The D-word makes Robert A. Sevier cringe. He sees it everywhere, in college brochures and strategic plans. The word is “distinctive,” and he urges clients not to fall in love with it.
Mr. Sevier, senior vice president for strategy at Stamats Inc., a consulting firm, is all for academic programs that might differentiate one institution from another. Yet focusing on distinctiveness, he believes, can lead to a dangerous assumption: If a college cherishes an offering, everyone else will, too. “You can be really good at something,” he says, “but if people don’t want it, it’s not a competitive advantage.”
In short, distinctiveness that generates insufficient revenue is nothing to crow about. So it’s worth asking whom an institution’s strategies and messages are really serving. Only after getting over its “institutional centricity,” Mr. Sevier says, can a college determine how to meet the needs of prospective students.
In an uncertain climate, that’s a difficult task. Although colleges define their marketing challenges in different ways, some prevalent trends suggest that a balanced strategy is important. Many colleges are pairing increasingly high-tech recruitment with old-fashioned outreach. They’re doubling down on traditional markets while targeting farther-away geographic areas more selectively than before. And they’re learning how to define themselves, in part, by soliciting others’ opinions.
Knowing how you’re perceived is important, say officials at Murray State University. Recently the Kentucky institution commissioned a survey of current and prospective students. The results stung. “The perception was that Murray State was really cheap,” says Fred Dietz, associate vice president for enrollment management. “But they did not see quality attached to that price tag.”
Murray State had long promoted its affordability. But it hadn’t done as well in describing its academic programs and student outcomes, Mr. Dietz says. Sure, officials had hoped for stronger incoming classes and better retention rates. “But we were kind of stagnant. We were expecting different results but kind of doing the same thing.”
After the survey, Murray State beefed up its admission requirements, bolstered scholarships for high-achieving students, created an honors college, and revamped recruitment materials to emphasize academic success. With a declining population of high-school graduates in its own backyard, it also hired an admissions officer to work from Louisville, and it stepped up outreach in Nashville and St. Louis.
Not all students are in the same circumstances, of course, so Murray State is also thinking harder about how subgroups differ. The admissions office now divides its applicant pool into four tiers, based on grades and test scores, and each group of applicants receives a different acceptance letter. (The best performers hear about the honors college and research opportunities, for instance, and those likely to need the most help get information about academic support.)
Raising standards can be risky. As of mid-January, Murray State had denied 400 applicants, compared with 70 at the same point last year. (It welcomed nearly 1,500 freshmen last fall.) How that might affect next fall’s enrollment remains to be seen. Yet Mr. Dietz is optimistic. The recent survey, he says, has sparked a campuswide conversation about quality: “It led us to hold off on any type of branding, and right now you don’t see a fancy tagline, because we’re taking the time to see where these changes take us.”
Sometimes a new branding campaign makes sense. Especially if it captures what’s already true about a campus, says Rob Westervelt, executive vice president for enrollment and marketing at George Fox University, a Christian institution in Oregon with about 2,300 undergraduates.
The university’s “Be Known” brand was born in 2010. According to the pitch, each student who enrolls on the small campus will be known “personally, academically, and spiritually.” That message seems to have resonated with families who visit the campus. “Part of marketing is listening,” Mr. Westervelt says, “and what we would continuously hear from parents was, ‘I don’t want my kid to fall through the cracks.’ "
Still, a message won’t help if it reaches the wrong students. George Fox has retooled its enrollment operation by hiring data scientists and software engineers. They’ve helped focus resources on the most-promising prospects — in Oregon, Washington, and along California’s I-5 corridor — while building an automated messaging system. “Sometimes it would take us a week to get information back to students,” Mr. Westervelt says. “Now it’s a 24-hour turnaround.” For this year’s freshman class, the university received substantially fewer inquires than it did the previous year, but it enrolled 46 percent more students.
To reverse a college’s fortunes, one need not reinvent the wheel. After a drop in enrollment over a period of about eight years, the University of Alabama at Huntsville has taken a “common-sense approach” to outreach, says Sally Badoud, director of marketing and student recruitment. That meant buying more names of prospective applicants and engaging those who showed an interest with a series of revamped mailings and emails. “Our postage cost is probably crazy compared to what it was,” she says, “but you can’t beat getting a cool postcard in your mailbox.”
The university had to overcome what Ms. Badoud describes as an “awareness problem” — the perception that it was just an engineering school for local kids. She made sure prospective students heard about campus life, the nursing program, and those undergraduates interning up the road at Boeing.
Meanwhile, Huntsville created more events for prospective students, overhauled the campus tour, cut its eight-page application down to a single front-and-back sheet, and waived application fees for students who attend recruitment events. Those and other changes have helped the university attract more students. This past fall the number of first-time freshmen increased by 45 percent, part of a long-term plan to increase enrollment.
Although Huntsville still recruits in other states, it has pulled back considerably, removing regional admissions officers who were based in Georgia and Texas. Now Ms. Badoud wants the staff to visit each county in Alabama, even if that means taking just one high-school counselor to breakfast. “We’re definitely working our local territory harder than we ever have,” she says.
A localized approach makes sense to Bob Johnson, a Michigan-based marketing consultant who works with colleges. After all, most students don’t travel very far from home.
Moreover, colleges often leave students “on the table,” he says, by not following up with them in a timely — or meaningful — fashion. When a prospective applicant flags her interest in a specific major, does she hear back from anyone in that department? When ACT/SAT takers report their scores to a college, an indication of interest, are they treated like just another prospect in the pool?
The answers to such questions matter. “You don’t go looking for a new gold mine,” Mr. Johnson says, “until you’re sure you’ve got all the gold out of the mine you’re in.”
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
