COLUMN ONE : Facing the Hard Sell in High School : Colleges use glossy marketing campaigns, consultants and cookies to lure top prospects. Some are even courting eighth-graders.
He’s no starting quarterback or flashy point guard. But 17-year-old Daniel Craddock has put up numbers that would catch any college recruiter’s eye.
A 3.8 grade-point average. A respectable SAT score. A transcript adorned with advanced college credits . . . and he is African American.
Small wonder that MIT, Cornell and Stanford began sending Craddock letters of interest early in his junior year at Lakewood High School, way before he had to commit. Yet it was a UCLA recruiter that beat them to the punch, persuading Craddock to skip his senior year and go directly to the Westwood campus.
“Being approached by UCLA, I thought about it and I said, ‘Why not?’ ” said Craddock, who hopes to become a doctor. “They kept pushing me and pushing and they showed an interest in (my) attending UCLA.”
Craddock’s story illustrates what many say has been an evolving--and sometimes disturbing--trend in higher education: Locked in an escalating competition for the nation’s top high school achievers, especially those of color, colleges are wooing younger students.
Colleges traditionally concentrate their recruiting energy on students in the last half of their junior year or those starting their senior year who have taken the ACT assessment or the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In recent years, however, competition has led some colleges to begin indirectly cultivating those in the eighth grade or earlier. And in what some experts say is a still rare but problematic twist, more schools are signing up the most exceptional academic stars as “early admissions,” plucking them from the talent pool before competitors fall into hot pursuit.
“It is something we recognize that is beginning to happen and people are beginning to talk about it,” said Jeffery Tanner, associate dean of admissions at Brigham Young University and president of the American Assn. of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, which represents academic recruiting divisions of 2,500 institutions.
“To bring a student in at a much earlier age, two years younger than their peers, I’m not sure we’re doing them a favor,” Tanner said.
Rocking--if not robbing--the scholastic cradle underscores a war for survival that has transformed college admissions offices over the last decade into powerful marketing enterprises that use extensive mailing lists, consultants and sophisticated computer programs to track potential applicants.
Gone are the days when low-paid admissions officers paddled quietly in administrative backwaters, pushing papers and relying largely on institutional reputations or connections with high school guidance counselors to steer a choice student their way.
Today, admissions offices employ full-time, higher-paid talent scouts and they cater to special market “segments.” USC’s School of Architecture seeks out minority high school students with B+ averages and an interest in the subject.
Schools convene focus groups, put up billboards, create posters worthy of the movies and mount phone campaigns. At Cal State Hayward, 150 professors have taken a “telemarketing” seminar and are responsible for encouraging about 25 applicants each.
For students, the recruiting blizzard can be so daunting that Hope College of Michigan has a gimmick to make its mail stand out--literally. It uses oversized literature calculated to stick out of mailboxes. Ohio’s Ashland University sends six-inch cookies from its school kitchens to 20,000 prospects.
The reason for such razzmatazz is simple: After feasting on World War II GIs and their baby boom progeny, colleges saw their primary market of 18-year-old high school graduates shrink from 3.2 million in 1979 to 2.4 million in 1992.
The implications were more foreboding for private schools, which statistics show depend on tuition for nearly 60% of their income compared to 21% for public institutions. But with legislatures cutting back on subsidies, all schools have found themselves competing for customers, not unlike companies peddling rival brands of shampoo, experts say.
“Colleges live and die by their admissions offices,” said Jennifer Britz, editor of the Lawlor Review, a new publication that caters to university marketeers.
And those admissions offices have turned to what the Review dubs “techno-recruiting,” the use of turbocharged computer programs and technology to track potential clients. Using categories such as race, family income, religious preference and the proclivity to move away from home, schools can order customized mailing lists from the millions of students who take tests administered by the College Board in New York and American College Testing in Iowa City, Iowa.
About 250 colleges also buy the College Board’s “enrollment planning” computer program, which is capable of breaking down students who take the SAT into 304 “geomarkets,” classifying them by 23 academic interests and identifying a school’s most likely institutional competitors for a student.
Meanwhile, a cottage industry of private consultants helps schools shape marketing strategy, remake their brochures--even analyze potential applicants by “psychodemographics,” whether families in their ZIP code are more likely to own station wagons or Land Rovers, for instance.
At USC, admissions officials have ordered the names of 300,000 high school juniors for this year’s mailing and they will field inquiries with a new toll-free telephone system, which automatically responds by mail within 24 hours to any student who answers a series of electronic prompts.
And the marketing is not likely to stop. Although demographics show a new tidal wave of high school graduates will swamp the market soon, experts say admissions officers must work harder to persuade students and their parents to pay $100,000 or more for a degree at some private schools. They also say that the new techniques have ignited an arms race between schools scouring the country for the brightest students.
“The recruitment of students has become one of the most competitive marketing climates in the country,” said Ernest Boyer, former U.S. commissioner of education and president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “Without question, it’s more intense than it’s ever been.”
Nowhere is the competition more intense than for top-notch minority scholars, who are attracting the kind of traffic once reserved for star athletes. Admissions officers say they are under great pressure to enroll more African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos to diversify their campuses.
The pool of minority scholars is comparatively small. Only 1,691, or 2%, of black students nationwide scored at least 600 out of a possible 800 on the verbal skills portion of the 1993 SAT test, as well as 8,646 or 11% of Asian Americans and 2,292 or 3% of Latinos. That compares to 58,802 or 9% of white students. A 600 on both verbal and math are considered minimum scores for entrance into the country’s top colleges.
That leads to ethnic-rich Southern California, where out-of-state schools have opened 15 new regional admissions offices in recent years. The reason: California’s secondary school population, which will soon graduate more minorities than whites, will balloon 81% by 2009.
“A lot of colleges see California as a gold mine,” said Edward Hu, Brown University’s associate director of admissions.
One prize catch is John Lindo, who sports a 3.6 grade-point average as a senior at private Loyola High School in Los Angeles. More than 100 schools have sent him brochures and unsolicited applications. The University of Illinois has called repeatedly. Lehigh University in Pennsylvania sends monthly newsletters. And the University of Missouri at Rolla just cannot take the hint.
“Even after I declared I wasn’t interest in attending that school, I still received mail from them, apparently hoping I would change my mind,” said Lindo, an African American who hopes to double major in electrical engineering and instrumental music.
The scrambling is so fierce that schools are routinely offering minority scholars expense-paid trips to their campuses. They will be paired with student guides and will sit in on classes and be encouraged to soak up the ambience of dormitory life. Admissions officers say such campus trips are crucial because students are more likely to enroll in a school they have visited.
Even the Ivy League has been forced to match these offers. Dartmouth College recently began paying for minority recruiting visits and rival Brown pays for several train cars of minority standouts from the Northeast to take an Amtrak caravan to its Rhode Island campus each year. One Midwestern college reportedly tried to impress a minority prospect by sending a limousine to transport her to campus.
The most desperate competition involves financial aid. College officials say they are in an escalating, hard-dollars bidding war for minority students, who often come from families who are unable to pay steep tuition. As a response, many schools offer merit scholarships or “preferred packages” of grants, loans and work-study jobs to minority standouts. Some schools are performing financial aid “leveraging” studies that show how to attract the greatest number of students for the dollar.
“In these tough economic times . . . there is so much consumerism among parents and kids that they are . . . shopping packages around,” said Hu, adding that more students are paying acceptance deposits to competing schools to see which one will come up with the most money. “From our end, it’s crazy.”
Harvard University officials were shocked in 1992 when only 55% of the eligible African Americans students decided to enroll, compared to its normal 75%. A spokeswoman blamed competing scholarships from other schools, adding that acceptances were back to 67% last year after Harvard redoubled minority recruiting efforts.
Officials at DePauw University in Indiana grumble about a top African American prospect who was snatched away by a rival institution that offered a $17,000 scholarship--although his father made more than $400,000 year. And at Pomona College in Claremont, dean of admissions Bruce Poch is still smarting over one recruit who switched after a Southeast school went directly to his parent with an offer of free tuition.
Such overheated recruiting has a downside for some students who get to college only to find the work harder and the pace faster than they expected. “It is not enough to recruit minorities and leave them to founder in a hostile college environment,” said Reginald Wilson, one of the report’s authors.
One solution, university officials say, is to reach below the ranks of high school seniors to “grow” promising minority students and get them used to the idea of attending college because some may be the first in their family with the opportunity. Admissions officers work with community-based programs such as the Young Black Scholars, a Los Angeles-based program established to nurture African American scholarship, or they will sponsor their own summer institutes for minorities or other gifted students of all races.
Britz said such outreach programs are “sincere, genuine commitments to make schools more diverse.” Yet recruiters also concede that these “seed-planting” activities pay indirect bonuses, allowing them to cultivate an emotional loyalty with younger students who are otherwise on campus to learn the finer points of debate or high school study habits.
“It’s a good recruiting tactic,” said Ken Woods, Southern California regional admissions director for the University of Denver, which sponsors two summer institutes.
“Face it, you’re dealing with a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old who is starting to call a faculty member, rather than Dr. Rosen, it is ‘Hey, Al. Let’s talk physics.’ ” Woods said. “They get to know professors on a first-name basis. It’s a great soft sell (and) we’re getting a database of kids.”
Making the pitch to younger students has become so important, said Mt. St. Mary’s admissions director Katy Murphy, that the Brentwood Catholic women’s school has decided to mail 10,000 letters of introduction to high school sophomores next year.
Experts say that schools are increasingly pushing exceptionally advanced younger students to sign up under early admissions programs, which allow them to bypass their senior year in high school and go to college.
Students who are typically eligible for such jump-starts have raced far ahead of their peers, plowing through their high school requirements and piling up college credits at community colleges. But emotional maturity does not keep pace in many cases, college administrators say.
Tanner, president of the national association representing collegiate admissions officers, said members of his group have expressed a lot of concern about this growing trend.
He said the phenomenon is being spurred in part by the fact that a number of states--including Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Utah--allow fast learners to take a college course and earn both college credit and credit toward their high school diploma.
While UCLA snatched up Lakewood High’s Craddock, UCLA admissions director Rae Lee Siporin said such cases are rare and that she enrolls fewer than six early admissions students a year. “They find us, I’m not looking for them,” she said.
But cross-town rival USC aggressively recruits sophomores for its competitive Resident Honors Program, allowing them to skip their senior year in high school. Last summer, USC sent 24,000 letters to students who scored high on the Preliminary SAT test, offering them the opportunity to trade a room at home for one in a campus residence hall if they took the SAT early in their junior year and scored 1,250 or above.
Last year, USC took 52 students into the program, including three Latinos but no blacks, a school spokesman said. University administrators say that they take great care in selecting only those students who are socially and emotionally ready, and that the number is not expected to grow by much.
Even when USC turns down students for the program, the early contact is considered a recruiting boon. “It’s a way for us to get them early to let them know that USC cares about them,” said Pennelope Von Helmolt, the program’s associate director.
