Brand attraction

Published : Dec 18, 2009 00:00 IST

NOW that there is so much talk about reforming higher education, it is important to know which models are sought to be emulated. Clearly, there is much that is wrong with many higher education institutions in the country, just as much is wrong with the system as a whole. But the difficulties of achieving and maintaining good quality pedagogy that is also relevant to the needs of a developing country are well known by now.

When looking for other standards by which to judge our higher education institutions, it is pointless to compare them only with institutions in developed countries, which have the benefit of much greater resources and operate in a completely different environment. Despite this rather obvious point, too much journalistic writing and middle-class perception treat the higher education system in the United States as the model that deserves emulation everywhere else in the world. It is regularly portrayed as the most dynamic, successful and attractive of all such systems in any country.

In India, this is also exemplified by the sheer demand for study in the U.S. The queues of students lining up to join higher education institutions in the U.S. seem to grow longer and longer regardless of the high and rising costs of such education and practical concerns such as visa difficulties. And the attraction for such students seems to be not simply the lure of eventual emigration to the U.S. but a genuine perception that that system is inherently superior.

How did this state of affairs come about? Is it really only about actual quality, or have other forces, such as effective marketing of the American system all over the world, come into play? A book (Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College, Inc., and Museumworld; Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2004) by James B. Twitchell, a professor at the University of Florida, suggests that it is essentially about successful branding.

Twitchells book describes the significance of branding in culture industries, including those that have traditionally been seen as far too highbrow or spiritual to actually descend to slugging it out in the marketplace. It does not cover only higher education; it also dissects the increasingly desperate advertising moves of organised religion and the more suave and sophisticated branding of high art and museums. But the most fascinating part of his book and the most instructive for us in the developing world is the expose of the business of higher education and the process by which such brand positioning has come to dominate all higher educational activities in the U.S.

Given the demographic changes that have led to an ageing population, higher education in the U.S. should be going through a period of contraction if earlier ratios of enrolment had been maintained. To sustain the expansion that is now built into the system, colleges and universities have to attract more students than they did previously. They have sought to do so by enlarging the pool of potential entrants. One route is to ensure greater diversity from within the population, by admitting more women, blacks and ethnic minorities. Another route is to attract those outside the national population therefore, the significance of foreign students.

It is no secret that all this requires branding. Twitchells achievement is to show how this has caused a central change in the way American universities are organised. As the experience of higher education gets commercialised, outsourced and franchised, what is being delivered is no longer knowledge so much as a brand, with all the consumer identification markers that this entails. So the central figure in the delivery is no longer the professor but the professional manager. And the largest department in most universities is now the development department, concerned with the raising and management of funds.

All this has changed the pyramidal structure of higher education in the U.S. The sector is now structured like a barbell. At one end are a few elite deluxe institutions with internationally recognised brand names that rule on the basis of their exclusivity. At the other end is a large bulk of mass providers that admit almost anyone and everyone because they must keep expanding to survive. The top group relies more on endowments and donations, the bottom group on student fees and state support. Meanwhile, the middle category, the underfunded and undersubscribed institutions that are neither good enough nor large enough, is being destroyed.

Within the institutions of higher learning, the game is not so much about getting through as about just getting in. The focus is mostly all on attracting enrolment and much less on what goes on after that. As a result both the good and bad universities and colleges are less concerned with the actual quality of education and the capabilities of their graduates and are more interested in their external image and the related ability to attract more students. This explains the famous statement attributed to Derek Bok, that Harvard University (of which he was president for two decades) is a real storehouse of knowledge because so much comes in, and so little goes out.

Branding is all about telling a story, and so the top institutions need to spread the story of how difficult they are to enter. For this they have to show a high rejection rate, which means, in turn, that they must somehow attract lots of applicants. Since rank is based on selectivity, private media rankings most famously that of U.S. News & World Report assume great significance.

Interestingly, all the data used in the rankings relate to entry features rather than exit or output characteristics. A lot of effort, not necessarily academic, goes into sustaining the rankings and, therefore, the brands. Pioneer advantage (the benefit of a long tradition) obviously helps but is not enough. It is necessary to work continuously at sustaining the brand name, as Twitchell shows with his brief description of what Harvard systematically does to ensure that it remains the top brand.

One might ask, this is all very well, but so what? Yes, higher education, like so much else in our increasingly consumerist societies, is being marketed and advertised aggressively by competing institutions. But is this an adverse development? Maybe this is just one more instance of consumer sovereignty allowing students and their guardians to be fully aware of the costs and advantages of different institutions.

Unfortunately, this is not really so since the hype and the ranking hide more than they reveal. More significantly, this entire approach creates basic changes in the way higher education is conceived and delivered so that the original purpose (dare one call it learning?) may be almost completely subsumed or even swept away by the branding process. Twitchells comment on this deserves to be quoted in full:

Understanding the marketing machinery operating Higher Ed, Inc., ... may explain some recent developments at universities such as (1) the predictable and supposedly uncontrollable eruption of grade inflation and the concomitant charade of teaching evaluations, (2) the single-minded outsourcing of almost every conceivable aspect of Higher Ed, Inc., (3) the selling off of academic space as the campus becomes commercialised: Georgia Tech put McDonalds golden arches on the floor of its coliseum, Columbia University lent its name to a for-profit company offering distance learning classes on the Internet, the University of California accepted a research grant from a pharmaceutical company to research new drugs and give the corporation the right to get the first look at the results, etc., (4) the loss of any shared nationwide curriculum, (5) the collapse of good schools at the low end of a cohort, and, of course, (6) the impact of shopping for branded education not just as a way to enter the institution but as a method of choosing a course of study. What looks like dumbing down is in reality a predictable effect of competitive branding (page 167).

This is why serious higher educationists in the U.S. are worried about the implications of education as business. There are growing concerns that the central mission of universities is no longer to advance and transmit knowledge and has largely been ousted by the just-in-time, immediate-gratification values of the marketplace. The impact of the global financial crisis has been to intensify these pressures. State-funded universities have had their budgets slashed and are desperate for high-fee-paying foreign students to maintain some semblance of their past structures. Private universities find that the value of their endowments has shrunk, and so they too need to commercialise more activities and get in more revenues from whatever source.

We in India and elsewhere cannot afford to smirk complacently at this sorry state of affairs in the U.S. for this is precisely the kind of system that many here are actually aiming for. So we may be looking at an image of our own future in higher education if saner voices do not prevail.

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