Marketing by Universities: What should parents do?

All my life, I have been in institutions where marketing was taboo. I had, of course, seen ads in print, on TV, on hoardings and in magazines, and often wondered the utility of these. Do people really take the most important decision of their career by looking at the ads. And once I joined the private sector myself, I realize that the answer to this question is an unambiguous YES. Even the NAAC accreditation team that visited JK Lakshmipat University last year wrote amongst its suggestions that we do greater amount of marketing so that more students are aware of the excellent opportunities that we provide.

I am told that advertisement revenue from education sector is greater than almost all other sectors in the country. Most private colleges spend more than 10 percent of their revenue on marketing and the total spend is more than a billion USD. That is a lot of money which could have been used to improve the quality of education.

Marketing is, of course, essential in any business and it is essential that universities reach out to potential students and tell them about its strengths. Only a few top universities can avoid marketing and depend purely on word of mouth. My concern is whether there is too much focus on marketing, too much money being spent on marketing which could have been spent on improving education, and whether the potential students and parents are taking decisions based on what they see in advertisements or do they only shortlist based on marketing and then try to get additional information before taking the final decision.

Taking decisions based on marketing is ok and perhaps the only way to buy a lot of goods and services. It is alright to buy a TV based on the ad that you saw. The maximum loss is that perhaps another TV would have given you a better value. In that sense, you perhaps took a small loss at the most. Same is true for most things. But education is different. Choosing one program over another, or one university over another, could impact your entire career. Choosing a program at a university only based on the highest package advertised by the university could mean a poor job at the end of your program while in another university, you could have done so much better.

Also, unlike most goods and services where it is very difficult for a lay person to compare the offerings, in the education field, it is not too difficult to get a sense of quality offered by different universities if you invest your time into it. Not trivial, but not impossible even for a layman. Marketing essentially assumes that all customers have very limited amount of time in which they want to decide and hence if certain messaging can be communicated a few times consistently, the customers will respond to it. And, for most goods and services, as we said above, it is ok. But it is not ok, if the consequences are very serious.

How many people will buy their homes based on advertisements. I would guess, very few. Advertisements can at best tell them about the potential projects, but they will visit a lot of places, want to see a model apartment, may be visit multiple times with their families and friends, talk to people living there in the neighborhood, and so on. Isn't college education more important than that. College education will determine whether you can buy that property or not in future. So, one needs to spend even more time to decide college education than buying a property.

I sincerely hope that students and parents will use advertisements only for shortlisting the top few choices (say, 6-8) and then get more information about them and there is no shortcut to actually visiting the university, talking to current students and faculty randomly (not the guys in admissions office), ask a lot of questions, see the facilities. Yes, it can be time consuming and if one is looking for universities outside the home town, there is additional expense of travel, but this is the most important decision of your career, and you should at least do as much due diligence as you would do in buying a property.