August
College Guides Irelevant?
Well here we are: number 37 in a category that has nothing to do with us.
Suffice it to say that I’m more likely to be publishing little news blurbs about Fiske rankings next week.
I tried to write something constructive about all this hullabaloo with US News rankings, but everything ended up being a half-reasoned rant (baby hasn’t been letting me sleep much lately…) To sum up my thoughts:
(Disclaimer: I’m talking personally and in general here after reading the news all day–not reacting to Warren Wilson’s policy in regard to guides, which I’m not really at liberty to discuss. Edit: Having had at least most of a good night’s sleep and gotten some comments on this, I feel the need to add some more disclaiming. This post is in places alternately unrealistic, reductionist, and narrow. Hopefully it’s still thought provoking.)
I feel as if college ranking guides are becomingly increasingly irrelevant to the youth market who, because of the internet, are much more accustomed to gathering, filtering, and evaluating their own information prior to making decisions. College guides remain the darlings of helicopter parents, certain administrators/trustees, and of the colleges that get ranked highly. Maybe when the current set of parents are grandparents we can finally look at casting off the big, problematic, and money-hungry guides. Probably not.
As always, I’m going to try to keep it relevant to my market. I didn’t look at the guides nine years ago when I was applying to college, nor did my friends. Students I talk to here at Wilson seem aware of them but report that they were largely disinterested or never cracked open the covers. The amount of attention guides receive nationally seems entirely out of proportion with where recruitment marketing goals should aim. Parents who still make purchasing decisions based on self-proclaimed authorities within a mass-media paradigm are a secondary audience to me. I am mainly interested in prospects who look to word-of-mouth and peer-moderated opinion much more than to any of the old media sources when considering their major decisions.
Think about it. You are selling a consumer product and are asked to prioritize two options to market your product to a young demographic:
1) Advertise with a paper-distributed Better Business Bureau-style buying guide
2) Advertise to influence Amazon.com user reviews and popular product-niche blogs and review sites
This should be a no-brainer. So why do we still persist with these guides? Give them the back-seat budget and attention that our other parent-targeted mailings and campaigns receive. As for marketing to your trustees/administrators: that’ll work great for you until your enrollment numbers end up in the can.
So who wants to head out with me and set up a wiki-based college guide? (Ha ha.. so much cringing out there. Come on, remember that marketing has to be about telling the truth these days.)
August 19th, 2006 at 12:37 am
A wiki-based college guide sounds brilliant, but I would be very concerned about stopping vandalism and administration-led sterilization. On wikipedia that isn’t a huge issue because it is an encyclopedia and thus intended to be objective fact, but would the “guide” be anything more than that? There are certainly out there today the “encyclopedia” style guides, but that would meet only a certain subset of the market’s needs. Maybe it would suffice, but everyone I know who’s tangled with the guides tends to be fonder of the more subjective ones.
August 19th, 2006 at 7:20 am
“The amount of attention guides receive nationally seems entirely out of proportion with where recruitment marketing goals should aim. Parents who still make purchasing decisions based on self-proclaimed authorities within a mass-media paradigm are a secondary audience to me.”
So, I guess you don’t have any helicopter parents hovering at Wilson. I’m not sure that parents play the same role today than they did 10, 20 or 30 years ago in the college decision process. With rising education costs, some of them are not only parents, but major investors in their kids’ future. This generation is said to be one that relies a lot on parental advice when it comes to choosing a college.
Wilson’s prospective students might be different.
This being said, I’m not sure college guides should get as much attention as they get in our institutions.
Anyway, great post. Keep up the good blogging.
August 19th, 2006 at 11:07 am
This post certainly wasn’t about Warren Wilson’s policy so much as my “half-reasoned rant” about the whole issue. It does reach a reductionist, narrow, and unrealistic conclusion. But it isn’t without truth in places (I hope). Warren Wilson does have helicopter parents, and we do take the guides seriously. We are actually starting some new initiatives to get families more involved–give the helicopter parents something constructive to do.
I just wish recruitment marketing didn’t have to deal with two very different and distinct audiences. It definately feels like one of those “if you try to please everyone you end up pleasing no one” scenarios.
August 19th, 2006 at 11:13 am
You’re right, Sam. I was thinking about how this sort of wiki could work and basically thought that you’d have to limit it to discussion of campus culture and subjective evaluations of the effectiveness of its educational program. The admission numbers just wouldn’t work in a wiki environment, where anyone could login and change Harvard’s acceptance rate to 98.3% :) Then again, half the point of such an alternative approach to a college guide would be to not put so much emphasis on numbers that can be very misleading.
But no matter how it was implemented, you’d probably need some kind of devoted editorial staff to keep the libel and vandalism to a minimum.