Educational organizations and advertisers thrive within a fiercely contested domain ruled by quick thinking and innovation. Research supports successful marketing tactics. This article examines the importance of making evidence-based decisions and offers insightful tips and useful recommendations for educational institutions and those wishing to improve their outreach efforts. 1. Understanding Your Audience
To develop successful campaigns, you must first understand your audience. Starting research, the basis of all studies is audience analysis. Understanding prospects’ preferences, needs, and challenges is key to successful data collection and analysis. To build a stronger bond with your audience, personalization holds the key.2. Building Trust through Transparency
Transparency is the cornerstone of research-based approaches in educational marketing. With an appreciation for realness, audiences demand honesty nowadays. Trust cannot be established without an institution’s being upfront about its offerings, policies, and achievements. Accurate information sharing about grad rates, qualifications, job prospects, and accreditations can bring confidence to prospective students & their families. Proactive action towards concerns and highlighting institutional strengths via research is crucial.
In addition, being at the forefront of providing students with all means of help showcases the institution’s commitment to academic excellence and research-driven education. However, there are students in college and university who need extra help. Mostly, it’s connected with writing tasks. For example, platforms offering research essay samples help potential applicants understand the expectations and standards of what is a research essay. This way, anyone gets assistance and a deep understanding of what the task should look like.
Transparency and clarity in providing such samples can go a long way in building trust with your audience and guiding them in their educational journey.3. Data-Driven Content Creation
The newest benefit at top companies: Private college admissions counseling
Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inboxListen to an audio version of this story, by Kirk Carapezza of GBH Boston.
NEWTON, Mass. — Shannon Vasconcelos fired up her laptop in a sterile conference room in a suburban office park, and right on schedule a mother and her daughter popped onto her screen.
The two were in the Adirondacks on vacation, but not even that allowed them an escape from a process that had already begun to consume them: getting the daughter into college.
Vasconcelos’s job is to coach them through this. Calm and reassuring, she fielded a barrage of questions from the daughter, a high school junior who said she wants to attend an Ivy League school and that her family has $100,000 in a college savings account.
“If you’re at the academic level where getting into an Ivy League college is a possibility, that also means that you would likely be eligible for lots of great merit scholarship money” at slightly less-selective schools, Vasconcelos responded. “So that’s something to weigh.”
It’s advice she’s well equipped to give, as a former assistant director of financial aid at Tufts University and now senior director for college finance at Bright Horizons College Coach, which provides private counseling for college admissions. And it’s free to this family, a job perk offered by the mother’s employer.
The New York offices of JPMorgan Chase. The company is among employers that provide college admissions coaching as an employee perk. Credit: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Corbis via Getty Images
A growing number of top companies are providing access to admissions counselors such as Vasconcelos as a benefit to their employees. These include JP Morgan Chase, American Express, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, EY, Paramount Pictures, Mastercard, Goodwin Law, Johnson & Johnson, VMWare and some venture capital and private equity firms.
These employers say that offering private coaching for college admissions as a perk — which typically costs around $140 an hour, according to the Independent Educational Consultants Association — is a way to recruit and keep workers in a tight labor market with record-low job satisfaction and to prevent the stress of the admissions process from cutting into productivity.
Why the college essay may never be the same
It’s one thing to invite students to talk about race in an admissions essay. But how do people coach them to present their best selves?
Tyler Harper tutored high school students in Queens who wanted to attend America’s best colleges. He helped them find the right voice via essays. It confounded him when Asian students wanted to seem less Asian, but then he saw that despite great grades and résumés, some got in and some didn’t.Why We Wrote This
The Supreme Court’s June ruling ending affirmative action upended about 50 years of college admissions practices. At some universities, the college essay is playing a large role in shaping what comes next.
Now that the Supreme Court declared affirmative action unconstitutional, he and other educators worry about what will happen to other students of color. If precedents hold true, enrollment could drop dramatically. He doesn’t want Black and Latino students to experience the pitfalls of racial gamification.
“Many of the Black and Brown students that I tutored, some of them were from upper-class backgrounds, and those students were talented jazz pianists or whatever. But they had the sense that ‘I probably shouldn’t write about jazz piano for my college essay because they want me to show that I’m a disadvantaged minority,’” Dr. Harper recalls.
“This is bad for minority kids who feel like they … have to talk about when they got pulled over by the cops,” he says. It is equally bad for white kids who feel they must lean into trauma, about an alcoholic parent or struggles with depression and anxiety.
