An article in Science News describes how researchers at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon used high-dimensional geometry to analyze the results of US News & World Report’s college rankings. What they found wasn’t that the rankings are based on flawed criteria (they didn’t address that question) but that the rankings shift dramatically depending on how you prioritize the seven factors USNWR considers.

The researchers argue that the magazine has prioritized these factors arbitrarily, which biases its rankings. Their goal was to see what the rankings looked like if the data were analyzed in ways that took this inherent bias into account.

After reverse-engineering the USNWR data, the researchers mapped the schools onto a seven-dimensional space correlated to the seven criteria. (And that will be the last we speak of seven-dimensional space.) This kind of arrangement viewed all seven categories equally, so the researchers avoided any ranking bias.

Then they examined the schools, ranking the seven criteria in every possible combination. In other words, they modeled all of the possible priorities prospective students might have (and not just the set of priorities USNWR assumes they have, whatever that might be).

The results? They found that the top schools were unaffected—Harvard, Yale, Princeton still rate the highest since they score the highest in all criteria.

Schools that were a bit more uneven could vary wildly, though. Penn State, for example, was 48 according to the magazine’s criteria, but it could also be as high as 1 or as low as 59. That variability evolves because Penn State is the best at making sure students graduate, … but weaker in other aspects. UC Berkeley, on the other hand, was strong in most categories except for one: alumni giving. … As a result, although U.S. News rates UC Berkeley as 21, the university could go as high as 14 or as low as 36.

The researchers suggest that USNWR publish a variety of rankings that reflect representative sets of priorities to combat this bias.

–Taylor Trussell, Stein

I attended this morning’s presentation, Understanding the Impact of Social Media on College-Bound Youth, presented by David Peck from Azusa Pacific University and Pam Kiecker who heads up research at Royall & Company.  

While I don’t have specifics on the methodology used with the UrCompass panelists, here are some of the stats that I scribbled:

• 84% of high school students are on facebook or myspace. At colleges this number jumps to 94%.
• 16% of high school students have visited a school’s official page on one of these sites.
• 2.9% of high school students use social networking sites to get information on colleges.
• The top two things students are looking to gain from these pages are to check out current students and to get information from an official source at the school. 
• Most useful insider sites, respectively: College Confidential, ratemyprofessor.com, sparknotes.com 

Is this number small enough that schools can continue to stall on building their own official pages? The answer is no because students are building their own communities and relationships surrounding your institution. And if you aren’t part of that dialogue, you can’t influence the conversation.

Often times, admission offices and others in charge of outreach to prospective students worry that they are inundated with email and print publications, but the reality is that for students, MORE is BETTER. Information is power and students want as much as possible. This was found to be even more true with students from under-represented ethnic groups.

Will students perceive our efforts in social media to be forced? NO! They think it’s smart of schools to communicate through “their” media.

The most important conclusion from the session? Online interaction, however frequent and eye-opening, does not compare to face-to-face interaction. Use social media with the same goals as when institutions use viewbooks and email broadcast: Get them to campus! Visiting campus will reinforce and elevate relationships that might have started on social  networking sites.

Contributed by: Ross Lenhart
Senior Vice President, Stein Communications

Recently for The Scoop, I have written reviews about two books that I admired, both of which dealt with student selectivity — College Unranked and The Price of Admission. Both involved the nuances of student selectivity — one dealing with the influence that a faulty ranking system has on the public; and the other, with the swaying power that wealth, alumni, and political clout exerts on the college admission selection process. I suppose I am somewhat of a college admission junky. This is completely understandable seeing that as a student, I first started giving college tours and answering questions of prospects and families in 1964; and then commenced with a profession involving the selection of the college a student plans to attend and why, and also the selection of whom a college accepts and why. The selection process has always been a source of great fascination to me. You have to admit — it’s a rather simple process — the student researches, visits, applies, and waits. The college recruits, gathers information, makes a decision, and informs the student of that decision. For over forty years in my professional life, this is the way it has been. For me, it has been the only way of making such a match.

I thought I knew it all, but by being an interested party in the future plans of my son and daughter-in-law, I have stumbled on a whole new system of student selection. It’s a match that happens annually in March. Not a tennis match, not a soccer match, this is another form of institutional people matching — a people match like none other. I became interested by watching my daughter-in-law, armed with her new M.D. degree from Emory, as she embarked on her journey to find her place as a resident in a teaching hospital — not unlike a high school senior in search of a college. As admission officers talk often and proudly about their medical school acceptance rates, they might want to follow their students a bit more closely after their college graduation and watch the process that confronts them in the fourth year of medical school as they head towards residency and internships. It’s a fascinating process of student selection of which I was never aware — a matching process that is actually called The Match.

You know the drill — in the early part of the 20th century, hospitals offered internships with short deadlines to medical students, who were forced to make decisions without knowing what other offers might be forthcoming. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? On the other hand, hospitals were being left out to dry because students rejected their offers, and it was too late for the hospital to approach the next preferred candidate, as he or she had already decided on another hospital. And don’t forget about the salary consideration here. After four years of college and four years of med school, these offers from hospitals aren’t quite the same financially, as say, six-figure top offers from law firms graduating law students after only three years. Realistically, it’s more like an offer of financial aid somewhat like a flat salary. Hospitals didn’t have a system of a Candidate’s Reply Date and then relying on a waiting list, or a system of rolling admission that we know in undergraduate college admission today. It was a lose-lose situation. Not good for the student; not good for the hospital.

Thus, in 1952, the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) was established; and since that time, medical students have applied to hospitals in their disciplines, whether it be family practice, pediatrics, or internal medicine, through the NRMP as a clearinghouse. Imagine how hard it was to get everyone to cooperate in order to get this system underway? But a week ago, approximately 15,000 medical school students found out through this year’s residency match where they will spend the next several years — some in far away places or in places they never really wanted to go.

This is where is gets hazy for me, and pardon me if I don’t get too detailed — but basically, The Match is a system that relies heavily on the process of algorithms for matching interns and residents with hospitals. In other words, and very simply put in my own elementary terminology — The Match uses a computer program to make an effective match of a resident with a teaching hospital through a nationwide system that honors the individual student choices of where he or she may want to spend his or her residency, and matches those choices together with the student recruitment desires and needs of the hospital. Rather confusing, but they do it, and it seems to work. Here again, amazing how all those hospitals and all those resident candidates can cooperate.

The Match works like clockwork. It’s set up on a system of firm dates and mandatory responses. In her search for her match for a residency in ophthalmology, my daughter-in-law flew at her own expense to eleven cities from Miami to Philadelphia to Charleston to Austin to others in order to have a personal interview. These trips served to personally set her own numerical priorities for The Match as well as to satisfy the match priorities of the hospital.

One might question the total financial outlay of the resident candidate when considering that the hospital also benefits in getting their match priorities in order. In the last few years, The Match has recently endured a challenge by a group of physicians through a class action lawsuit alleging that The Match has violated antitrust laws by claiming that NRMP practices encouraged lower-than-competitive wages and imposed exhausting working conditions on residents.

As gender enrollment patterns changed in medical schools so have the accommodation considerations of The Match. In 1952, when The Match was launched, only two out of every ten medical school graduates were females. When my daughter-in-law graduated from Emory Medical School, the gender ratio in her class was fifty-fifty. Also consider the marriages, engagements, or partnerships that are bound to happen for some med students after four years of working and studying together intensely. Not wanting to split these relationships geographically, the NRMP also has developed a system of a Couples Match, allowing those who are married, engaged, or partnered to be selected or matched to the same teaching hospital together.

Once the medical specialty is selected, the multiple interview trips around the country taken, the different paperwork steps followed minutely and on time, the fourth year med student waits until a seemingly never-ending drum roll takes him or her to the nail biting date of March 20th. Last week at exactly 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Daylight Time, 15,000 students ripped open envelopes all at the same time and learned where they will train as doctors for the next several years.

Is it a sane method of compatible student selectivity, or just plain March Madness? For the answer, you might just want to consult your physician.

Sources:
The Journal of The American Medical Association, February 19, 2003.
The New England Journal of Medicine, January 23, 2003.

Contributed by: Sam Jackson
High School Senior, Phillips Exeter Academy

No matter how well-endowed a school may be, another finite resource will always be in short supply: time. The energies and attention of an admissions office must be focused for best success. Dynamic web marketing can be very effective. If you are considering using new web technologies to connect with prospective students, there are some things you should know; if you already do, there is still more to learn, for I have never seen an implementation that couldn’t benefit from audience feedback. Read carefully, because I speak for your audience.

The web is not a magical vehicle for marketing. With proper savvy, the internet can be coaxed into performing as a successful higher education marketing tool, but even the most polished of marketing attempts can fall flat if it loses touch with its target market — and what age group is more fickle than teenagers? The modern web offers untold opportunity for creative and effective marketing techniques to be utilized, but with these new tactics can come new abuse. I will cover some of the difficulties that arise when an institution seeks to exploit blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and the rest of Web 2.0 — and what can be done to avoid them. (This piece focuses specifically on blogs.)

There is one key principle which, if followed, almost guarantees a successful message: “Respect the consumer.” I have observed a few deadly sins of higher education marketing, but a lack of respect for us, the consumers of so much endless marketing tripe, is the worst and most frequently perpetrated! It’s important to remember that we millennials are not stupid, however ridiculous that name might be; we can see through the trimmings of traditional marketing copy and we resent pandering.

Disrespect manifests itself first and foremost through a lack of authenticity. Authenticity is more important for good, effective PR than anything else. The perception that a finely polished brand image is a reasonable trade-off for authenticity is a false one, so far as people my age are concerned. In the post office at school, it takes only one quick glance into the recycling bin to see what people think of the campy mail storms attempting to drown out one another in the battle for our mindshare. If you think you’re safe from the knee-jerk garbage reaction on the basis of your brand’s intrinsic value, think again: I have seen expensive materials from the most prestigious universities in the US meet their end without ever leaving their shrink-wrap. Though I read everything I get, most people are not as generous with their attentions. What applies to direct mail applies just the same to new media — it’s even easier to click the back button than it is to try to throw a paper airplane brochure across the room.

Back to the web: blogs are the most prevalent new form of exotic web marketing. There are three kinds of blogs that can work to promote an institution: Sponsored student blogs, admission office blogs, and unofficial student blogs. The last a school has no particular control over, but they exist as nearly unconquerable competition for any homegrown sponsored effort, as they can nimbly tread waters a school-sanctioned blog could not — especially the salacious details incoming students really want to hear about. Schools can promote their blog programs by pushing visitors there; let the content do the rest.

A request for authentic information is not a request for students to tarnish their school’s name. I have exchanged heated emails with sponsored student bloggers who angrily accuse me of demanding they slur their university in the name of authenticity. Not so: it is a demand for respect, not slander. Anything less can and does create a negative backlash. To illustrate: drinking certainly occurs on college campuses, but I don’t ask for photos of drunken escapades any more than I beg for candid shots of late-night cram sessions. Neither one of those scenes presents a credible, balanced image of a school. What is true for photographs applies to all blog content in context: there is a middle ground between descriptions of room decorating adventures and Frat Party weekly. Even the appearance of impropriety (i.e., marketing) can sour public opinion. Better to promote honesty and authenticity — two concepts which, when treated carefully, can actually coexist with donors, parents, presidents, and most importantly prospectives.

When a school deploys a sponsored student blogging program, its primary goal should be to connect with prospective students. Painfully often, this goal is never met, and the blog dies nothing but a flat perspective of student life mired in tour guide style censorship. Blogs convey two kinds of information: first, readers value the insight that casual details about daily life afford. One blogger I spoke with told me that no one would care if she complained about the terrible rush to get season tickets for hockey. However, a close reader would see that enthusiasm and passion for the team shows that the school is a close community. Then there is the easier-to-access big picture campus topic: a vignette about recent student political protests on campus tells me a lot more about campus activism than any vague, sanitized answer from a tour guide.

Student bloggers should be encouraged to write about issues that are important to them; people write best about what they know best, and students know their school. They’re less familiar with the thing that only exists on glossies sent to new students and alumni. Let the students sell the school.

My preferred sort of official blog are those maintained by one or more admissions counselors for a particular school. I think these are great from an institutional perspective because the counselors can do the same thing they always do (answer questions online) while developing a knowledge base of old questions, answers, and content which can be accessed anytime, anywhere, by anyone. Most of all, these blogs go a long way towards pulling back the curtain on what is a very mysterious world to most; not everyone has time to read The Gatekeepers. The power of friendliness is not to be underestimated.

The desires of prospective students will, for a long time yet, fail to intersect with those of schools and admissions officers, but I hope that some insight into the mind of your applicants has been gleaned from my words. It’s a long way down from the window of the ivory tower, but that doesn’t justify the disconnect from the masses clambering below. Throw down your hair and reach out a hand: the web can help.

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Sam Jackson is a high school senior boarding at Phillips Exeter Academy, where he spends his free time trying to appropriate funding to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for his Science Club. When it’s too cold for ice cream, Sam passes the time debating (on and off the team), fighting the dress code, and missing his golden retriever, Cozmo. He also publishes a blog, the Sam Jackson College Experience, chronicling his journey in the college recruitment process: www.samjackson.org/college/

Contributed by: Heather O’Neill
Associate Director of Admissions, Vanderbilt University

“April is the cruelest month…”
- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

As the May 1 deadline for students to submit a matriculation deposit approaches, I find myself in complete agreement with T.S. Eliot. For those in admissions, April is the cruelest month, yet also one of the most joyful and gratifying. It is a month thick with contradictions, 30 days spent vacillating between counseling denied seniors and their parents through their grief and hyping the university to eager juniors visiting campus during Spring Break, between traveling to junior college nights around the country and being on campus for admitted seniors visiting one last time before making a commitment, between this year and the next.

The transition between the final exhausting days of admission committee meetings in March and the first days of April was particularly abrupt and jarring this spring. We mailed our decision letters early on a Saturday morning and assumed that Monday would be quiet, a buffer zone between the end of reading season and the start of the avalanche of phone calls. Apparently the U.S. Postal Service made Vanderbilt admission letters their highest priority that weekend, however; because the calls came flooding in from students around the country who received their news in Monday’s mail. The end of reading season is always draining, emotionally and physically. The reality of a 33% admit rate is that each of us lost a number of battles for students in whom we became invested and that pain can make it excruciatingly difficult to maintain a professional demeanor when faced with a parent irate over his or her child’s lack of a merit scholarship offer when you know how hard you fought just to have that student admitted. Each day in April, we span the continuum of emotions from elation when a student we have championed in the process decides to attend our college to heartbreak when another does not. We are frustrated with parents who cannot understand that there were students who presented stronger applications than their child and we are grateful to those who thank us for the time we spent answering their son or daughter’s questions even though he or she was not admitted. We host admitted students for final campus visits, answer their last-minute questions (Are there soundproof rooms in the freshman residence halls where you can practice the drums? Let me find out for you…), and keep our fingers crossed that enough of them will choose us that we achieve our target freshman enrollment.

In the midst of this emotional roller coaster, we begin recruiting the current high school juniors who will comprise next year’s applicant pool. My first spring college night was on April 10th, just two weeks after we mailed decision letters. I received my first question about the admissions process ten minutes into the fair. “What do you look for in an application?” asked a shaggy-haired boy in a polo shirt and flip-flops. My mind raced as I tried to form a simple answer and I eventually stammered out something about a challenging high school curriculum, contribution to the school or local community, strong writing, etc., all the while thinking of the multitude of students with those qualifications who did not make it this year. “Just be true to yourself and do the best job you can with your applications and then let the chips fall where they may,” I told him, “It’s hard to see now, but you will end up with a great college home next year.” He looked at me quizzically and asked for our average SAT score. Clearly the wounds from this year’s selection process were still too raw so early in the spring. Not enough time had passed for me to gain perspective and remember that juniors are not immersed in this process yet, that they just want to hear some general statistics so they can begin differentiating between the hundreds of colleges whose names they know.

These spring college nights are proliferating as the rise in Early Decision and Early Action applications means that the college search process now begins in earnest in the junior year of high school for many students. They do offer a wonderful opportunity for juniors to gather information on a wide variety of schools, but, for admissions officers, the month-long split personality disorder that they induce is difficult to handle. Our loyalties are divided between the seniors we have admitted and hope to enroll and the juniors just starting the search. Like the parents and teachers they are leaving behind, we need the summer to ease our emotional attachment to this year’s seniors and find closure as we hand them off to our faculty and student life staff. Only then are we prepared to go out to high schools and college fairs across the country to meet a new group of prospective students, finally ready to fall in love all over again. So April truly is the cruelest month, forcing us to flirt with next year’s class while our hearts still belong to this year’s seniors. We look forward to May 1, when the final matriculation deposits are in the mail, our phones stop ringing off the hook, and we can turn our full attention and affection to next year’s class.

Contributed by: Wade Marbaugh
Publications Coordinator, Georgia Perimeter College

It takes a team to raise a college’s image.

The Georgia Perimeter College Office of Marketing and Public Relations carried that theme to its professional organization’s national conference in March. Director Jennifer Stephens hoped to share GPC’s experience with members of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations, which met in Austin, Texas.

GPC has seen its MPR office transform from lacking in teamwork and having a low marketing orientation to launching a highly effective branding campaign in 2005. The emerging teamwork necessary to launch the drive involved more than participation by Georgia Perimeter’s personnel. Vendors such as Stein Communications played a big part in the transition, which involved potential competitors working side by side for a common goal.

Promotion of GPC has not always been inadequate. Public Relations director Ann Knight did a great job from the 1970s through the 1990s. However, by the turn of the millennium, Georgia Perimeter was besieged with problems.

The college had grown from a quiet suburban community college — DeKalb College — to a diverse, bustling urban institution. Then suddenly the baby boom ended, dropping enrollment drastically and bringing the need for aggressive marketing strategies.

Knight’s premature death in 2000 left the MPR office in a state of transition and relative disorganization. Budget slashes came with the recession of 2001.

“The evolution of the office from a one-person PR shop to a large, fast-paced MPR office brought about some inherent problems,” Stephens says. “And there was too much internal competitiveness, aggressiveness, and lack of teamwork. Stress levels were high. We needed a marketing plan and a communications plan.”

When Stephens took the helm in 2002, she began building a stronger organizational structure and nurturing a culture of teamwork. The group attended leadership, team-building and creative workshops; internal and external communications improved; new employees strengthened the staff; the office held lunch meetings and had other fun activities at meetings; meetings became more productive.

GPC brought in a marketing consultant, Sandra Golden and Associates. Golden began to steer the office and the college toward a marketing orientation.

Subsequently, Stephens and Jeff Tarnowski, GPC’s vice president of Institutional Advancement, initiated talks with Latham and Associates, a firm specializing in branding issues. That led to extensive focus group studies by Latham at the college’s six locations.

What occurred next may be groundbreaking in business technique — at least it is unique for GPC. In May 2005, the MPR office invited all of its major vendors, even potential competitors, to an Institutional Advancement retreat at which Latham presented its findings and recommendations.

Gene Middleton, Jennifer Bagley, Bonnie McQuagge, and contract writer Scott Suhr represented Stein Communications among the vendors attending the retreat.

That Stein was invited is no surprise. Stein and GPC go way back (from Stein’s days as Phoenix Communications), as Knight contracted with them for many years to design and print college recruiting materials. Through the 2000s, Stein has continued to design and print exceptional promotional pieces for GPC.

Other vendors in attendance included EM2 Design, a Decatur firm that designed two annual reports for GPC that won first and second place in the 2005 NCMPR national competition, and J & R Kern, a Gainesville agency that has produced remarkable print and broadcast ad campaigns for GPC.

“We felt that we should get all the vendors on the same page with the branding campaign,” Stephens explains. “That way we would unify our look and feel in all our promotional efforts.”

At the meeting, Latham proposed a branding campaign that focused on everything from use of the school colors to primary messages. Having the various vendors present produced immediate results.

In fall 2005, Stein produced an award-winning recruiting package — including a colorful viewbook and search piece — that incorporates Latham’s branding recommendations.

“It couldn’t have worked out better,” says Stephens. “The recruiting pieces are in full conformity with the spirit of that branding retreat. Stein even came up with a tagline that we’ve adopted for all other materials — ‘Two years that will change your life.’”

Stephens is quick to point out that “we’re not there yet.” Much remains to be done to perfect the teamwork approach, but her office runs a much more systematic promotion and branding of the college than in previous years. Sharing the branding campaign with vendors at its conception contributed greatly to this success.

For more information on the teamwork approach and branding campaign, contact Jennifer Stephens at jstephen@gpc.edu or 678-891-2684.

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Wade Marbaugh serves as publications coordinator in the Office of Marketing and Public Relations at Georgia Perimeter College.