the Sam Jackson College Experience

Or, “It’s not lying when admissions office does it” –

Just wanted to quickly highlight something which is not gross lying, but just mild misrepresentation. The Yale Admitted Students website has fantastic images of student rooms which are really really scrumptious and gorgeous and make you feel like everyone at Yale lives in wonderful palaces — also, that they all clean their rooms. I was stunned when I first saw them and asked the admissions office if they were real rooms of undergrads or if they were staged photos (when I was applying) and I was told, no, they’re all real.

And they are, in a certain sense, at least… anyway, of couse, they want to put Yale’s best face forward, and I don’t mean to say that rooms aren’t often great! I am still puzzled why they had Emma Watson stay overnight in one of the less spectacular freshman dorms, if they’d wanted to really court her; still. (Emma, if you’re reading, I hope you chose to apply and matriculate! Harvard is Azkaban and if you come to Yale I’ll never mention Harry Potter when you’re around. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions about Yale; this offer applies to prospective Yalies who aren’t movie stars, too.) Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like paying for postage very much when it comes to this college admissions business, just because I’m already preparing myself to fork over tens and tens of thousands if I matriculate somewhere. It doesn’t cost very much to mail return postcards. I don’t know what the dollar cost of printing off little inserts is–I know that the little mini-packets given out at this past college fair cost less than 15 cents in most circumstances. The school (unnamed!) which cited that 15 cent figure included return prepaid info-cards to request more information. And yet Tufts, a school with I would imagine a larger marketing budget (for they certainly had fancier viewbooks), wants me to pay postage. That’s fine with me–it’s just a little bothersome, though luckily I have the appropriate stamps already.

But what about the economically disadvantaged? For them, adding postage costs to their normal expenses is just another hurdle between them and a college education…then again, NPR was reporting last week that costs to market to individual students can swell to thousands of dollars. So maybe I shouldn’t mind the lack of prepaid postage on that little parcel. More than anything else, it just means that far fewer people are going to send them in.

I would have said something about this to the Tufts officer who was at the college fair, Matthew S. Hyde, but I did not realize until I looked at my materials later. I’m sure there is a good explanation for this all, and I’m just overanalyzing a single little piece of paper, but it does lead me to wonder what the general protocol is? I couldn’t remember ever getting anything else which asked me to pay postage.

“Postage waivers” don’t work because you would have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to get them.

Any ideas on how to save more poor people the cost of postage? Does my paying postage subsidize postage for others, special pre-postage paid mailers distributed to low income areas?

This is a follow up to a popular post I made few days ago, “Spend a Week inside my mailbox!” which offered readers the chance to see everything I got in the mail over the course of a week. There have been some budget cuts, and in this installment we can only offer one day of mail. Still an exciting opportunity, I think.

This is all the mail I got on Wednesday, August 30th. If I get anything today (the 31st) I will edit this post and add it, doubling your value for the same low, low price of zero dollars. Can’t beat that bargain.

University of Pittsburgh sent me and my parents letters along with a pamphlet. My parents and I both got letters telling us how awesome UPitt was and how much I could do there, specifically talking about the Honors College. I’ve seen plenty of letters addressed “To the Parents of Sam Jackson” and I guess that speaks to their power to influence children and the hopes of marketers that they themselves can be influenced. Perhas not influenced–just informed. I know they didn’t know much about UPitt before I shared all that these letters had taught me. Then there was a “Fall Saturdays at Pitt” visitation pamphlet which had a nice picture of the Cathedral of Learning on it. I think the Cathedral of Learning is quite cool. Sadly I don’t imagine having the time any saturday this fall to get out to Pittsburg, and even had UPitt been on my list months ago (it was not, sorry) I wouldn’t have had the chance to visit it in July (see: CMU, old post).

Georgetown College sent me another pamphlet of something. They want me to come visit them. Visiting Georgetown College is, I’m afraid, not a good enough reason for me to go to Kentucky, although they are near Lexington, KY which I always am glad to say hosts the world’s largest pendulum clock in its public library. That spectacle aside, I will not be visiting. I feel quite bad about Georgetown College, actually, that they’re sending me these things. You see, back in July when I was looking for the visiting hours of Georgetown University… all these webforms look more or less the same… and that’s why Cornell College in Iowa once called my house. Sorry, guys, my mistake.

George Mason University sent me a very cute little envelope with lovely gold embossing on it but inside there was one little page asking me to go online to express interest so they could send me more stuff. I felt bad about this one, too, because they’re contacting me so late in the game. George Mason, I don’t know anything about you!

and, the piece de resistance,

Brown University sent me their viewbook! The first thing I saw was, of course, the cover. I make note of the cover specifically in comparison to UPenn’s viewbook, received and reviewed so recently. Like UPenn, Brown’s cover was a showcase of their seal. UnlikeU not just the plain stone seal looking very cold and intimdiating. Instead, with a nice play o shadows and light, it was off to the side of the cover, with “BROWN” taking full center in a color nearly one golden retriever (what can I say, I’m a sucker for golden-orange). The tree leaning across the page delicately did the trick, too, though at first glance I was fearing it might have been ivy, which would have been a little tacky. Really what I liked about the cover was the fact that it let Brown’s sorta Richardsonian Romanesque architecure stand front and center to impress and display the seal, rather than leaving it naked in the center of the page. Good design choice. Inside it’s not a full follow-through, but still quite good. There was a lot of information in it and the effort to try to fit it all in clearly impacted ease of reading in some places, but not too much. I quite liked it.

That’s all for today, folks.

Let me begin this post by thanking Morgan Davis of Erelevant for a very insightful comment which has once again conjured a response from me which I am reappropriating for the front page. I love the discussions I have with readers, which is why I would encourage more of you to interact a little bit! You might learn something from each other, too. In the past three days, I’ve had visitors from 150+ colleges and universities across the USA and Canada: I see you! Embrace the new web and share your thoughts! I respond to everything.

Now, moving on to the content again… here is the comment Morgan made, excerpted from my recent post”Cornell Student Blogs Crashing and Burning.” The comment is on student blogging generally and why, despite my begging, the world won’t see too many truly honest student blogs blessed and promoted by colleges anytime soon.

“authenticity is more important for good PR than anything else”

Amen.

Authenticity is still really scary for a lot of Admission and PR folks. We don’t use blogs at my school precisely because we know they would have to be *real.* We go out and look at our students MySpace and LiveJournal writings and imagine them with the college logo blazoned across the top. More often than not, we come away scared.

Sure, there’s lots of good stuff too [on MySpace], and even the bad stuff is RELEVANT and AUTHENTIC, but I don’t think many institutions are ready to invite real-life, open discussion of the good and bad in campus culture to their official namespace. And, honestly, the reason is not to fool or deny prospective students at all–it’s parental, donor, administrator, and media opinions that drive these decisions (sad but true).

So the best bet for learning about colleges via blogging will probably remain third-party and personal sites. Officially sanctioned blogs are most likely going to read like viewbooks in first person and without the glossy photos.

I read this and was sad to realize how true it was. So, through my tears of naiveté, I typed up an e-mail response. Here’s that response, lightly edited:

Thanks for the inspiration! I started thinking again about the looming danger of too much of the wrong kind of information about a school. Certainly photos of bong collections and voyeur shots are in vogue when it comes to social networking, but would absolutely not do for a visible school-affiliated blog.

A polished admissions blog might pretend to target the same audience as these great unofficial ones (prospective students, others) but we’re not lambs to the PR slaughter here. High pageviews and visit counts will be a consequence of high profile links to the blogs; plaster them on the main site and all those applicants are going to look at them, whether they derive any value from them or not. If a school was seeking to fill its ranks with witless dupes, then these might be fantastic recruitment paths. To the best of my knowledge, they’re not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Morgan Davis is the Web Director at Warren Wilson, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. He has a blog called erelevant which purports to be his “off-the-cuff blog about electronic marketing and working within higher education.” It seems to more or less fit that bill. I found it while snooping around on Technorati, and it has proved very interesting. On August 8th, Davis wrote a post titled Are Student Blogs Really A Good Idea? which is question which I answered earlier by saying “sorta depends, but yeah.”

Davis cites polls which have shown teens–namely prospective students–are not very hip to the blogging jive.

I continued my research and found similar results on a national poll. The National Research Center for Colleges and Universities (NRCCUA) conducted a survey of 1000 members of the high school class of 2006 from all over the US. Their survey found that 24% of students said they read blogs and 19% said they wrote them. They compared their results from statistics from the PEW Internet & American Life Project and commented that less teens in their survey read blogs than the PEW-reported adult readership of 27%. This seemed to suggest that blog interest was possibly more prevalent among adults, which made perfect sense if you made a clear separation between “blog” and “social network.” PEW’s numbers were much higher–38% of teens polled read blogs, but PEW also made no distinction in their questions between blogs and social networking sites, which could explain the disparity.

This got me thinking about my own peers, and how many of them were familiar with the blogosphere, how much of them read anything from it, etc. It’s completely true that we as young people are far more concerned with social networking (read: Facebook, MySpace) than with the blogs so highly touted in the 2004 election. I’m not entirely representative of my age group.

It pays to know and understand the difference between blogs and social networks. You can harness a blog for recruitment purposes, but it is much harder to do anything with the social networking sites.

Right you are sir. Then again, it’s certainly easier to find student-collegiate resources on Facebook when one can simply navigate to the “Friends” list, find some senior you knew last year who goes to whichever school you might be looking to find anything out about, and drop them a line. If student blogs were as easy to find and access as that, I’m sure they’d have better market penetration.

Read the rest of this entry »