Food For Thought

newmassdad
Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:17:19 +0000

The marketing issue is too often not well understood, especially when it comes to higher ed - colleges marketing themselves.

In brief, colleges need to brand themselves and differentiate themselves from others. Branding means, essentially, defining the place as standing for something, be it sports, professional training (as in wall street internships, an IVY specialty), intellectual activities, social life etc. Differentiation is a bit more subtle, but involves recognizing that you can’t be all things to all people, and recognizing that you are never going to win some competitive matches. For example, while UofC’s admissions materials may turn off some students, I have no doubt that Ted and co have studied this and decided that the turned off prospects would have never attended uofc anyway.

Then we enter the realm of revenue management - the art of getting enough full pay students to make the books balance. It is no surprise that uofc has not revised its fin aid policies to match Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford et al. They will never win against these schools based on $, I suspect they concluded, so why try.

Keep in mind that, although uofc would never discuss it, it is relatively easy to run “experiments” to test out various hypotheses regarding admissions practices, and I’m sure they do. They can easily offer more generous financial aid to targeted groups of students (targeted via any parameter you can imagine: zip code, type of HS, test scores, family income) to see what approaches have the desired impact. They can do retrospective or prospective analysis, and I’m sure they do both.

So, if you really want to exercise your brain, try to figure out what they’re trying to do (the message they are trying to convey, for example) with each action they take, be it uofc or anywhere else. You may see some interesting patterns.