Food For Thought

unalove
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:04:37 +0000

I found this blog entry on another patch of the internet, and I thought it was worth sharing:

[The Risk Of Insult Is The Price of Clarity U B r a n d e r](Private Site)

A couple of things to consider:

1. People make money based getting you to apply to the school that they’re working for.

2. The people who make money doing this have to balance a careful line between making their college universally appealing without being too general and making their college distinct without being too polarizing.

I felt that this blog entry was particularly interesting in light of a lot of university image discussions we have here. The university pays people to send you a “Life of the Mind” catalog and funny postcards, which distinguishes Chicago as an intellectual and offbeat school but probably turns off a lot of students in the process. (Some students probably think “Oh, I don’t want to go to a school where I have to do a lot of work!” in which case I say good riddance, but I’m afraid there’s a significant group of kids who say, “Yeah, I like the idea of reading Marx and Plato for class, but this brochure is so darn self-righteous and snooty!”, in which case I’m angry the brochure was such a turn-off).

For those who haven’t seen our marketing, you can see it here:
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/lifeofthemind/

On my end, as a high school student, I did the best I could to ignore college marketing for exactly these reasons: the people being paid to market a school to me were not the people I was going to be attending classes with, so why bother paying attention to what schools were sending me? At the same time, I did read what was sent to me, and while I don’t remember Chicago’s stuff at all, I remember that Brandeis, USC, Harvey Mudd, and Reed all sent me material that appealed to me.

I guess my general question is: to what extent has U of C-issued marketing played into your conception of the school? Do you think the marketing is truthful? Effective? Did it key you into the school or did it turn you away? If you’ve visited the school or know people who have attended, how does your impression of what you’ve seen (or heard) differ from what you’ve read?