Higher Education Disconnects

Introduction

In my youth, the most significant purchase I would expect to make was a home, followed by a car. For today's students, the second-largest expenditure will be a university education.  They will start their careers tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Are we really surprised there’s been a steady decline in new enrolments since 2013? Students are seriously thinking about whether a university education is worth the investment.

Through marketing research projects commissioned by universities and private colleges, I have spent the past few years speaking to hundreds of people involved in higher education. This includes school students, undergraduates, postgraduates, alumni, deans, course coordinators, working professionals, industry bodies, and graduate supervisors in both the private and public sectors. Many of the discussions revolve around the relevance and appeal of proposed new courses, or reasons for declining enrolment in existing ones, although many other topics have been explored. Some major themes emerged, inspiring me to write about a few of them. My hope is that they are good food for thought for those in the higher education sector.

Marketing might seem anathema in some academic circles, but its mindset can deliver something universities really need right now: more student enrolments. Universities can supplement their academic perspective with a marketing one to keep the proverbial lights on. Most already do, to some extent, but there’s plenty of room for improvement.

This isn’t a call for a hard sales approach in universities – something I abhor.  Rather, it’s a call to put oneself in the shoes of today’s prospective student to help them justify racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. When a university knows what students think, feel, want, and need from higher education, it is far better placed to deliver that value in the form of courses, services, communications, and the student experience. And these help to drive enrolments.

Theme 1: Lack of direction

Most of the Year 11 and 12 students I’ve spoken to don’t know what to study, and this is backed up by many of the undergraduates who didn’t know what to study in their final year of school. A rare few have a clear view of their future and how university will aid them, but a majority have not attained such epiphany. Their parents tell them to go to university and find something -anything- just so long they get a degree. They default to studying something akin to what they enjoyed, or succeeded in, at school. For example, most sports science undergraduates I’ve spoken to claim to have always enjoyed sport and so it made sense to study something sport related. For many, that’s about as deep as the decision-making process gets.

Most students are not clear-eyed adults; they are teenagers whose mental development is still a work in progress. They aren’t worldly, wise, or well informed. They’ve been focused on finishing their schooling and little else. As important as school career councillors are, the university is where the rubber really meets the road. These students enter university with little or no line of sight of their career options, and they need help to picture them.  Alumni career stories are powerful but under leveraged examples. Universities can help students imagine their futures, to excite and inspire them. When you can capture someone’s emotional attention, you’re onto something powerful.

Theme 2: Employability

A large majority of the students I speak to are very concerned about employability and want assurances their studies will position them for a career. They want hard facts about their employment prospects on completion, salary expectations, and career pathways. This is a relatively easy feat for courses that are shoe-ins to accreditation (like law, medicine, many health degrees, etc.) but more challenging for degrees with less structured career pathways.

Students place great emphasis on the importance of hard and soft skills development to list in their CVs, and nothing is more important than the curation of practical experience to prepare them for their careers, especially among graduate students.

Theme 3: Communication

Few students claim to get the information they need about a university degree from the website or course handbook. There is a substantial gap between what a university chooses to say about their courses and what the prospective student wants to know about them, such as what it will be like to study -what they’ll be doing, how they’ll be learning, what’s expected from them, and what hard and soft skills they’ll develop. They also want to know what sort of career it will open for them, and what that will really be like in five- or ten-years.  

Course descriptions and handbooks are generally dry and filled with inaccessible language and terminology. Too many are written for academic peers, rather than teenagers whose thinking processes are trained for the consumption of bite-sized chunks of social media content. Yes, they’ll have to stretch their information processing habits when they start studying, but (at least) until they’ve enrolled, universities could do well to meet them halfway.

Conclusion

The stakes for students are simply too high to leave to chance the choice of whether, what and where to study. Universities can do more to mitigate this risk, and a marketing perspective can help.

A subtle shift in mindset from selling degrees to selling careers is a good starting point. There can be more emphasis on delivering practical experience and skills development to better prepare students for their careers. And there is plenty of work to be done on communicating with students in accessible language that grabs their attention and inspires them to want a university education.