The College Choice

College admissions offices do much more than decide whether or not to accept applicants into their respective institutions. Before they have the opportunity to make a decision on applicants they must attract students to gain interest in the college or university. One recruitment tool used is to implement market segmentation and targeting. All types of institutions whether they are large, small, public, or private implement forms of these marketing strategies. My expertise largely lies in the area of small, private institutions, so that will largely be the focus of my analysis. At my current institution a strategy recently implemented seeks to attract students that come from wealthier backgrounds.  This is being done in a number of ways. One way this is being done is by the addition of rowing as a varsity sport. The theory behind this addition is that people who compete in rowing tend to come from wealthier backgrounds. As The Atlantic notes, “[sports such as rowing]… require expen...

In today's world of college admission offices social media has become an increasingly used tool. Every school now seemingly has a twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat account. Lots of schools are using social media due to the fact that most college or soon to be college students use some type of social media. This has been a recent development for higher education institutions. Even a couple of years ago colleges did not have much of a social media presence. Their main source of direct marketing was in the form of mailings and phone calls with student. This form of contact has proven to become ineffective in recent years, which prompted institutions to take a step into the world of social media. For example, Ohio Wesleyan which is a private liberal arts school in Ohio dove in by creating Instagram and Facebook accounts for each admission counselor on staff. This allowed counselors to interact with prospective students and to show where they were traveling among other things. T...