Recently, SimpsonScarborough’s Elizabeth Johnson was a panelist at Inside Higher Ed’s conference on “Higher Ed in an Era of Heightened Skepticism.” Along with Brandon Busteed of Gallup and Zakiya Smith of the Lumina Foundation, Elizabeth participated on a panel exploring the question, “Solution: Better Branding or Real Change,” which posited that there are two main perspectives on why today’s public is so skeptical of higher ed:
Perspective 1: Higher education is broken, meaning there is actual underperformance by this ecosystem of institutions in serving its historical mission of providing affordable and useful education to students, producing workers for the economy, and serving the public (i.e., all of the things people expect higher education to do).
Perspective 2: People don’t understand us. There is a misperception.
Moderator Doug Lederman, IHE’s co-founder and editor, started off the session by asking the panelists, “Which of these two perspectives is more responsible for the declining public confidence in higher education?” Below is a transcript of Elizabeth’s response to the question (it has been lightly edited for length).
The reason I jumped at the chance to sit on this panel is because the title of it is flawed.
Does everyone see that?
“Better branding or real change.”
There can’t be an “or.”
In fact, the title itself reinforces the fundamental misperception and misunderstanding of marketing and branding in higher education in the first place. To think that we can have a better brand if we don’t change is ridiculous, and it’s a real problem.
Higher education has been so slow to adopt the basic principles of marketing and branding. Back when I started my career in the early ‘90s, I didn’t work with anyone on a campus who had “marketing” in their job title. But we’re getting better. Institutions are hiring chief marketing officers, creating vice presidents of marketing and communications, and more. We are making some good progress, but it is extremely slow.
Colleges and universities are notoriously poor marketers. We continually talk about why the public doesn’t understand. We think to ourselves, “How can they possibly think a college degree isn’t worth it?”
Well, our mere existence is not a marketing strategy.
I know that for many colleges and universities, “marketing” and “branding” are dirty words that we have reluctantly adopted. We don’t really want to talk about it, but over the course of time we’ve realized we have to. As an industry, we must realize that there has to be a mindset change; we must realize that all institutions—public, private, small, large, profit, or non-profit—have to market themselves; we must realize that we have to devote resources—time, person-power, financial—to marketing; we must realize that we have to tell our story better; we must realize we have to be braver.
From her smart, forward-thinking perspective, President Pat McGuire of Trinity College said that institutional leaders must be braver to use their platform as presidents of all different types of institutions to change the rhetoric on higher education.
Many people are afraid to take on such a task, but until we stand up and realize we have to get in front of this negative language and messaging around higher education, until we start really investing in marketing the industry more effectively, it’s not going to change, and the problem will persist.
To close, it is important to note that this is certainly not just a marketing problem. As an industry, we have to change and continually innovate, and with that, our brand will change.