Colleges are spending a lot of money to attract students. They buy mailing lists. They hire marketing consultants and brand strategists. Some, according to this Wall Street Journal article,even pay big bucks for full time chief marketing officers. It’s the
old school of marketing, and not in a good way, the kind that spends lots of money to interrupt people with the right messages and hope that doing it often enough will convince those people to buy. It’s the same way advertising agencies try to sell toilet paper, potato chips, and washing machines.
If I were a chief marketing officer at a college, here’s what I’d do.
Slash the marketing budget to the bare minimum. No more ads. No more consultants. No more mailing lists or social media campaigns or anything else that isn’t absolutely necessary.
Then take all of that money and do something great for the students who are already there, something they’d talk about. Here are a few suggestions (not all would be appropriate for every college):
1. Meet every student’s full financial need.
2. Build the best career advising center in higher education and guarantee your students full-time employment within six months of graduation.
3. Put the faculty on notice that great teaching, not prolific publishing, is what will get them job security. Change “publish or
perish” to “inspire or retire.”
4. Put all your classes on video and spend what used to be class time having real, personal interactions between students and professors.
5. Create five programs that you can name in response to the question, “What is something students can get here that they can’t get anywhere else?” Hint: small classes, study abroad, and a library with over a million volumes won’t get the job done.
6. Offer remarkable tours that stand out from the collegiate competition.
7. Offer classes with outside experts. Example: “Sweat Equity 101:students will conceive of, launch, and manage a business funded by the instructor, Dallas Mavericks owner and self made billionaire Mark Cuban.”
8. Have professors lead teams of students to solve interesting real problems, like researching an AIDS vaccine, building solar powered machines, harvesting sustainable crops, or fundraising to save a failing local non-profit.
9. At the end of every semester, give every student the means to film a 10 minute video montage entitled “What I learned—and did—last semester.” Then send it home to their parents.
10. Stop playing the marketing game. Accept that you’re not for everybody and be honest about who will thrive on campus. Make it your goal to attract the right students, not to get as many applications as possible. And tell US News to shove their rankings.
If word of mouth is the best marketing, the best way to spend marketing money might be to give your students more experiences worth talking about.