Creativity: Colleges Market Easy, No-Fee Sell to Applicants - NYTimes.com

Colleges Market Easy, No-Fee Sell to Applicants - NYTimes.com

Excerpts:

Lifting a page from the marketing playbook of credit card companies.
Last fall the college [College of Saint Rose in Albany] sent out 30,000 bright red “Exclusive Scholar Applications” to high school seniors that promised to waive the $40 application fee, invited them to skip the dreaded essay and assured a decision in three weeks. Because the application arrived with the students’ names and other information already filled in, applying required little more than a signature.

Theirs [Royall & Company] is a roster that includes well-known institutions like Marquette (which promised a free baseball cap to the first 250 respondents to its “Advantage Application”); Rensselaer Polytechnic (the “Candidate’s Choice Application”) and the University of Minnesota (“the Golden Gopher Fast Application”). Others that have regional reputations — like the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. (the “Distinctive Candidate Application”) — are hoping to raise their national profiles.

Royall helps each college identify potential applicants by buying lists of high school students’ names and addresses from the College Board, based on how they performed on the PSAT or SAT, or on information they provided on their high school class rank, interests or ethnicity.

To Royall and its clients, the subsequent outreach helps students who might not know that a particular college exists. Moreover, the company argues that it is saving applicants precious time at a hectic moment in their lives. (Some colleges’ fast-track applications, for example, encourage students to submit a graded high school paper in lieu of an original essay.)

“People might say this is too easy, it isn’t rigorous enough,” Mr. Royall said. “No one has ever told us that the people applying using these methods are less qualified.”

Read Full Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/education/26admit.html?ref=todayspaper
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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.