One question that always comes up (or should come up, anyway) in discussions of university branding and positioning is: “how different is our institution, really”?  Well, for a few years, when we ran the Globe and Mail Canadian University Report survey, we used to ask students questions that would allow us to see how different students thought their university was.  The results were… interesting.

We asked students to locate their institution on an 11-point double-ended scale.  Did they think their institution was more focussed on graduate students or undergraduates?  Was it focussed on a couple of key fields of study, or more spread out?  Focussed on global issues or local ones?  Was it open to new ideas, or cautious about them? Did students have to be self-sufficient, or was the institution a nurturing one?  Was the curriculum more theoretical or applied? Was the student body homogeneous or diverse?  And, broadly, was it professor-centred or student-centred?  We could then plot their answers on a spidergram to show how institutions differed from one another.  What we found was an interesting degree of clustering, which allowed us to make specific categorizations of institutions.

The most definable groups of institutions were what we called the Liberal Arts schools – mostly small schools where students described their institution as undergrad-focussed, very nurturing, and not focussed on a particular field of study.  This includes the usual suspects at Acadia, Mt. Allison. St. FX, but also the religious schools (e.g. Redeemer, Trinity Western), the Western Colleges (Brescia, Huron, King’s) and Guelph (but not Trent).  The other big clustering of schools were what we called the “graduate-focussed schools”.  This was basically the U-15, minus McGill, U of T St. George (though the other U of T campuses qualified), Waterloo, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, but including Carleton, SFU and Concordia.  These two groups position themselves on the spidergram as follows:

Figure 1: Positioning Results for “Graduate” and “Liberal Arts” Schools

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: The further a line is to the edge of the spidergram, the more the value tends towards the first word in the axis description (e.g. “graduate” rather than “undergraduate”).

There were a number of individual schools that had very distinct profiles.  Waterloo, for instance, looks entirely unlike every other institution. Students there are much more likely to describe their institution as open to change (a trait which is significantly correlated with student satisfaction), and much more likely to describe their institution as being “focussed” on a few key areas.  OCAD University was by far the most likely to be described as having an applied curriculum and a student-centred program.  McGIll and Toronto (St. George) had weirdly identical results (i.e. their students described them in *exactly* the same terms), describing them as being much more global, much more graduate focussed, and much more sink-or-swim (i.e. NOT nurturing) than other schools.

Figure 2: Positioning Results for OCAD University, University of Waterloo and McGill/University of Toronto (St. George)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, here’s the important bit.  The results from every other school in the country, from Trent to Saint Mary’s, to Fraser Valley, to Saskatchewan and Manitoba – were basically one big lump.  None of these institutions really stood out in any way – basically, students just described these places as “school”.  None had any real distinguishing characteristics on which you could build a sensible brand.  If they had a colour, they would be beige.

If you view higher education as one more social service where the goal is provide a uniform product to students everywhere, this is a good thing.  But if you think universities should be distinct entities, catering to varying niche tastes that evolve over time, it’s a pretty depressing picture.