Marketing the Liberal Arts: Recruitment Season

How can we get more students to choose a liberal arts degree?

By Daniel Oppenheimer

Here’s a first look at our new prospective students campaign. And never fear — in the final version the students will be real, not AI.

One of the most fundamental dilemmas I face as head of communications for UT Austin’s College of Liberal Arts is that many of our undergraduates didn’t choose to be here. Right now, about half of the students in each incoming class identified our college as their first or second choice when they applied to UT. They want to be here, in other words, and not just at the university. The other half of our first-year class didn’t list us as a preferred college, but decided to come here anyway because they want to be at UT.

We’re happy to have these students, of course, and in fact their presence is a significant factor in why our college of liberal arts hasn’t seen the same drastic declines in certain majors as many of our peer institutions. From a brand perspective, though, this is not an ideal situation. It’s also not ideal for the students themselves, who (according to a recent analysis we conducted) are 16% less likely to graduate in four years than the students who chose specifically to be here.

Because of the way UT Austin admissions work, we’re always going to have some of these students. There is the potential, however, to drive up both the number of overall applicants who are interested in the liberal arts and the number of admitted liberal arts-oriented students who choose to matriculate to UT. Moving the needle on either of these numbers would result in a college with more students who really want to be here. That would be good.

This is the background to a campaign we’ve been developing to market the college to both prospective and admitted-but-not-yet-matriculated students. We’re far enough along that I can share some initial concepts with you as well as the fruits of the research that went into developing our campaign.

The research had three main elements. I did a scan of how other universities are pitching themselves to prospective students. I conducted small, informal focus groups with students and relevant staff and leadership. And I just lived my life as the father of a daughter in her senior year of high school, watching the flood of mailings and emails pass through her inbox and our mailbox (usually on the way to the real and virtual trash).

The global takeaway from each path of inquiry was the same: It all kind of blends together after a while. Colleges and universities are all drawing from the same bucket of core themes: connection, opportunity, warmth, self development, tradition, innovation. We all feature the same kind of photography of happy and engaged students, passionate-looking teachers, and idyllic campus landscapes. We’re all telling versions of the same story, which is that you should come to our school to discover yourself and build your exciting future.

I don’t take this to mean that there’s no point in doing such marketing, but it’s useful to have this broad view in mind. It helps to clarify what the point is and what a set of realistic expectations should be. For lesser-known schools, the goal may be to put yourself on the radar of students who otherwise wouldn’t know about you. For many of the elite schools, it’s clearly to artificially juice their selectivity by driving up applications from students who have little chance of getting in.

For every school, of course, the point is to increase applications and matriculations, but there are other goals as well. It’s our first communication with the students who will eventually attend our school, and it’s an opportunity to get them excited about and acculturated to our community. There’s also the much longer-term project of developing and reinforcing loyalty to the institution that will persist beyond graduation.

So the marketing matters, if often at the margins, and it’s interesting to observe how schools sell themselves. A&M is warm and familial (“Join the Aggie Family”). MIT’s main admissions site is a feed of blog entries from current students, each of whom gets a cute custom illustration. Sewanee sells the natural beauty of its environs. Texas Tech is selling tradition and spirit (“Be a Part of the Legacy”). If I had to characterize our current prospective student landing page, which features the tag line “Choose COLA,” I’d say it’s pretty median: bright and colorful, happy students, cool-sounding classes, etc. Its message is that this is a place where students are engaged and upbeat.

The vibe on the A&M admissions page is warm and familial.

Sewanee was the one college that was able to get itself on to my daughter’s long list simply through good marketing. She’s not going there, but I bet their campaign has driven up applications.

Our prospective student brochure features the tagline “Your Story Starts Here,” and the vibe is communal and warm. This is a place, it’s conveying, where you can find yourself, where you’ll have support, and where your experience is valued. It’s a beautifully designed brochure, and the message is a solid one, but the tone is a bit softer than what we plan to implement. The conclusion we’ve come to is that we need to increase the emphasis on achievement and ambition in order to better compete for students who might otherwise choose a STEM discipline, a business degree, or a liberal arts degree at another college or university.

The heart of our new campaign is what I’m calling, informally, the wheel of destiny. You can see one iteration of it, “For Future Leaders,” in the graphic above. The point of the wheel is that it can land on many different futures, depending on each student’s interests and talents. Whatever your destiny, in other words, the College of Liberal Arts is here to help you discover it and then give you the skills and support to launch into it. We’re large and many-splendored and dynamic and well-resourced.

We’re not laboring under the illusion that this is a once-in-a-generation marketing concept. Our sense is that it’s a good one, and that it will serve to anchor a more strategic, more coordinated set of communications across the varied platforms. We’ll produce a video, a social media campaign, a new brochure, email graphics, etc., and it will give more efficacy and consistency to both our prospective student campaign and our communications with current and former students.

It’s often the case, in branding and marketing, that simply having a consistent message across platforms and repeating it over time is more important than optimizing for the most brilliant message. Repetition and consistency tend to prevail over an extra 4% of creativity.

That said, if you’ve got a brilliant idea, please share it with me. My inbox is open: oppenheimer@utexas.edu