Over the years, a lot of people have surveyed incoming university students to find out why they chose a particular institution.  Most of these surveys contain a battery of questions about influencers: i.e. what were the sources of information that a student used to make their decision.  What researchers are looking for, usually, is some indication that school websites or career fairs or Maclean’s rankings or whatever are actually having some impact.  But year after year, students essentially give the same two answers for “top influencers”: namely, “family and friends”.  This doesn’t really help institutions because they have no idea what family and friends are telling the students, where they get their information, etc.  Institutions simply want to understand how to get information about their offerings into the information pipeline.

Here at HESA Towers, we’ve been working on a program of research on this for a couple of years now.  Two years ago, we followed a couple of hundred grade 12 students for a year to look at how the timing and type of information students received changed their views about institutions over time.  This gave us some interesting insights on which sources of data at which points in time seemed to make a difference to students.  This year we are doing something similar both with students in grade 11 (one of our big findings in looking at grade 12 students was how many of them had their minds made up about an institutions before their final year of studies) and with parents of students in grade 12.  I won’t bore you with the details here (though by all means get in touch if you want details about how to obtain our research – see the grey box below); what I want to do today instead is talk specifically about grade 12 students’ epistemology when it comes to choosing an institution.

Briefly, students know that institutions are selling them something.  From what we’ve seen, they are actually quite sophisticated media consumers – very willing to question institutions and not take for granted what they see on websites.  Actually, not to put too fine a point on in general, high school students hate institutional websites.  Like, with the fire of a thousand suns.  There are few if any exceptions.

Now precisely because students know they are being told something, their fondest wish is to be able to “look under the hood”, so to speak.  They want to be able to hear from other students what it’s like to be at a particular school. When they do this, they are not thinking like “investors”, they are thinking like “consumers”.  If you’re going to dedicate four years of your life to something, you want to know you won’t be lonely and/or bored.  Choosing an institution is, in many ways, effectively choosing a lifestyle or a “brand” for four years of their lives: what they really want to know is whether they will meet people from whom they can learn and with whom they can have a good time.

Many institutions understand this, and their response is to make “real students” available to prospective students to explain from a credible first-person perspective what it is they can expect.  But while high school students appreciate this effort, they know there is still an information asymmetry: high school students have no way of knowing whether these chosen students are reliable guides or not.

Now, the most credible source of information for grade 12 students are people they already know and who can give them first-hand straight dope.  They might trust adults to tell them about programs, but when it comes to student life and explaining it in a way a high school student can understand, they’re only going to listen to kids more or less their own age who come from a similar background.  Siblings, first and foremost, but apart from that the students that most closely meet this criteria are students from one’s own school in the graduating class one year ahead.

Now here’s the bit that I think eludes a lot of people.  A high school student does not need to speak with older classmates in order to obtain needed information about a particular post-secondary institution.  All they need to do is register where various graduates choose to go to college/university and they can make their own inferences about institutional brand.  Basically if you’re a high school student and all the older kids you admired went to institution Y, then that school starts out with a huge advantage in recruiting you even if you never spoke to any of those students about life at institution Y.  It’s wordless viral marketing, but no less effective for that.

(My son did this in a negative way: he put his efforts into avoiding the institutions which attracted the greatest number of what he considered “douchebags” from the graduating class prior to his own.  I won’t offend the institutions which got eliminated via this process, but let’s just say that via this method he concluded that Wilfrid Laurier must be a decent place to study.)

This is more or less how universities become branded without ever actually spending money on branding.  Students with particular characteristics (the jocks, the tree-huggers – whatever) choose institution X and that then affects how younger students with the same characteristics view each institution.  Breaking this cycle is very hard and goes well beyond a couple of ad campaigns.  Institutions seeking a new kind of student have to pro-actively identify and persuade a different type of student to come to their institution and in some cases actually discourage some of their more traditional students from attending (very difficult to do in an era when money is tight).  Success in this form of persuasion is very time-consuming, and takes a lot of patient work because results will take years to become apparent.  It means paying attention to many, many high schools and actually getting to know and assessing the individual students that come your way from each.

That doesn’t mean marketing to students is hopeless.  There are other parts of an institution’s value proposition that can be emphasized (employability, opportunity, etc) in ways that will make prospective sit up and take notice.  It’s just to say that students have already decided a lot about a school long before they first see a website or a viewbook, and marketing campaigns need to be conducted with that in mind.