<p>invasion,
I did not attack UChicago marketing practice. It’s their money and they have a deep pocket; they can use it anyway they want. I was trying to come up with possible reasons why some other schools haven’t copied them given what UChicago has achieved. The end result is obvious, why there haven’t been more copy cats that match their level of effort? What’s holding them back?</p>
<p>You said some schools have already did the whole [marketing] thing. Maybe some schools out there did but that’s not NU. It never had a huge admission department; the FA has never been among the most generous; it doesn’t give merit-based scholarships… NU’s increase has been pretty gradual; remember NU has six schools with wide array of disciplines. It doesn’t need a lot of marketing to get applicants and frankly, 32,000 applications is nothing special these days and it’s only twice their numbers in 1995. A 100% increase over almost 20 years is really not all that exciting. Many schools have more and have seen bigger jump.</p>
<p>Cue,
Maybe those other schools marketed heavily in the mid-90s but not NU, at least not done by the admission office. I am looking at the historic data and the only sigificant jump happened when NU won the Big Ten and went to the Rose Bowl. Within college football, NU was the media darling in the fall of 1995 and 1996. But that’s not marketing from the admission office; it was just a feel-good Cinderella story in college football.</p>