In today’s environment, colleges and universities must reach out and market their programs. The higher education landscape is crowded with many different types of institutions and offerings. Moreover, there has never been a period of more diversity in the types of students pursuing postsecondary opportunities. The traditional student today is what we used to call the non-traditional student. Adult students, immigrants, minority students, and first-generation students all attend now more than in the past. As a result, higher education has increased marketing efforts to reach these students. However, colleges also must remember that higher education marketing messages matter.
Brand image is important to companies and higher education institutions.
The social responsibility of higher education means higher ed marketing messages matter more than usual.
As Harcum College in Philadelphia has discovered, forget this at your own peril.
Inside Higher Ed details the transportation advertisements Harcum is running on Philadelphia buses (the image above shows the ad).
There has been controversy about the African-American man dressed in a suit holding a basketball. Although the college argues that this was to advertise their sports management program, others believe that the ad played on stereotypes of African-Americans.
Others have questioned if the woman dressed like a healthcare worker is a nurse. Opponents suggest this fosters gender stereotypes of nursing students.
I don’t have any reason to question the college. I believe they were trying to create an ad that reached students and promoted their programs.
The problem is that higher education marketing (particularly related to diversity issues) does a poor job.
A few years ago I did a study of television commercials that air during college football bowl games.
I found that the advertisements were largely generic and frequently described institutions similarly. This sameness gives students little reason to pick one college over another.
Using the same data, a colleague, Brian Bourke, and I explored the use of race in the commercials.
We found that most institutions employed only token displays of diversity.
The advertisements also communicated a dominance of whiteness, which can negatively impact students and society generally.
The Harcum case as well as many others continues to show the problems in this area.
As Brian and I said in the conclusion of our study, “The ordinariness associated with whiteness has become just so ordinary and ‘normal’ that when we see images of white students in collegiate marketing efforts, we pay little if any attention to what we see. More important, we do not pay attention to what we do not see: difference. Despite the rhetoric of multiculturalism and social justice that has swept across American higher education in recent years, we continue to experience the dominance of whiteness from the perspective of normalcy; institutions continue to send these messages to students, parents, and the public.”
I would argue that this is what’s behind the reaction to Harcum’s advertisements. The primary issue is over concerns with how we address diversity in higher education marketing.
Higher ed marketing messages matter. We forget this at our own peril.
