In a video on the Office of Admission webpage, for a minute and a half — as soft electronic music plays in the background — John Krasinski reveals why “you should look no further than Brown University.”
“Take it from me,” he says. “I’m John Krasinski, class of 2001.”
Brown is not the only university using this type of marketing. Harvard’s admission website includes a sixteen-and-a-half-minute video entitled “Welcome to Harvard” that features several stories of current students and alums — including those of Natalie Portman and Matt Damon — as well as footage of its campus.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s admission website includes a video comparing the school to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, with a tour featuring Tim the Beaver, MIT’s mascot, robots and a football player dipping a football into liquid nitrogen.
Perhaps the most well-known college admission video was produced by Yale — a lengthy musical video, released in 2010, entitled “That’s Why I Chose Yale.” Students, administrators nd faculty members lip-sync lyrics detailing their love for Yale, explaining the university’s residential college system, showcasing extracurricular activities and profiling sports teams and the student advising program.
One element is missing from each of these ambitious admission videos. None of them mention that there’s a less than 10 percent chance you’ll get in.
It’s not uncommon for schools to use creative marketing techniques to reach students, said Michele Hernandez, a college consultant and former assistant director of admission at Dartmouth.
“It’s a little bit of a factory process,” Hernandez said. “I think it’s a little disingenuous… It’s kind of unfair to encourage unqualified kids to apply.”
Many universities send marketing materials directly to students, Hernandez said, noting the volume of mail her daughter, a current high school junior, receives. “You could probably save the planet just by stopping sending these.”
Indeed, Brown’s Admission Office sends out “thousands and thousands of letters” and “hundreds of thousands of emails,” Director of Admission Jim Miller ’73 said. “Our role is to find the best students we can find, wherever they are in the world. That’s the bottom line.”
While students from lower-income areas — who may have less access to information about colleges — often benefit from the mailings, many students now rely on virtual tours and online college information outlets to inform their college search process, Hernandez said.
“Today’s students depend more on … social media. Schools are trying to change the delivery,” Hernandez said. “They are trying to get more talent, and they’re trying to get more diversity.”
But, she added, “I think sometimes they should be discouraging students to apply.”
Hernandez made a clear distinction, explaining that she thought paper mailings were acceptable ways of reaching students, while an admission information session, or “the travelling road show,” as she calls it, often specifically encourages unqualified students to apply.
In her work as an admission officer at Dartmouth, Hernandez found that sifting through applications was “somewhat of a scientific process.”She added that if students approached her with SAT scores in the 500s — out of a possible 800 section score — asking if they should apply to Brown, she would answer no.
“Students always say, ‘Well, there’s always a chance!’ But really, sometimes there isn’t,” Hernandez said.
“There’s almost never a 100 percent chance that a student will not be admitted to Brown … but, is this about what’s likely to happen, or is this about giving kids a chance?” said Steven Roy Goodman, an educational consultant and admission strategist at Top Colleges.
Unqualified student applications speed up the reading process for admission officers, Hernandez said. While admission officers may spend hours debating between qualified applicants, “they’re not going to spend more than three minutes” on a clearly unqualified student, Hernandez said.
“Schools like Brown have three goals,” Goodman said — to “maximize the number of students who apply,” to “have the lowest acceptance rate” and to “make sure that the combination of those two generates the best class.”
In the U.S. News and World Report’s 2014 rankings of national universities, “student selectivity” accounts for 12.5 percent of the criteria, and an institution’s acceptance rate accounts for 10 percent of student selectivity.
Though Miller said the University’s placement on ranking lists does not “factor at all into our process or our selection,” the Admission Office still advertises certain placements, like Brown’s “Happiest Students” ranking from the 2010 edition of the Princeton Review, said Rebecca Whittaker, director of outreach for admission.
Goodman said a university’s recruitment push often contradicts a high school student’s best interest, because the admission office is part of the university. “Admissions is really designed right now to benefit the institution.”
Despite the questionable implications of heavy admission marketing, universities often feel compelled to compete with one another, Hernandez said.
“All of the Ivies kind of act in concert,” she said. “They’re just doing their jobs.”
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