My Take on Godin’s Higher Ed Melt-down

When Seth Godin posted The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer) yesterday, several friends and colleagues eagerly asked me what I thought. I admire Godin and value his insights but for those of us in higher education marketing, he didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. I’m not going to examine each point. University web developer Dylan Wilbanks does a nice job of that.

The higher ed bubble has been expanding to a scary bursting for several years. In terms of marketing, the last two decades were “boom years” for higher education. The combination of one of the largest college-bound populations in history and a thriving economy led to too many applicants for the best schools. Every college and university that had the philanthropic support to do so became more competitive – adding faculty, programs, and amenities.

Given the competition for space at top colleges, lesser-known institutions were able to expand the public’s perception of the prestige category of schools beyond the Ivy League, the “Little Ivies” like Amherst and Williams, and the public Ivies like Cal Berkeley and Michigan. Marketing colleges became huge business with media outlets all too happy to produce guidebooks and websites offering new categories of “hot” colleges, “New Ivies,” “Colleges that Change Lives,” and “Colleges with a Conscience.” During this period many colleges and universities not only became stronger due to new resources, they also increased their visibility and prestige.

These boom years are over at least for the foreseeable future. The same factors that led to the boom – greater numbers of college-bound students and a thriving economy have reversed. At the same time the public and government leaders are critical of the high cost of higher education. This has been an issue for several years as tuitions rose at a much higher rate than the cost of living, but economic stress has intensified the issue. This makes perceptions of value versus prestige more important.

In addition a revolution in technology is changing the way the public accesses higher education and the way institutions think about the education they deliver. With more and more online courses and programs being offered even at top universities many in higher education have posited that a sea change is coming just as it has in the newspaper industry. No one is quite sure what the new landscape will look like and what it will mean. But if the institutions I work with are any indication most are trying to figure out how to navigate the new landscape and remain relevant.

I think the truest thing Godin says is that students and their families are not willing to blindly pay for “the best” anymore. He’s also right about the lack of quality in the majority of (but not all) direct mail students receive. (The Wilbanks post is especially insightful on this). Institutions do use direct mail to increase applications. But they also know increased applications are no longer a great measure of success given that students apply to more schools than ever. The real metric institutions pay attention to is the “fitness” of their applicant pool and their matriculating “yield” of admitted students – in other words, the students who actually enroll after being admitted.

Given that pundits have been predicting the end of higher education as we know it for most of the last decade for the reasons that I've described above, my real question is will the “end” come with a bang a la the financial meltdown or by degrees? To my mind, the rise of value versus prestige is one of the biggest changes that has been happening for a few years now. How institutions develop programs of value and prove that value in today’s world is what we higher education marketers need to be marketing. What we’ve been marketing has been mostly about real or wannabe prestige.

Stopgap Measure or Elegant Solution?

Sometimes my clients come to me and want something now. The ambition of the project they describe within the timeframe they propose will not produce the quality they want and we both know it. I can either say no to the work, dive into the equivalent of a professional “all-nighter” or come up with an option that is not exactly what the client first imagined but can be done well within the timeframe – an elegant solution. I've recently found myself casting about for a similar solution to something I want done right now.

Jane Friedman wrote an excellent post last week about not being able to do everything you want all at once. She was talking about her fiction writing but the lessons are universal. I can relate. In a perfect world I would continue to do the exciting work I’ve been doing with my clients, finish the book I’m working on as well as two others I have in mind, have fun with the family I love, practice yoga every day, write a daily blogpost and keep up with my colleagues on Twitter and Facebook, take my own advice on how best to position and market my business, teach more writing workshops, travel more for pleasure and learn two more languages. I can’t do it all (at least not at the same time) so I do what I love and need to do most right now: work, family, book #1, yoga.

All this is a long way of zeroing in on keeping the blog promise I made awhile back – too long ago in bloggertime. I promised to begin posting my portfolio through my blog. Despite writing one of those posts and gathering gorgeous photos of the work from my creative partners, I have yet to begin the series. But many of these projects are already being showcased on client and partner sites. So in this single post I've created a stopgap measure -- links to several recent projects with a little bit of background on each. You can decide if it is also an elegant solution.

Scripps College
Over the last several months I've been honored to work with my alma mater Scripps College on the inauguration of the college’s eighth president Lori Bettison-Varga. My role was to work with the college to develop the inaugural theme which resulted in "The Genius of Women." I was also delighted to work with President Bettison-Varga on her speech and with Michael Bierut of Pentagram Design, who designed the emblem for the occasion. Here is the story of the emblem that I also wrote.

Yale University
One of my great pleasures over the last two years has been working with Yale Undergraduate Admissions to conceive of and write a new viewbook and a companion book showcasing Yale as a science and engineering innovation incubator, and to translate the voice and persona of those print publications to a forthcoming undergraduate admissions website. The Yale publications have been another opportunity for me to work with the incredible Michael Bierut. The viewbook has been lauded by AIGA and Higher Education Marketing.

NYU Abu Dhabi
Another Pentagram project that was fascinating to work on was for NYU’s new Abu Dhabi campus. My role was to help craft and write a vision piece for the campus that does not yet exist to be used with multiple audiences -- prospective students, faculty, parents, and partners. I can’t share a link to that piece at the moment, but here’s the curriculum guide we also did. (Be warned this is a fairly long pdf download but it's worth it to see Michael’s brilliant use of the NYU torch on the second page.)

Middlesex School
I had the fun of teaming up with Middlesex School director of admission Doug Price, with whom I worked at Episcopal High School a few years ago. Doug hired Pentagram and me to create a new student recruitment series. You can see the viewbook here. The advancement team, Pentagram and I are now working on the school’s capital campaign.

University of Pennsylvania
Over last summer and fall I partnered with CCA to create Penn’s Your Ivy campaign which included a search publication and microsite. My role was as message strategist, writer and interviewer for the storytellers featured on the site. I’m excited to be working with the CCA team again on a new brand campaign for the University of Delaware.

Some of the most gratifying and successful work I’ve done is in collaboration with Liza Fisher Norman and her team at Turnaround Marketing Communications. The firm specializes in independent school marketing. Here are a few of our recent projects and some of my enduring favorites.

William Penn Charter School
The William Penn Charter campaign series. I love these little books, which won a CASE silver award and were featured in CASE CURRENTS magazine as a unique and innovative case statement solution. After having worked with Penn Charter on a viewbook and several other projects over the last several years, in 2009 Turnaround and I created a new brand campaign – “Reinventing Classic” and a viewbook to tell that story. It’s one of my favorites.

A few of the other award-winning projects on which we have collaborated include Cheshire Academy recruitment, Chestnut Hill Academy recruitment, Germantown Friends School capital campaign, The Orchard School recruitment. We had the fun of presenting the Germantown Friends strategy at the 2010 Annual CASE/NAIS conference.

Carnegie Mellon University
A highlight last year was working with director of central marketing Marilyn Kail at Carnegie Mellon University. I was wowed by her team's depth and breadth of message and marketing savvy across all platforms. The great Rick Landesberg of Landesberg Design and I worked with the university to develop its campaign communications including a case statement. Rick and I got to team up again last winter as faculty members at the CASE Annual Publications Conference.