College Recruiting: From Ivory Tower to Madison Ave.
A decade of image packaging has amounted to a virtual revolution in the post-secondary-school sales pitch. In other words, Willie Loman is alive and well on America’s college campuses.
Rather than take flak from friends, students who apply to Harvey Mudd College are advised in a letter from the California engineering school’s dean of admissions to “try saying it fast . . . it sounds a lot like Harvard Med.”
By the first snowfall, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology will mail out 2,500 “Ski Terre Haute” posters to prospective students. It depicts a skier poised on the slightest of hills, a cornfield with barn and silo in the background. “Average skiing conditions,” reads the fine print, “mellow wet corn on 72-inch packed-dirt base.” The president of the unsung Indiana college shrugs and grins. “We decided,” he says, “not to go with the ‘submarine races on the Wabash River’ idea.”
Luther College’s latest recruitment brochure sounds as if it borrowed its script from Joe Isuzu. The little liberal arts school in Iowa boasts a student-faculty ratio of 1 to 1 (“Well, actually it’s 14 to 1”) and claims the largest college endowment nationwide (“Well, Harvard’s is the largest . . . but ours is growing very fast”). The brochure’s title? Also a baldfaced lie: “World’s Greatest College.” Explains the public relations specialist who created the promo: “You can’t do this unless you’ve got the goods. Then you can make jokes about exaggerated claims. . . . Luther is a better college than people who’ve never heard of it think it is.”
Higher education has never had much in common with used-car sales. Like lawyers and doctors, the professorial rank traditionally has resisted the hard sell. As long as education was a seller’s market, American colleges and universities could snub marketing hype as beneath the dignity of the ivory tower. Recruiting was something football coaches did--not admissions directors.
All that has changed. Prompted in the mid-1970s by demographic forecasts that the nation’s population of 18-year-olds was about to drop off and remain low, admissions deans scurried to find ways to keep tuition checks coming and to fill dormitory bunks. The fact that marketing itself had graduated from crass commercialism to new-found respectability as a business science made it more palatable.
The result: A decade of image packaging at institutions of higher learning amounting to a virtual revolution in the post-secondary school sales pitch. In other words, Willie Loman is alive and well on America’s college campuses.
“If you go back 15 years, the common model of college admissions was a few people sitting in an office, and if somebody called or wrote, they’d send out an application,” says a communications administrator at an East Coast college. “Now we’re paying attention to what people want to know in selecting a college and to how can we most effectively get that information to them.”
For Western Maryland College, that meant hurdling a big obstacle. “From a marketing standpoint the name is a disaster,” says Bernice Thieblot, a specialist in college public relations hired by the school three years ago to put it back on the map. Oddly, where it’s located on the map is part of the problem.
“It is not in western Maryland,” she says. “It’s located in central Maryland, just north of Baltimore, in Westminster. And it is a private college, not a public one . . . named after the now-defunct Western Maryland Railroad.”
The president of the North Charles Street Design Organization in Baltimore, Thieblot is considered among the top experts in enhancing the image colleges present to prospective students. She has been doing it for 16 years, since just before the market got hot with what she calls “the admissions phenomenon.”
Her clients have been some of the heavyweights in higher education, from MIT to Oberlin to Vassar. To polish an image, she often tries to distinguish an institution’s strengths, debunk its worst myths, eliminate its weaknesses. With Western Maryland she couldn’t do that.
“They’ve got a lot of alumni who are attached to the name,” says Thieblot, who describes Western Maryland as a respectable, generic liberal arts college, the quintessential alma mater. “We just had to transcend that image.”
A fan of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” cartoons, especially the older ones that tweaked the nose of higher education, Thieblot decided “the cynicism reflected in his work might become a springboard for some things that needed to be said” about the school. With the artist’s permission, Thieblot produced several slick, full-color publications using blowups of the irreverent strips on the cover to alter slightly the perception of what the college stood for.
In 1986, the first year the “Doonesbury” package was mailed out, the initial requests from high schoolers for more information doubled. Campus visits by prospective students increased 38%. Applications went up 36%. Average SAT scores of applicants increased by 40 points. Last year, visits were up 110% and applications up 86%. “Not that much has changed from the way they had been recruiting,” Thieblot says. “The majority of the success is due to the communications.”
Thieblot also credits the Educational Testing Service (the folks in Princeton, N.J., who have monopolized the testing and ranking of college-bound high schoolers) with making the direct-mail approach practical for higher education. In 1972, ETS first made available to colleges its mailing lists of test takers and their scores. “Suddenly colleges could be much more . . . targeted,” she says. “They didn’t have to wait for the students to come to them.”
Few colleges wait anymore, but no longer are they looking simply for warm bodies to fill seats. With the reality of the demographics-scare less alarming than the predictions, many admissions offices are using pumped-up promotions to erase public misperceptions and to find “the right students”--those best suited for their environment and curriculum.
The University of Pennsylvania contacted Thieblot four years ago. Like other Ivy League schools, it had no trouble attracting applicants. But it had a nagging little problem. It is commonly confused with Penn State, half a state away from its campus in Philadelphia. “We devised a way to hit the name ‘Penn’ hard,” says Thieblot, who thought the full name was too much of a mouthful. “For purposes of admissions, now they are Penn.”
Reaching Minorities
To further distinguish the two, she produced a series of publications that made the most of Penn’s beloved founding father. Among other things Benjamin Franklin introduced to this country was rhubarb, reads the cover of one brochure, adding: “We think Penn is one of his better ideas.” Nearly a third of the students who received that mailing returned the reply card.
Many institutions have found that getting the polished word out has resulted in an increase in applicants who previously weren’t bound for that particular college, and often weren’t college-bound at all. “We don’t have a single client who is not working hard to recruit and maintain minorities,” says Thieblot. “We’re skinning that cat every which way we can.”
So far, Dartmouth College ranks sky high for the recruiting program it devised. The most remote of the Ivy League schools, it is located in Hanover, N.H. Few would deny Hanover’s beauty, a skiers’ paradise. And few would know without seeing it. So Dartmouth admissions officials came up with what colleagues jokingly refer to as “Air Dartmouth,” a so-called fly-in program that provides serious applicants with round-trip airline tickets to Hanover.
This year, the undergraduate school flew in a couple hundred “high fliers,” some of them minority students. And Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business Administration flew in a dozen--all minority prospects. That was no afterthought. News reports in the last few years have put the campus at the center of a racial tempest. “Our attempt is to help balance people’s perspective about what we’re all about up here,” says Sam Lundquist, director of admission at Tuck, “. . . to demonstrate by first-hand witness what is happening here.”
‘An Informed Decision’
Lundquist admits flying prospects to Hanover is expensive. But the program, paid for largely by alumni contributions, he says, is working. Of the fly-ins who visited Tuck this year, all have enrolled. “We want them to make an informed decision,” Lundquist says. “If they are going to turn us down, it should be because they know what they are doing.”
Richard Detweiler, associate vice president for planning and communications at Drew University, in Madison, N.J., believes marketing for a small school is perhaps the only effective way of attracting a pluralist student body. “The fact is that we are not a household word,” says Detweiler, who sends several classy and professionally produced publications to about 100,000 prospects each year to fill 375 freshman spaces.
“We need to draw our student body from people who aren’t just next door. The profile of what students you want to go to your school is broader than it was 15 years ago. We have to reach out to minority students and other demographics. From our point of view, marketing is absolutely necessary.”
When Samuel Hulbert agreed to a new and offbeat recruiting plan for Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, almost everyone saw it as risky at best. But he felt Rose-Hulman needed something to distinguish itself. An expensive, all-male institution founded in 1874, it has little name recognition and is surrounded by Indiana cornfields. Attracting students was no cinch.
“The majority of students at Rose-Hulman had never heard of the school their junior year in high school,” says Hulbert, probably the first college president to risk relying on wit to recruit freshmen. “Humor is the main way we’ve tried to overcome that. It was quite a gamble that really paid off.”
1st Line Fell Flat
Not immediately, though. Hulbert admits the school’s first punch line left no one rolling in the aisles. “That piece said something like, ‘Rose-Hulman--the school that sounds like the name of a lady wrestler.’ It didn’t go over too well.”
Since then, the school’s recruitment publications and tactics have become more sophisticated. In April, 45,000 computer-picked high school juniors received “the catapult piece,” which slips the basics about Rose-Hulman’s summer engineering and science program for high schoolers into bizarre artwork and restrained cleverness. “Rose-Hulman is not the name of your blind date to a fish fry,” the brochure deadpans.
Among numerous other mailings is “the nosy dean piece,” which pesters those who didn’t respond to the first piece, and an admissions catalogue describing Rose-Hulman as “a college for students who take their Tinkertoys seriously.” There’s also a mail-back video that tours the campus with a Joe Isuzu-inspired character.
“The average student who shows up at Rose-Hulman has received 39 communications from the school,” says Hulbert. “If it’s something a little bit crazy and colorful, our hope is that instead of throwing it in the basket because they’ve never heard of this place, they’ll look through it. . . . And usually the first piece of mail they get from a college is from Rose-Hulman. The Yales and Harvards aren’t so worried about getting to them first.”
Uproar Among Faculty
By the time Duncan Murdoch left Rose-Hulman in 1982 for Harvey Mudd College, he figured the risk of using humor to recruit students “had been minimized.” He figured wrong.
“A mushroom cloud went up among the faculty here,” says Murdoch, then dean of admissions and now vice president of development at the Claremont, Calif., school. “We had the pedestrian college brochure . . . with students sitting in the library and professors holding chalk. They were afraid we were being too frivolous.”
Murdoch designed “The Harvey Mudd College Junk Mail Premium Kit” anyway. Inside the cover (which announces, “For all of you who are fed up to here with dull, repetitive, pedestrian college brochures, pamphlets, posters . . .”) is complete information on the college, punctuated with one-liners. This year, despite warnings by professional publicists, he kept a line in Harvey Mudd’s new video that says, “This is not a cutthroat kind of place. Nobody is going to blow away your computer file or spit in your petri dish.”
“We’re getting our best kids on junk mail,” Murdoch says. “This year we had to turn down 80 national merit scholars. . . . I kind of laughed my way to the bank.”
While college recruiting has changed from lean-and-mean to thick-and-slick, using slapstick is the exception. Few PR specialists are even willing to venture beyond direct mail and into public advertising. Not the College of New Rochelle. Besides its print ads that have appeared in the New York Times and local newspapers in Westchester County, N.Y., the school put its name up in lights on Broadway recently. “We bought space on the huge flashing message lights at Times Square,” says Debbie Silverman, account executive at the Manhattan advertising firm Ruder Finn & Rotman, which handles the College of New Rochelle. “It was incredible.”
Concern About Hype
Frank Burtnett, executive director of the National Assn. of College Admission Counselors, worries that as college promotion becomes more like selling cornflakes, recruiting students will replace personal contact with hype.
“I saw a help-wanted ad for an admissions officer that listed the requirements as ‘good on the phone, direct mail and be able to close a deal,’ ” Burtnett says. “That blew my mind. Closing deals is terminology I don’t want to hear in this business.
