How to Market a College in a Troubled Locale

Sean Proctor for The Chronicle

Antoine M. Garibaldi remembers what it used to be like for prospective students to visit the University of Detroit Mercy. When he took over as president, in 2011, anyone coming up Livernois Avenue, a main artery that borders the campus, encountered rusted light poles with dead bulbs along the scruffy streetscape. The city declared bankruptcy two years later.

Livernois now sports new light fixtures and a landscaped median. Things are looking up for Detroit — and for Detroit Mercy and nearby Wayne State University as well. A revitalized downtown has helped the city begin to rebound from its nadir as an international symbol of urban decay and dysfunction. Its two largest universities have increased their once-sagging enrollments, even as the number of high-school graduates in Michigan continues to drop.

Turning Your Location From Albatross to Asset

Your college is bustling and brimming with talent, but it’s in a traditionally distressed downtown or a rural Nowheresville. How do you get the word out to students who would thrive there?

• Tips on Making the Most of Your College’s Location
• How a College in a Sleepy Town Energized Itself

As the two institutions have benefited from Detroit’s gradual turnaround, however, they have had to contend with its lingering reputation as a near-ruin. “The image of the city was detrimental for people wanting to come into the city to study,” says Deborah Stieffel, vice president for enrollment and student affairs at Detroit Mercy since 2013.

Incoming classes at Detroit Mercy have risen above 500 for the first time in recent memory; this fall, the campus welcomed 550 new freshmen. The number of full-time freshmen at Wayne State rose from 2,588 in the fall of 2016 to 2,653 in 2017.

The secret to the colleges’ recent enrollment success is that there is no secret — or at least no single tactic or killer app. They have relied on a suite of efforts to step up their recruitment game, lower barriers to entry for students, and shift perceptions of their location from an albatross to an asset. “There are no silver bullets, but there’s a lot of silver buckshot,” says Dawn Medley, associate vice president for enrollment management at Wayne State since 2016.

Relationships Matter

Both enrollment managers knew that Hail Mary gambles on far-flung recruitment efforts were less likely to help than was building a solid local ground game. About 90 percent of students at both Detroit Mercy and Wayne State come from within 100 miles of Detroit, and that demographic was unlikely to change much. Rather than spend precious resources trying to lure Californians, for example, to snowy Michigan, Ms. Medley says, “I’d rather go and get those students who are closer.”

At Detroit Mercy, a Roman Catholic institution, revitalized recruitment started with visiting the more than two dozen Catholic high schools in the region. “It wasn’t just pushing paper across the table,” Ms. Stieffel says. “It was developing relationships with families and all the people who might refer a student to our institution.”

Outreach needn’t be limited to recruiting efforts. Since some Detroit high schools lack libraries, Wayne State is designing a workshop to make sure schoolteachers and students know that the university has resources they can use.

Sean Proctor for The Chronicle

It was clear at both institutions that recruitment couldn’t be left only to a few administrators and counselors. Improved enrollment had to be a campuswide effort. Wayne State has created a community-ambassador program that has trained more than 200 students and faculty and staff members on how to be a resource for information about the university. A casual conversation at a soccer match or in a waiting room can be turned into an information session. Ms. Medley and her staff hand out cards reading “Caught in the act of radical hospitality” when they spot someone making a visitor on the campus feel welcome. Recipients are invited to periodic events celebrating their efforts, reinforcing the role that ordinary stakeholders can play.

As with so many other things at a college, leadership can make a crucial difference. The gregarious Mr. Garibaldi makes many high-school visits himself, sniffing out Detroit Mercy alumni among administrators and putting the institution on their radar.

Ms. Stieffel says the president is her secret weapon: “He may not have met you before, but he knows someone who knows you, and he knows their kid and he knows their dog, and he can always remember their name.”

Building a team means building relationships within the institution, too. “Make a lot of friends on campus,” Ms. Stieffel says — and not just among faculty members or others who may play an obvious part in recruitment. Detroit Mercy needed new software for managing customer relations, but she didn’t have enough money in her budget. Her conversations with Edward G. Tracy, associate vice president for information-technology services, led to his department’s paying half the cost.

A Path to ‘Yes’

The two universities not only doubled down on reaching out to students in the Detroit area but also changed how they communicate with them, and what they said. In years past, Wayne State had typically sent large packages of printed information — admissions forms, financial-aid information, invitations to open houses — all at once. “That would save money on postage, but it wasn’t establishing a relationship with the student,” Ms. Medley says. Now the university stays in more frequent contact with prospective students, through calls, emails, and texts. It is testing an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot to answer questions at all hours.

The university reminds potential applicants about forthcoming deadlines, answers questions, and provides advice on financial aid, so that prospects “see us as a support system and not just the big behemoth that they have to go up against,” Ms. Medley says.

Wayne State has also tried to expand its enrollment by making the process less intimidating for students who are from lower-income backgrounds or, especially, who are first-generation college attendees. (Nearly 50 percent of students there are Pell-eligible, and about the same proportion are first-generation.) The university has begun waiving the application fee for any student identified as first-generation. Those students, and their parents, then get additional contacts from counselors, along with invitations to events regarding financial literacy and what to expect from the college-application process.

Wayne State has also re-examined its institutional aid to make sure the funds are going to those who most need the help. Ms. Medley’s enrollment-management office has tried to make sure that endowed scholarships are used as efficiently as possible for merit-based aid, so that institutional dollars can be used for students in need. A new program called the Wayne Access Award uses institutional aid to cover any gap left over after Pell Grants and scholarships. Ms. Medley has become an evangelist for RaiseMe, a program sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that allows high-school students to earn microscholarships for academic milestones to help pay for college — say, a $150 award for an A in a class.

All the financial-aid maneuvering is designed not only to build Wayne State’s enrollment but also to enroll more students who need the education it offers. “We need to find a path to ‘yes,’ " Ms. Medley says. “That is the philosophy that we’re working on all the time.”

Detroit Mercy recently announced an effort to make college-going costs seem less intimidating: a tuition reset, from $41,258 to $28,000. “Students would write us off before we even got a chance to put our actual package on the table, because they saw the $41,000 price tag and said, Oh, I can’t afford to go there,” Ms. Stieffel. “What we are trying to do is bring the price down closer to what people actually pay.”

Challenge and Opportunity

What about the challenge of Detroit itself? Ms. Stieffel arrived at Detroit Mercy the same year the city declared bankruptcy. But she had served as dean of admissions at Loyola University New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and during the first years of its recovery. “Disasters are really, really bad,” she says, “but they also provide opportunities for you to learn some things.”

It was clear to her that Detroit Mercy needed to own its location. The university’s recruiting material at the time seemed to downplay the city, she noticed. “The word ‘Detroit’ was not front and center, and it had to be,” she says. “You can’t not say it. And you have to find and promote the reasons why people might come to Detroit to study.”

The idea of living and studying in Detroit appeals to many members of Generation Z, Ms. Stieffel says. “Students these days, we were finding, are driven by mission, interested in working in their own communities to build their own communities.”

With the combination of many entrenched problems and the recent renewal sparked by significant investments by the Detroit native Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, Detroit can offer a rich mix of challenge and opportunity for some applicants.

Matt Sutton, a graduate of Detroit Mercy and a master’s candidate in its architecture program, says his father’s family lived just two blocks from the campus during the 1967 riots that set the city aflame. They moved out of Detroit, and eventually to Royal Oak, a suburb where Mr. Sutton attended high school. When he began looking at colleges, in 2011, he grew interested in Detroit Mercy’s School of Architecture and planned a visit to the campus, he says, despite his “expectation that everything was going to be run-down.” He was pleasantly surprised to find that it was “kind of like every other college campus.”

Detroit Mercy has a particular appeal to architecture students, Mr. Sutton says, because its School of Architecture also houses the Detroit Collaborative Design Collective, a nonprofit architecture-and-design firm dedicated to revitalizing the city. “It’s beneficial for the students to have a practice actually inside the building, working on improving the community,” he says.

Students may see the appeal, but Mom and Dad were sometimes another matter. “Parents were a little more, ‘Well, I don’t know if I trust Detroit,’ " Ms. Stieffel says. She and her staff worked hard to get both students and their families to visit the campus, which borders blocks full of vacant houses but also some of the toniest streets in the city. Many local parents hadn’t even driven by Detroit Mercy in 15 years, and a visit to the 91-acre main campus served to assuage their worries.

The university offers a $1,000 financial-aid grant, renewable for four years, to high-school students who visit before March 1 of their senior year. “That made them come and see what we had to offer here,” Ms. Stieffel says.

The truth is that the city’s past reputation doesn’t matter much to today’s high-school students. “They don’t know what happened in Detroit 10 years ago,” Ms. Medley says. “They were little kids.”

Students visiting Wayne State find a bustling campus in a neighborhood, Midtown, that has benefited from the renewed vitality of downtown.

Perhaps nothing persuades students and their parents to get excited about a university more than a university that is excited about itself. “Find what makes you amazing and spend your time sharing that,” Ms. Medley says. But “they have to know it’s real.”

The combination of a good academic program, good outreach, and a distinctive mission can help colleges make good matches with students. Stella Costello, now a senior at Detroit Mercy, was one of those suburban Catholic high-school juniors who took an early tour of the campus. The nursing program, she found, fit her educational goals. She was “a little bit” nervous about attending school in Detroit, she says, but Detroit Mercy’s emphasis on improving the city helped seal the deal.

“My family’s really about service work and giving back,” she says. Ms. Costello herself began volunteering in elementary school, at a soup kitchen managed by her mother. “That’s one of the things I liked about U of D,” she says, using students’ nickname for the University of Detroit. “They’re clearly focused on the community they’re in.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.