By Bonnie Clark

As both a marketing professional and the parent of a rising high school senior, I am shocked by how colleges and universities are missing the mark in selling their institutions to prospective students.     

Every day, it seems like our postal carrier delivers roughly a half-dozen slick mailers from such-and-such university, proclaiming the excellence of their academics and the diversity and vibrance of their community. One North Carolina university even mailed a Fed-Ex-style box with stickers, luggage tags and all sorts of inducements to come and visit the campus. Upon seeing this, my thought was: “Dude, she’s just not into you.”

It feels like these schools are working off marketing plans created 25 years ago. What 17-year-old is opening physical mail?

The first rule of marketing is: Know your audience. If you’ve spent any time with a teenager, you know that they’re perpetually online. I can’t remember the last time that my daughter opened a piece of mail.  So, what are all these schools hoping to achieve spending hundreds of thousands on marketing? Do they think parents will read them and add the college to their lists? Maybe, but most parents are busy and would be more inclined to consult U.S. News & World Report or speak to friends and family, not read a brochure.

Universities buy lists of names from the College Board, which administers PSAT, SAT and Advanced Placement exams. But they don’t seem to put a lot of effort in connecting student fit to test scores, grades and acceptance rates. For example, we’ve gotten marketing materials from schools as diverse as University of Chicago (4% acceptance rate) and Towson University (82% acceptance rate). The student who applies to the former is not going to apply to the latter, even as a safety.

Why are higher-ed institutions blanketing our mailboxes this way? Schools have a vested interest in getting as many students as possible to apply. Beyond the obvious application fees, which range from $50 a pop for a public university to up to $100 for an Ivy League, schools are looking to juice their numbers. The more applications, the lower the admit rate (in fact, some schools intentionally reject students with higher grades and test scores than the average enrolled student, called “yield protection”). The lower the admit rate, the better the school looks to prospective students who prioritize selectivity above all else. Which brings us to the crux of the problem—and it’s a problem that a lot of businesses and industries struggle with.

While institutions of higher learning should be using these mailers for brand awareness purposes, most are using them to convert customers.

In marketing, we create campaigns to serve different points of the sales funnel. From the top, brand awareness—where you’re trying to get prospects to learn about your product/service or in this case, college/university—to the bottom, conversion, i.e., getting a new lead to convert with a sale, namely applying.   

For the world’s most selective colleges and universities, brand awareness isn’t an issue.  Everyone knows Yale, Harvard and Stanford. If a student is considering one of these schools, they will apply if they think they have the grades, test scores and extra curriculars to fit the criteria. But that only applies to roughly a few dozen schools (there are nearly 4,000 U.S. degree-granting institutions). What about the 90% of schools that aren’t household names?  

These schools should focus on moving prospects through the funnel—from short-form videos on TikTok that can help students discover their school to data-driven messaging, AI tools and hyper-personalized digital strategies to engage and connect with leads around academics or other interests. Institutions of higher learning would be smart to focus on nurturing prospects and turning them into leads. Then and only then should the school focus on conversion, encouraging students to sign up for a virtual or in-person tour.

Colleges and universities are not alone in wanting to jump right to the sale. When clients come to us, they are often looking to take market share from a category leader. While that is an understandable goal, it is not something that we can achieve with a single article or TV appearance. It takes time and is the natural culmination of our full PR/marketing program: brand awareness through digital channels, thought leadership and earned media to engage with prospects at the decision-making phase, webinars and free trials at the conversion stage.

Harvard didn’t become a household name overnight. Instead of throwing money at glossy mailers that no one will read, colleges and universities should be doing the hard, but infinitely more valuable, work of connecting with their audience across the multi-channel environment, giving them a glimpse of what life is like on campus and being ready to move them through the complex and expensive process.

Whether it’s a college or a wealth management firm, there are no shortcuts in marketing and communications. If you want to ace the test, you first need to do the work, no CliffsNotes allowed.