Times are only getting tougher for small private liberal-arts colleges, but a prominent management consultant said on Tuesday that they can help themselves by emphasizing their advantages.
The consultant, George Dehne, said that to attract the best students, small colleges need to update their marketing campaigns to advertise not just that they have small class sizes but why that is important.
Colleges should be emphasizing to students that “you have to be prepared—you can’t hide in a small class,” he said at a session of the annual meeting here of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “You have to be able to defend your views. You are going to learn from others.”
Those are aspects of the college experience that prospective students would find attractive, said Mr. Dehne. Some other positive traits about small colleges are the students’ ability to customize their majors and pursue double majors, to get personal attention, and “to participate in the life of the college.”
But most small colleges are not emphasizing those strengths.
“You can’t compete on the number of professors or the number of majors,” Mr. Dehne said. “So you have to show them what you do have and tell them why they should want it.”
Mr. Dehne’s Connecticut-based company, GDA Integrated Services, does management, marketing, fund-raising and admissions consulting for higher-education institutions. It has worked with more than 400 colleges in the United States.
The company’s latest surveys of potential college students and their parents show that students are increasingly gravitating to larger urban colleges and universities. In fact, only one in 10 incoming students would even consider going to college at a rural location or in a small town, where many small colleges tend to be.
Students see larger universities as more challenging, more diverse, more fun, and better for career preparation, the surveys found.
About half of students said they would prefer to go to a college where graduate assistants teach some of the classes.
“We believe that has to do with a student’s desire to relate to people closer to their own age,” said Christopher Small, executive vice president of GDA. “That makes it essential, in our view, that you involve faculty in the [student] recruitment process, to prove that they are approachable.”
Small colleges should also be looking at what business leaders say they need in recent graduates but are not getting: global knowledge, self-direction, writing ability, and critical-thinking skills. Then they should emphasize how a broad education in the liberal arts helps to hone those skills, said Mr. Dehne.
Even with that, it is a tough sell.
“I never talked to a freshman who found the liberal arts useful,” said Mr. Dehne. “I never talked to a senior who didn’t.”