Larry D. Lauer

This week I had the pleasure of spending some time with a group of private college and university presidents. Items on our agenda included current trends in news media relations, increasing government regulations, and the marketing and communication implications of the dramatic changes coming in our industry.

“Talking points,” described last week in Lesson 55, guided our conversation about market changes. I explained my observations about the changing role of governments, and that I feared that many of the current cutbacks in financial support will become permanent. We talked about how tuition increases in the public sector will change competitive dynamics, and how more and more reliance will be put on private fund-raising at both private and public institutions. On top of all that, we discussed how our industry is now facing increased competition for money, students, and reputation from institutions in Canada, the UK, Europe, India, China, Singapore, Australia and more.

For me, all this added up to the basic question: What kind of leader will we  need to pilot us through all of these “sea-changes?”

What interested me most at this meeting was that some of the smaller private university presidents were already demonstrating a new level of thinking about the future.  Many already had some depth of experience in conducting programs and developing partnerships in other countries, and at least one president was open to exploring partnerships with for-profit universities!

What’s more, these “new breed” presidents did not sound like traditional intellectuals or scholars. Rather, they were thinking about imaginative ways to bring distinction to their institutions, and how they would deal with increasing public concerns about college costs and the globalization of economies. In other words, this week it became even more clear to me that the future of higher education will be characterized by the emergence of a creative-thinking, marketing-oriented, new kind of educational entrepreneur.

As I reflected on all this, I realized that we were also only talking about becoming much more sophisticated at implementing basic marketing ideas. We were not talking about avant-garde thinking, rather we were simply underscoring a renewed importance of practicing basic integrated approaches to marketing. We were putting even more emphasis on defining differentiated strengths, and getting everyone “on-the-same-page” with respect to telling the story. The presidents stressed the practicality of the liberal arts in a career-education oriented world. And we amplified the even greater importance of selecting appropriate target markets in the US and abroad, as well as the strong need to master the use of multi-platform, interactive, communication tools. 

Staying successful in this dramatically changing, ever more international, market, is indeed within the reach of even the smallest private college or organization. The key will be having enlightened, marketing-oriented, leadership, with the necessary advancement talent and counsel close at  hand.