Blog Post #4: If You Go to College You're Worth 37 Cents

“What? Only 37 cents! I am worth way more than that! I went to college!” you say. Easy there, chief, I am not talking about the value of your life. You are probably worth at least 10 dollars. Okay, okay, maybe you are worth a little more than that. But what am I talking about? I am talking about how schools in higher education, like Saint Michael’s College (where I go), value students in the early stages of the college search when they are merely prospects. I will explain this further later in the post.

College students of the past 10 or so years: have you ever thought about all of the schools that were crazily vying for your attention when applying for college? If not, think about it now. Think about all of the pamphlets you read, all of the emails you received, mailings you read, and all of the college visits that you went on (see Fig. 1 below). At some point it probably all blurred together because of the sheer volume of stuff you were getting. I know it did for me. Now think about the amount of students that each one of those colleges was contacting with the same, pamphlets, emails, mailings, and visits. Yeah, that is A LOT of stuff that these colleges are sending out and a lot of money that they are spending.

Fig. 1: Some of the materials that St. Michael's sends out

Colleges now are competing with each other more than ever. In the recent past, namely with the explosion of the Internet and with it things like email and social media, it has become increasingly difficult for colleges to vie for the attention of prospective college students. There are so many distractions that the contemporary American teenager deals with, so it is tough for colleges to find ways to break through the barriers. Once the colleges do break through the barriers, though, many schools do not want just any student. They want the best students there are.

Now this leads me into what you really wanted to know: why you are worth 37 cents if you went to college. The Saint Michael’s College Vice-President of Enrollment Management, Dr. Sarah Kelly, visited my marketing class this past Tuesday. She talked to us all about the many facets of higher education marketing, namely in light of Saint Michael’s. One of the ideas that she introduced was the concept of the “student recruitment funnel” (see Fig. 2 below). This past year in the United States, there were 4.5 million new college students that became part of the funneling process. Saint Michael’s, a school of around 2,000 undergraduate students, though, is not looking to appeal to all of those 4.5 million. So what Saint Michael’s and Dr. Kelly do is they buy the names of 110,000 prospective students (based on SAT and PSAT scores) who may fit the Saint Michael’s mold. The cost of each one of these names: 37 cents. 

Fig. 2: The funnel that all college students go through

That makes a lot of sense, right? They pay 37 cents and you pay 50,000 dollars per year? There is a lot more to it than that, since colleges spend an exorbitant amount of money on marketing, but it is interesting to think about that for a second.

One takeaway from all this, though, is that current and developing society is becoming an increasingly noisy place. It is incredibly difficult to find out whom your target market should truly be and how you are going to reach them, especially in light of the technology that many of us have at our fingertips. It is more important than ever to think of how to cut through the noise as a marketer, whether you are marketing your personal brand or some other brand. How are you going to stand out and avoid becoming part of the noise?