Category: marketing

For student recruitment, rankings still matter

Here’s some disturbing news for those of us who wish college rankings would just go away:

According to recently publicized results of a poll of prospective college students, the rankings of college and university programs by media outlets like U.S. News & World Report continue to have a significant impact on the college search process.

The consulting firm Art & Science Group, conducted an online survey with 846 college-bound high school seniors in November and December 2012. Here’s what they found:

  • Two-thirds of students surveyed indicated that they had taken college rankings into account in their college application decisions.
  • Students with the highest SAT scores (1300 or higher) were more likely to have considered the rankings in their application decisions than students with SAT scores of less than 1300.
  • Nearly two-thirds of students surveyed “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that the rankings are “very important in trying to sort out the differences between colleges.”
  • About two-thirds, respectively, somewhat or strongly disagreed that the rankings “don’t matter” and that they “don’t matter to me, but they matter to my parents.”

So, yes, the rankings remain relevant. And with the proliferation of new ranking organizations out there, and the White House’s push to have a grading system for higher education, these types of numbers games will continue in a variety of forms. Just in the past year, we’ve seen the rise of many “ROI” (return on investment) rankings, like this one. Look for this trend to continue. Since U.S. News owns the reputational ranking category, other groups, from publications like Forbes and Washington Monthly to salary-information services like PayScale, will focus on ranking schools by ROI or affordability.

Beyond the rankings

But the Art & Science Group folks suggest other factors may play an even greater role in students’ decisions on picking a college. Things like “substantive and atmospheric insights and information from the campus visit, interactions with parents, information on the web and in print materials, and more personal forms of contact with prospective students … can have a greater influence than rankings.”

Furthermore, “we would argue against spending too much institutional time, money, and energy on hand wringing over rank per se and on attempts to improve it. For most institutions, it would be far better to focus on planning strategy that strengthens an institution’s competitive position on a substantive basis: differentiation based on educational approach, student experience, innovative teaching, and the like.”

In other words, your time is better spent developing and refining your institution’s brand persona and messaging, and developing ways to deliver that messaging to your prospective students.

Friday Five: The week’s must reads

Five posts for your weekend reading consideration:

  1. The best of #heweb13. Judging from all the Twitter talk earlier this week, the #heweb13 conference in Buffalo was a great success. (Kudos to Mark Greenfield and company for putting together such a stellar event.) For those of us who weren’t able to be there, we had the benefit of excellent coverage by the devoted crew of bloggers at LINK. Now another devoted blogger, Karine Joly, shares her 13 top LINK blog posts from the conference. (And she even gave up the chance to eat maple bacon ice cream to sift through all the LINK posts. Talk about dedication.)
  2. The Show Me State (of the art). I must admit, as a Missourian, I was hooked by Seth Godin’s headline. But the text below the headline should give all marketers pause. We spend so much time showing, revealing, offering samples, giving stuff away, just to draw in customers. Maybe in doing so, we’re hurting our causes. Maybe we should show a little less.
  3. 5 successful rebranding efforts. Every brand needs a little freshening up now and then. What do you think of these five efforts? Were they as successful as the author suggests?
  4. Here’s what the marketing organization of the future should look like. In this post, Forbes’ Jennifer Rooney reports on what a panel of top chief marketing officers (collectively called the Marketing2020 project) think their organizations should look like in 2020. The structures are more hub-and-spoke models of collaboration rather than hierarchical, and the “non-negotiable characteristics of the 2020 marketing organization” will include “a goal of business growth; a clear purpose; complete internal alignment of functional areas; clearly defined roles and responsibilities of each individual; research centers and data-informed efforts; an amalgam of agency partners as well as an in-house agency-like team; cross-platform social-media engagement; a strong CMO-CEO connection.” (Hat tip to @DebHammacher for sharing.)
  5. 10 rules for creative projects from painter Richard Diebenkorn, by Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings.