College Recruiting the MTV Way : Education: Potential students are fewer and reading is declining, so schools are trying videos. Critics say the tapes are misleading.

The synthesizer music throbs with an irresistible beat. Tightly edited scenes of attractive young people flash by--biking, dancing, working on computers, playing volleyball. Innovative video techniques superimpose moody graphics over live action. A seductive yet authoritative male voice narrates.

What’s going on here? Is this the latest MTV rock video? A commercial for beer or soft drinks? The opening to a new teen romance movie?

Guess again. It’s the latest college recruitment technique in an era when 18-year-olds are harder to find than they were 10 years ago, and reportedly fewer of them respond to the written word. In this case, it’s a video promoting Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, a pioneer in the use of videos to sell four years of college. But it could very well be a pitch for any number of other schools.

About half the nation’s institutions of higher learning--world-famous Ivy League universities and obscure junior colleges alike--are selling themselves to the VCR generation with snappy videos that extol their campuses as beautiful, academically excellent and fun.

“We are dealing with a generation of students who respond to visual images more than their predecessors,” explains Joseph Allen, admissions director at UC Santa Cruz, which has had a recruiting tape for two years. “It’s a group that is used to taking in information that way.”

It is also a smaller group than it used to be. The number of high school graduates has declined about 20% nationally in the past decade, and applications to colleges have been dropping, although immigration to California has eased the trend here. The national situation is not expected to reverse until the late 1990s when many children of Baby Boomers reach college age.

That is the main reason colleges are willing to spend $20,000 to $120,000 making videos and to brave criticism that they pander to the anti-intellectual.

Drake has played its 3-year-old tape on MTV amid Madonna and Bruce Springsteen videos. The video manages to combine the promise of computer-aided studies with the lure of college romance. In its closing seconds, an attractive young woman asks a shy young man for a date though a message on a computer screen--undoubtedly a powerful image for some males whose strongest relationships may have been with computer keyboards.

Drake officials say applications doubled because of the video and because of the school’s new emphasis on computer technology.

Many schools want their videos to fight a negative stereotype, explains Bradford Owen, president of Profilm, a Los Angeles firm that has made 17 college videos in the past four years, including most of the ones for the University of California. Profilm is part of a blooming sub-industry of college recruiting filmmakers and video distributors.

“Since these are image tools, what we try to do is to create an image of the school based on fact but enhanced by the medium,” says Owen.

For example, the one he made for UC Santa Cruz seeks to shed the old hippies-in-the-hills image and emphasize strong academics and mainstream career possibilities. UC Davis’ downplays its agricultural programs and stresses how pleasant life there can be. UCLA’s attempts to assuage fears about the school’s enormous size. UC Riverside’s emphasizes that there is plenty to do in that community.

College admissions officials say the videos help families who can’t afford cross-country trips scouting potential schools for their youngsters. The tapes give a sense of what a campus looks like and what it offers, they say, and are not so different from a catalogue with pretty color pictures of autumn leaves on campus.

“It’s not the end tool. It’s sort of the very beginning,” says Joan Paschal, a recruiting expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Council for Advancement and Support of Education. “You want to catch the person’s attention, make them want to find out more about the campus. And then the more traditional decision-making process kicks in.”

But some counselors and schools remain skeptical.

Frank Burtnett, executive director of the National Assn. of College Admission Counselors in Alexandria, Va., worries that the videos are “too slick, too Madison Avenue” and stress parties and sports over course work and libraries.

“There is the potential, I think, to give the students what the students would like to see rather than what the students need to see,” he says.

Occidental College in Los Angeles is one of the holdouts. Officials there decided they would rather put money into personal visits to high schools around the country instead of into videos, spokeswoman Frances Hill says. Besides, she sniffs, “the kind of students we are trying to attract are more oriented toward reading than looking at videos. . . . A student who comes to Oxy has to be prepared to work really hard and to do a lot of reading, and they are best approached through the printed word or in person.”

And Caltech seems close to abandoning its 4-year-old video, which circulates through various rental and free-viewing distribution networks to schools and homes.

“There may be some benefit from it. But my perception is that the persons mainly benefiting are the filmmakers,” says Dan Langdale, Caltech admissions director.

Viewings of 20 college videos, which usually run from 5 to 30 minutes each, showed that some schools seriously attempt to explain their curricula, faculty, student bodies and surrounding communities.

But more often, the tapes are numbingly similar--highlighting sports teams, tight-sweatered cheerleaders, handsome joggers in sylvan settings, class discussions on lawns, fancy laboratory equipment and computer workstations. Any nearby river, beach, ski mountain or cultural center tends to figure prominently in the filming. And the music rarely stops.

Students giving testimonials are carefully chosen for ethnic diversity, and all attest to the faculty’s friendliness and availability.

Professors so tout “excellence” of academic programs that differences blur among, for example, Cornell University, Flagler College in Florida, the University of Pennsylvania or Green Mountain College in Vermont--schools that differ greatly in their standards for admission and graduation.

On the other hand, counselors, parents and students say today’s young people are video-sophisticated enough to be able to sift reality from hype. Some videos backfire, they say, by focusing too much on a particular type of student or on an obviously staged event.

For example, John Vosmek, a high school senior in Portland, Ore., said he and his parents watched about 10 college videos recently and had some fun with the repeated bromide: “The biggest problem at this campus is that there are too many classes and activities to choose from.”

But Vosmek said he found the videos useful for gaining a general sense of the nine East Coast schools to which he has applied. This spring, after the colleges decide whether they want him, he plans to tour the schools that said yes and choose one.

Paula Bingham, who helps counsel college-bound students at Bonita Vista High School in Chula Vista, said the videos’ benefits outweigh any drawbacks.

“They are a PR kind of thing and a sales pitch, but kids don’t really have an opportunity to experience a lot of the colleges any other way,” she said. “It usually generates more questions in their minds for when they finally get down to the campus.”

Higher education is taking other marketing steps to cope with the declining number of teen-agers. Many schools are tailoring courses and schedules to appeal to older students already in the work force.

Colleges are casting a wider geographic net, sending recruiters to high schools and college fairs in parts of the country they would not have visited a few years ago. Applicants are being invited to more frequent and more elaborate campus parties, and professors are pressed to write more letters urging promising students to enroll.

But videos have the advantage of reaching a much wider audience, college officials say. Realizing that an amateurish video can turn off potential applicants, most colleges have dropped in-house shows produced by film students and have hired professional filmmakers. About 25 film companies around the country now specialize in college recruiting and compete strongly for new business.

And the competition for students has spawned a cottage industry of video distributors.

For example, a few years ago attorney Shelly Spiegel noticed how inconvenient it was for her younger brother, then in high school, to ask individual colleges for their tapes. So she quit practicing law and founded College Home Videos, a Philadelphia mail-order company that distributes the videos of nearly 100 schools, partly through an order list inside the well-known Peterson’s college guides.

Potential applicants usually pay $4 per video. Colleges pay $3,000 a year each to be part of the network, although some make extra arrangements for Spiegel to send their tapes free of charge to good prospects. Altogether, she estimates, the firm annually sends out about 50,000 copies of college videos.

Other firms, such as Learning Resources Network in Durham, N.C., and College U.S.A. in Gaithersburg, Md., place laser-disc machines with large selections of the college shows into high school counseling offices and also offer videocassettes that can be taken home free of charge. In addition, College U.S.A. plays its tapes on the cable television Learning Channel.

LRN president Robert Chapman, a former college video producer, urges college administrators to carefully consider what message they want to send to potential freshmen and what kind of freshmen they want.

“A skillfully produced video can have enormous influence on its viewers, an impact that can probably only be matched by a visit to the campus or by the influence of a parent, trusted friend or adviser,” he says.

Ironically, young people are quick to pick up that message. In a reversal of the usual marketing trend, high school seniors are starting to send elaborate videotaped presentations of themselves and their skills as part of their college applications.

However, Burtnett of the national counselors association cautions high school students that expertise with home video recorders will not replace old-fashioned ability to write an application essay. So videocassettes of speeches, piano recitals, athletic performances and some wacky home movies are piling up unwatched in admissions offices nationwide.

“Colleges are just beside themselves about this,” Burtnett says. “They are not looking at them.”