly higher grade-point averages have started enrolling in greater numbers—especially since Green Mountain was dubbed America’s greenest college by Sierra magazine this year.
Colleges that are not in “hot” cities might build facilities to build excitement; after all, surveys show that students rank facilities among the top considerations when picking a college. Consider the University of Cincinnati, which raised its profile by commissioning star architects like Frank Gehry and Michael Graves to design new buildings. That helped put the campus on the map. Or colleges might use landmark buildings to enhance their location, as Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art did with a Thom Mayne academic building last year.
But Mr. Staisloff calls this “Field of Dreams impulse” a risky strategy. “In many instances, if that is the only play, that’s not enough,” he says. “It’s got to be done in conjunction with other symbols of quality.”
Showing Off Your Assets
Lots of colleges have strong programs. The ones that are perceived as high quality are better at promoting them.
Mr. Papa and Mr. Hayes, the marketers at SimpsonScarborough, say the colleges they visit invariably think of themselves as “hidden gems” or “best-kept secrets.” They are sometimes reluctant to publicize their successes. “They feel like [marketing] might be something that is less than authentic,” Mr. Papa says. His advice: “Get over it.”
Often, when consulting with colleges, the two men see marketing departments with too few staff members or insufficient resources to get the college’s story out. And the colleges’ marketing strategies are unfocused: A tenet of marketing is “consistency in message and action over time,” they say. (Mr. Papa and Mr. Hayes have seen colleges that have changed their marketing messages three times in as many years.) To start with, colleges need a position in their market that is authentic, in demand, and distinctive.
“Once you have that, everything drives that particular message home,” Mr. Hayes says.
Many people cite Texas Christian University, for example, as having a consistent marketing vision. It has effectively promoted both the institution’s growth and its ties to the cowboy-and-culture vibe of Fort Worth.
To raise perceptions of quality, colleges can be more deliberate about showing off their academic prominence, Mr. Hesel says. “You very deliberately plan the normal academic activities of the institution to leverage them to get media attention.” That means thinking strategically about what professors are doing in the classroom, in the lab, or at academic conferences, he says, and not being timid about promoting those activities in public.
The University of Rochester’s president, Joel Seligman, was good at that when he was dean of the law school at Washington University in St. Louis, raising the school’s profile in the process, says Mr. Hesel, the strategic-planning consultant.
Alumni are also key in conveying quality. When Mr. Hesel worked in fund raising at Princeton University, he always invited well-known graduates to events with prospective students and school counselors.
The alumni don’t need to be famous to be effective. Higher education, for the most part, does not provide a service that prospective students can touch, see, or feel, so alumni are integral in conveying what the college experience is like.
“It’s about telling stories,” Mr. Papa says. “If you can put someone in front of [prospective students] with whom they can connect, that can be really motivating.”
Looking From the Outside In
Successful institutions of the future will reframe the way they perceive themselves, even as the world changes the way it sees higher education.
“Higher ed has been riding a model since the G.I. Bill and post-World War II that is done,” Mr. Staisloff says. “I think some people have figured that out sooner than others. ... Higher education is so ripe for a reinvention.”
Colleges are accustomed to looking at themselves through a traditional set of metrics: numbers of graduates, graduation rates, degrees granted, percentage of faculty members with doctorates, and papers those professors turn out and where they are cited.
Colleges will have to learn to look at achievements from the perspective of the public and other constituents, says Ms. Klein, the strategic consultant. “The things that get measured that describe quality could be very different. I believe fervently that we have to completely change what we measure as outcomes.”
In other words, colleges must look at themselves from the “outside in” rather than just the “inside in,” she says. Do students graduate having learned how to solve problems? Were they prepared to enter the work force? Where are they 10 years after graduation?
Academics who resist this view might consider some recent market research at DePaul University. David H. Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management and marketing, says that when prospective students, parents, civic leaders, and others were asked about what makes an institution stand out, they cited some predictable factors: strong academic reputation and highly ranked academic programs among them.
But when DePaul officials looked at the factors that might lead people to recommend the university to others, those traditional measures dropped off the list and were replaced by more “outside in” factors: the balance between the academic and social experience, the support for career planning, the strength of the relationship between the university and the community, and the university’s engagement with global issues.
Standard measures of reputation still form some perceptions of quality, Mr. Kalsbeek says. “But those aren’t necessarily the qualities that most relate to a positive regard for the institution.”
