Sweatshirts of change: The coming age of consumerism in Higher Education
A father reflects on whether universities are truly doing their part during the admissions process given the large investments of time and money from parents and students.
By Dr Paul W. Thurman Professor of Management and Analytics, Columbia University
"In fact, we felt like beggars who would do anything to allow this great university to charge us hundreds of thousands of dollars over four years."
My youngest daughter, Vanessa, is in her junior year of high school in the United States, and is starting a process well-known to all of her classmates around the country: the college visit and selection process (often referred to as the “sweatshirt tour,” whereby she buys a sweatshirt at every college she visits). While not every college requires a campus visit before applying to it, many do, and some keep track of this “demonstrated interest” visit as part of an applicant’s profile.
On a recent campus visit with her, while standing in line at that college’s bookstore in order to buy yet another sweatshirt, a strange and slightly scary insight occurred to me: this small bookstore was set up perfectly for me to be a customer, and to buy a $75 sweatshirt, yet the huge university around the small bookstore was not set up very well for my daughter (or for me) to be a very high-spending customer of it.
After completing my purchase, I asked my daughter, “Vanessa, do you feel like you are a customer of this university?” “What do you mean, Dad,” was her response. “I mean do you feel like you are actually the buyer, here, of this college’s education and experience?” Her reply startled me a bit. “No, Dad. I want to go to a good college, so that’s why I’m trying really hard to learn about the schools so I can write good applications that they will like.”
Wow.
Neither Vanessa nor I realised that, just like her sweatshirt, which was marketed, displayed, and sold (with a discount coupon offered by the admissions department, I might add), colleges, too, are offering a “product” or “service,” in the form of an undergraduate education and experience - which hopefully leads to employment - that costs thousands of dollars in direct expenses. We did not really feel like customers. In fact, we felt like beggars who would do anything to allow this great university to charge us hundreds of thousands of dollars over four years to provide my daughter with an education and prospects for good employment afterward.
For that kind of money, shouldn’t a university treat my daughter and me as “prospects,” to some extent, and do whatever it takes, beyond just a simple campus walking tour, to “woo” me and to persuade me to spend all my money with them instead of with another college? Usually, we become top-tier, highly desired customers based on our purchase behaviour and/or loyalty. When it comes to higher education though, we become wanted customers only if we meet the supplier’s standards of excellence… and then can pay for the (non-refundable) privilege of attendance.
"Given the investment that Vanessa’s mother and I will eventually make in her education, surely we deserve to be treated more like customers than bill payers."
Seems a little backwards. I could only think of one other industry where we have to work hard but are often inconvenienced, where we need to be good customers for companies that offer no refunds or exchanges (generally speaking) irrespective of our satisfaction: airlines.
Economically speaking, there are some similarities. Although we pay very different prices for the services universities and airlines provide, we have a lot of legwork to do to be a good customer for them. Once we’ve bought our tickets or tuition, we usually can’t get our money back… even if our plans change for good reason. To expect superior customer service is a bit of a stretch, too, in both industries. When we fly, we tend to fly with a supplier we know a bit about beforehand, such as on-time ratings, lost baggage rates, general customer satisfaction, “brand” value and safety, and frequent flyer program perks.
Universities have similar metrics; graduation rates, dropout rates, student and faculty satisfaction, and employability statistics. Fortunately, along with my daughter, I also packed the most recent QS World University Rankings and Subject Rankings reports showing how schools and programs and subject areas ranked in terms of satisfaction, scholarship, and employability. These data, like “Consumer Reports” or “Travel and Leisure” rankings of airlines, helped my daughter and me consider some factors like faculty-student ratio and employability on a level playing field across all the universities she wanted to visit. We also benefitted from testimonials and “real talk” from current students and alumni whom we knew personally.
But did any of those data or resources make a difference? Did any of that beforehand knowledge help with admissions? Not that we can tell. All the admission presentations and campus tours were largely the same; schools touted their safe and clean aircraft… oh wait, I mean campuses, and all talked about how selective they were in the hopes that your child, too, would fit in as part of their campus family. Interestingly, we often seemed to be better informed about a school’s faculty makeup, student reviews, and employability acumen than the admissions office speakers and tour guides. Thank you, QS, for arming us with good intelligence!
There’s an old bromide that’s been tossed around in American higher education for years: (research) universities are really nothing more than private equity funds with an education side-business. Sadly, there is some truth to this. Universities often dedicate lots of resources to managing their endowments and philanthropic efforts with only some tacit energy put toward “marketing” and “customer retention.” No wonder I feel like I have to make myself up to be a really good prospect so I can pay for the privilege of being a customer someday. Granted, I don’t need tea and crumpets every time I visit a campus, and a red carpet really isn’t necessary. But given the investment that Vanessa’s mother and I will eventually make in her education, surely we deserve to be treated more like customers than bill payers. No matter how much you pay in tuition, room, and board, any issues that may come up in the dormitory, classroom, or campus gym facilities are at best met with an apology and a promise to make it better next time.
However, consumers have become more powerful, thanks to social media, among other things, and even in old, staid markets like healthcare, consumers are demanding more say, more choice, and more flexibility. Additionally, we are starting to see some nascent tastes of this consumerism in higher education… especially as more prospective students and their parents are armed with market benchmarks, ranking reports, and previously unpublished “user reviews” from students and other parents.
Are we therefore seeing the dawn of a new age of consumerism in higher education? I certainly hope so. We should be able to demand more contact hours for our kids as well as more reasonable tuition requests and better campus facilities. If our kids have to be on Zoom for certain classes, those shouldn’t cost as much as in-person instruction does, for example.
Data and information about higher educational institutions, including leadership pay and compensation, investments in infrastructure, and sustainability initiatives, are giving us much more data than we’ve ever had before. However, if we don’t turn that data into information, and then knowledge and then wisdom, we won’t be empowered to make the changes that institutions (at least in the US) need to make to be competitive; for example, more non-degree training programs for job skills/upskilling, certificate programmes for those who want a college experience but who don’t necessarily need it for their chosen professions. This power of this consumerism, if wielded properly, can then help transform universities into responsive suppliers of educational goods and services that constantly seek to improve their wares in order to attract the best (paying) customers.
This brings me back to the bookstore and my sweatshirt purchase. Interestingly, as we approached the cashier, she asked how we were doing and if we had enjoyed our campus tour (I guess the coupon I was holding was a big clue as to why we were there…). We explained that we were visiting and that this was one of my daughter’s top school choices. The cashier then did something unexpected: she spent 5 minutes explaining that she was a current student, that there were some big positives but a few negatives about the school, and that she really hoped to see my daughter on campus. She took the time, with a long queue of sweatshirt-holding parents and prospects behind us, to tell us her story, to answer a couple of my daughter’s questions, and to give us a really good feeling about the place where we might spend over $300,000 in tuition.
She saw us as customers. She saw us as shoppers and as potential buyers and wanted to make a good impression on us. The university we visited would be well-served to learn from this sophomore working the register at the bookstore. She did more in a few short minutes to sell the university, while selling us a sweatshirt, than any of the admissions and tour folks did. She kept it real by telling us the good and the bad and we appreciated it.
May we all reap the benefits promised by the sellers of such dreams and promises so that we actually smile and feel good when we say, “Been there. Done that. Got the sweatshirt!”
Why don’t we learn from history?
It’s high time to use wisdom learned from the past to outsmart technology and transform new challenges into opportunities
By Yoram (Jerry) Wind Lauder Professor Emeritus and Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania
"This solution is consistent with history’s lessons. You cannot stop technological advancement by mandating it to disappear."
In January, the New York City education department blocked access to ChatGPT on the city’s school devices and networks. Some educators and school administrators fear the app, which uses artificial intelligence to convert prompts into high-quality text, might lead to widespread cheating, as students pass off ChatGPT’s work as their own. Haunted by similar concerns, the school districts of Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and Baltimore have instituted similar bans, as have districts in Alabama and Virginia. Other school districts are pondering similar restrictions.
Are we right to worry about the “negative impacts on student learning,” as the NYC education department calls them?
Based on more than five decades of teaching experience at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, I consider the recent decision by the New York City Board of Education and other school districts to be a mistake. While it is possible that text generators such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Bing AI could be used to plagiarise or cheat when we assess students based on testing for memorisation, why are we addicted to archaic testing approaches and trying to protect them? What does anyone gain by glorifying learning by rote?
I believe that a much better approach is to assess the students' understanding of the material they are required to learn. During my time teaching at Wharton, I have never given a closed book in-class exam that relied on memory. All my exams have been open book or take-home exams that allowed students to use any source in demonstrating their understanding of the material.
If we prevent students from using tools that can make them faster and more efficient at expressing what they have learned, it is as silly as arguing that students will become better writers if they are barred from using typewriters and computers or that using calculators will hamper their efforts to master math.
In the case of ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms that follow or will follow them, the solution is simple: We should encourage students to start with the ChatGPT response to the query they are trying to study. Then they should be evaluated based on their ability to critically analyse the algorithm’s response, creatively improve it, and ideally implement what they have learned.
To be sure, this means that teachers will have to work harder. This new approach to assessment will require them to read and evaluate each response. It will also eliminate the convenience of automatic grading of multiple choice questions. However, at the same time, it will encourage students to focus on understanding rather than memorising their lessons. It will also increase the relevance of and their engagement with the topics they are studying.
This solution is consistent with history’s lessons. You cannot stop technological advancement by mandating it to disappear. We cannot decree that students can no longer use calculators, typewriters, computers, and mobile phones. Such bans never work -- and the blockage of large language models like ChatGPT will ultimately fail. It is for similar reasons that prohibition did not work, and most anti-drug legislation is ineffective.
Those in charge of our education system need to realise that they should not fight technological advances. Instead, they need to embrace these new technologies. It is much better to adapt pedagogical systems so that they can work with innovative technologies and not against them.
Teachers, for the sake of our students, it is time to get real.
What does AI mean for international recruiters?
AI will transform the landscape for international recruiters in many ways, from mirroring human interaction to enhancing onboarding for pre-student arrivals.
By Professor Wendy Alexander Vice Principal, International Dundee & Scottish Government Higher Education Trade & Investment Envoy
"Again, ethical considerations should be to the fore to counter the implicit biases that plague machine learning."
You know AI has gone viral when your waiter is urging it upon you as he pours the wine.
AI is not new in international recruitment. Leading agents and course search sites have used machine learning algorithms to guide student choice for several years. However, generative AI, like Chat GPT, is fuelling a new generation of products and services. The new ‘use cases’ for this generation of AI are not fully apparent but direction of travel is clear.
Generative AI will, over time, transform content creation, learning support and assessment at universities. Algorithms are already transforming learning analytics, powering a raft new of learning and teaching products. Online learning and language learning will become less isolated experiences because they will be scaffolded by a flurry of AI powered co-pilots. Much research will be powered by AI. And universities’ back offices: finance; HR; timetabling; registry; and student services will all use AI to power their operations. Granted, the deployment timeline is debatable, but the sector will not be immune to these changes to business operations.While there will be multiple challenges around product safety, reliability, hallucinating, inherent bias and ethics, it will not halt the tide of innovation.
So, what does this all mean for international recruiters?
Though universities have been slow technology adopters, international recruitment teams are often technology pioneers. Digital marketing was embraced early, data products were enthusiastically purchased from global rankings providers (QS, THE) and sophisticated visualisation products mapping international demand purchased from likes of IDP and Study Portals. Agent aggregators introduced AI based applicant advice products to identify best fit programmes. International applicants were no longer reliant on the partial knowledge of a local agent. Prospective students now explore their fit with institutions served based on AI analysing their attributes, qualifications, location preferences and price point. Already the agent advisory function has decisively moved online with AI driven insights increasingly an essential component of the agent function. With twenty million prospective international students exploring courses at five thousand institutions in the major destination markets, the matching prowess of AI driven, personalised recommendations were bound to triumph. Far-sighted agents have adapted by moving further down the funnel beyond supporting course choice, to application support, English language proficiency, visa, and pre-arrival services and insurance.
Now, the new generation of generative AI tools have taken off because they are intuitive to use and mirror human interaction. Their capacity for text, image and video generation will support most professionals in future. The core use cases for AI in marketing, recruitment, admissions and conversion are not centred on text generation but rooted in deploying data to increasingly personalise the applicant journey at scale. Data lies at the heart of the student recruitment journey. All leaders need to be comfortable with analysing, visualising and deploying data. It means closer working with strategic planning who can bring data to life, sharing tools and analysis. It also means a relentless focus on data quality. The adage of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ still holds.
In marketing, AI will drive ever greater targeting of potential students. For enquiry teams, AI driven 24/7 chatbots, will manage the routine queries that could previously dominate a recruiters’ time. In admissions, AI will increasingly review student applications, delivering faster processing and offer making and minimising applicant attrition via automatic red flagging. In conversion, where peer-to-peer engagements really count, leading players now support AI powered chatbots. This virtual advising on all aspects of the pre-enrolment journey will keep growing. Expect AI powered language translation for more effective communication with international applicants or their parents. Furthermore, AI driven predictive modelling will increasingly forecast applicant retention and success rates. This could prove irresistible to highly selective institutions and those concerned about visa compliance. Again, ethical considerations should be to the fore to counter the implicit biases that plague machine learning.
AI is already driving wider changes in applicant behaviour. The number of applications per international applicant is rising, driven by the ease of application via agent portals, and a post COVID appetite for considering multiple destinations. This rise in the number of applications per international student, means a concomitant reduction in the enrolment rate per application. At Dundee, our response has been to ‘pivot to conversion’ to win a higher share of offer holders to our institution. This ‘pivot to conversion’ implies a focus on the speed of offer; the quality of applicant support; visibility of the student and campus experience, access to academic advisers and easy student peer access. These service differentiators will be enabled by a new generation of AI products. The highest impact face to face engagements are focused further down the funnel.
At Dundee, we recently used an admissions services tender process to understand the new products in the admissions space. We found multiple providers offering post acceptance compliance support services e.g., financial credibility, CAS issuance. Several agents were also keen to provide filtering and admissions services for their own applicants. However, there were few takers for comprehensive admissions services processing.
A degree is earned and not purchased. In consequence, admissions processes are complex, sometimes decentralised, and frequently bespoke to programmes (think medicine, nursing, art and design). Admissions must assess multiple qualifications from a myriad of providers. Change is likely to be evolutionary. Yet with many UK universities routinely processing over fifty thousand applications annually, the potential for AI driven innovation is clear. Many institutions are locked into one of a few service providers specialising in admissions software, thereby creating higher barriers to entry than in other parts of the recruitment funnel. UCAS provides a structured process required for domestic undergraduates. The international application process is a more complex patchwork. However, expect change around the streamlining of admissions, with more AI enabled routine task management (document chasing, deadlines, deposit payments, accommodation applications etc.)
In core recruitment services, global agents and aggregators will accelerate their tech stacks to personalise their student services in ways unavailable to individual institutions. This tech enabled quality of service will tend to deepen a prospective student’s relationship with their agent/agent platform pre-arrival. The savvier recruitment teams will get alongside these tech enabled agents to better serve future generations of students. The prize is international students studying in the right region, at the right institution and excelling on their dream programme.