Sweatshirts of change
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 Thurman
"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.
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.
"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."
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!”
This article was published originally in QS Insights Magazine 3.
