Subscribe to Your College Blog
I attended another college fair last night at Westwood High School (MA), where nearly 100 colleges were in attendance. These fairs are one-stop opportunities to see what a college has to offer, but it's really a time to pick up the school's literature and meet an admissions person. That's all.
Unfortunately, many of these colleges didn't send their own admissions people, but instead sent people with dated perspectives: alumni with sweet but irrelevant memories to a 16-year-old who shows up to the booth. Perhaps guilty of such bad marketing were colleges like Villanova, Hamilton, Hobart & Williams, Wake Forest, and UMaine. Maybe they knew something about college fairs that made it worthwhile NOT to send their admissions people. For this post, I submit the following observation.
According to my own subjective categories, here are the colleges that impressed me the most:
Most creative and practical presentation catalog: Bridgewater State
Most influenced by a student's interest in their college (HINT: send emails, make lots of phone calls, show your face frequently to admission people): Holy Cross
Most informative catalog so you don't have to visit campus: UMaine, Orono
Most bang-for-your-buck (3 required internships): Endicott
Most worth-looking-into engineering college: Illinois Institute of Technology
Most noticeable college for creative writing: Eckerd (sunny Florida)
Most attractive for accounting and math majors: Eastern Connecticut Univ
Best packaging for college fairs: St Michael's
Most frequented booth: Northeastern
College fairs should be attended only by students (read: parents should stay home) so they can meet the admissions people. It's a way of getting a first sense of the school, but hardly enough of a sense to establish an objective opinion (read: students should stay home).
College fairs are classic Show & Tell: Here's our fantastic catalog, you should love us because of these three hundred and sixty-seven reasons, which means you should feel soothing goosebumps about spending your life-savings with us.
If you must, collect literature and free pens because that's about all you or your student are going to get out of it. I suspect 16- and 17-year-olds are more savvy than the colleges: they discovered the internet a long time ago, and they can order all the college's marketing stuff online. Plus, a student makes an impression by visiting the campus, not the fair. That was the "inside" info I got from these admissions people who showed up.
No comments:
Post a Comment