Recruiting Pitch Put on Tape : Lend Us Your Ears, Costly Small College Asks Youths

Small, expensive Knox College, hoping to overcome growing competition for fewer top-grade students, has come up with a new recruitment strategy aimed at keeping its brochures out of the wastebasket.

They call it the Knox Box, a five-minute tape-recording featuring the voices of students talking about life on the private college’s campus.

More than 3,000 of the $4 Knox Box packages have been sent to prospective students in the last month, replacing the usual magazine-size brochures, called view books.

Honesty, Not Flash

“There’s no glitzy background music, no baritoned narrator saying, ‘Welcome to our college, la-dee-da,’ and all that,” said Richard B. Nirenberg, the Knox spokesman who came up with the cassette approach for “the audio generation.”

“This is just our attempt to get through to the potential student with our message, in as honest an approach as we can.”

On the tape, 21 students discuss why they chose Knox and why they like the school, where tuition, housing and fees this academic year totaled $10,560.

A female voice says, “In the beginning, my parents didn’t think they could afford” Knox College because they had two other children in college, one at a state university.

With Knox’s financial aid, she said, “I think it works out that my parents are really paying the same amount to send each of us.”

Others discuss what they gain from Knox academically and personally. One young woman says she felt inspired because Knox’s Old Main hall is the only site still standing that was used for the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Finally, a laughing young woman says, “I feel very prepared just . . . just for life.”

Despite the Madison Avenue-style marketing, the Knox Box aims to sell quality education to a select audience, Nirenberg said.

“There is a great deal of competition for top students,” he said. “And there are a great deal of fine liberal arts colleges out there much better known than Knox College.

“We need to do something a little different to get that student’s attention for three to five minutes and keep him from throwing our stuff in the wastebasket along with all the rest.”

New Twist

Audio or visual aids are nothing new in colleges’ attempts to market themselves to college-bound students.

But the Knox Box is unique, some national associations involved in college recruitment say.

The box, mailed directly to high school juniors or seniors, includes a brief brochure and half a dozen post cards to be used in seeking more details.

“I think it’s a great creative idea,” said Ann Winship, Chicago-area student-search director for the College Board, which sponsors the Scholastic Aptitude Test college-entrance exam.

Knox used lists of high-scoring students provided by the College Board to make an initial mailing last spring to about 65,000 persons. The 3,000 Knox Boxes were sent to students responding to that overture, and more will be sent to later respondents.