Fort Worth — Individual community colleges can’t match the marketing budgets of for-profit institutions that plaster their regions with advertisements. So they’re exploring ways to fight back by going national, pooling their efforts to promote online programs in a new marketing collaboration that was announced Sunday at a distance-education conference here.
The discussions, led by the American Association of Community Colleges, represent a fresh spin on an older strength-in-numbers distance-learning vision called the International Community College, which failed to get off the ground after four years of planning.
The distance-education landscape has changed drastically since that telecourse project. Both for-profits and an increasingly aggressive group of traditional four-year colleges now often recruit by purchasing “leads” on potential students that are parcelled out by online portals – a game community colleges have generally not joined.
The new national collaboration might look at how community colleges could exploit that tactic, perhaps by putting up a lead-generation Web site, said Pamela K. Quinn, an association board member who is provost of the distance-learning arm of the Dallas County Community College District.
Planning is at an early stage, she said, but one outcome could be an online clearinghouse that could showcase programs that train workers for particular jobs – say, veterinary technician. The project would cost “millions,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview Sunday at an e-learning conference put on by the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the national community-college umbrella group.
Institutions participating in the talks include the Dallas district, Foothill-De Anza Community College, Rio Salado College, and Northern Virginia Community College.
For-profit institutions have chased community-college students for years, and the financial power they bring to the competition is daunting. For the three-month period ending November 30, 2009, the Apollo Group, parent of the University of Phoenix, spent $275-million on “selling and promotional” expenses, or about 20 percent of its total net revenue of $1.3-billion for that quarter, according to a report the company submitted to the government. To put that in perspective, the Dallas district’s distance-learning marketing budget is about $150,000.
Ms. Quinn sees how that lopsided competition plays out locally – for example, in the case of her husband’s barber. He got sold on a for-profit college without exploring cheaper local online options.
“He just didn’t even know what was available five miles from him, and yet he knew what’s available on the national scene,” she said. “I don’t think anybody who wants to be active in the future can afford to not pay attention to how successful some of the for-profits are becoming.”
She added, “We want to make sure students understand their options and aren’t going into debt to get a degree. There are probably a lot of people out there that don’t know what their options are, and they’ve been very impressed with some of the very fancy glitzy advertising that’s out there.”
