‘How can marketing stop school’s declining enrollment?’

Q: Some three or four years ago, you were one of our guest speakers at our school association convention. You spoke on “school marketing” but you did not touch on the problem we’ve been experiencing in the past five years or more. We have had a declining enrollment at all levels—elementary, high school and college, especially at our BSBA degree program.

We’ve tried everything we know including asking and requesting our teachers and professors, active members of our parent-teachers association (for help in recruiting enrollees), and some newspaper and magazine advertisements.

None have worked. Enrollment continued to go down not drastically but slowly.  Though slow, the fall has been continuing.  And it has been no consolation to learn from other schools that they too have been suffering over the same past five or more years.

We have a new college dean who has been on this job for only past two years.  During our strategic planning last month, she suggested we write to you (you were her social marketing professor). Please tell us how marketing can help our school stop its declining enrollment.

A: It’s too bad you didn’t tell us the name of your school (although it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want the identity revealed.) But we could hold it in confidence along with your sharing of the specific circumstances surrounding your school’s enrollment problem.

If you did, we could have done a sharper and deeper diagnosis and drew out just as sharper a set of practical marketing prescriptions.

The senior MRx-er did this when he was invited to talk last Jan. 30 on school marketing to the Board of Trustees, deans and department heads of St. Scholastica’s College. But we’ve been asked in just as generic a way as you did by two or three other schools about declining enrollment.

So we decided to answer your question in this column in anticipation of several other schools asking about the same or similar school problem.

What is your product?

We start with what’s distinct about school marketing.  What’s distinct is all about the students.  Let’s talk about your BSBA students.  At the start of this four-year program, students are your market at the recruitment stage.

When students enroll, you’ve succeeded in selling to them your product, namely, the BSBA degree program.  Then over the four years, this batch of enrollees becomes your raw materials for processing into knowledgeable “business administration” graduates.  Finally, at the end of the four years, those students when they graduate become your product.

If you think about it, this is truly amazing.  It’s transformational marketing.

Marketing myopia

What does this mean for the enrollment problem you asked? It’s telling you that your focus in your search for a problem solution for your declining enrollment is rather myopic in its direction. It’s only half right. It’s right in its attention to recruiting enrollees by asking your teachers and professors, active members of your parent-teachers association, and doing some newspaper and magazine advertisements.  Because these measures did not stop and reverse your enrollment decline, they were obviously not enough. That’s why we say that they were only half right.

So what you have to do is to now pay attention to where you’re half wrong. That’s with the other end of the entire process of transforming your BSBA enrollees into hirable business administration graduates.

Your school’s BSBA graduates who have made a name for themselves are the truer driver, the better source of enrollment motivation for those you are recruiting.

The “other half”

Why do you think that La Salle has been and is still the first choice of students and their parents for a business degree?  That’s because La Salle has made and is still making its many successful business graduates as the aspirational heroes of incoming BSBA students.  The students’ and parents’ school choice is anchored and influenced by forces of a “modeling behavior.”

So when marketing your BSBA program, do not stop at telling your prospective enrollees about what they will learn from the program’s four years. That’s just half the job in motivating enrollment behavior.

Include the other half.  Include as well who they can expect to become like.  Do this by mentioning the names of your school’s more famous BSBA graduates.

The myopic focus on what skills and values your BSBA program offers makes your school no different from any other schools for a BSBA degree.

If you’re no different for others, then you are in effect marketing a commodity.  It’s with your more famous graduates where your prospective enrollees and their paying parents will find and appreciate your school’s U.S.P. (unique selling proposition).

Now,  how do you set up and organize along this U.S.P. for the school marketing of your BSBA program?   It was the business historian, Alfred Chandler, who gave us the guiding principle.

He said: “Structure follows strategy and not the other way around.”  And Chandler warns us that if we violate this rule, at best we may just survive but at worst, we may suffer a lot or even die.

What strategy are we talking about?  It’s a two-sided strategy that draws on our brief but important explanation regarding what’s distinctive about school marketing.

Let’s be specific about those two sides.  One side is a “student market management strategy” directed at the start of the BSBA four-year program.  The other side is a “graduated-student-product management strategy” directed at the end of the same BSBA four-year program.

Who’s in charge?

Now, who’s in charge of these two sides?  In almost all schools, two different and separate offices are in charge.  The Admissions Office takes care of the “student market strategy” while the Placement Office or Alumni Office handles the “graduated-student-product strategy.”

This may make sense by tradition and conventional school administration practice but it does not make school marketing sense.  So instead, follow Professor Chandler’s advice: get these two offices to function as one or else you “may suffer a lot or even die.”

Hope this helps! Once you take care of the two-sides and implement the Rx we’ve prescribed, your enrollment should start growing again.

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!