A study of college faculty and administrator attitudes toward, and involvement with, educational marketing and student recruiting.

Marketing and student recruiting have become common management tools at American colleges during the past two decades, particularly at institutions suffering serious enrollment declines.

At the center of most higher education marketing efforts are admissions directors. In previous years they were often little more than processors of applications, but now have become marketing consultants. Many academicians suspiciously regarded marketing and student recruiting activities as being inappropriate for higher education, and hoped to remain untouched by a more business-like approach to college management. Nevertheless, admissions directors found that increased involvement on the part of faculty and administrators can be essential for institutional survival.

The major purpose of this study was to examine faculty and administrator attitudes toward, and involvement with, marketing and student recruiting. A mail survey was distributed to a random sample of 25 four year, public and independent colleges in California selected from The hep 1985 Higher Education Directory. The faculty sample was a random selection of 150 independent college faculty and 149 public college faculty. The chief academic administrators from the sample colleges served as the administrator sample.

A Likert-type scale was used to assess subject attitudes toward various statements regarding marketing and student recruiting. level of faculty and administrator involvement with these same activities. Single item questions established the Data analysis led to these conclusions:

1) Faculty attitudes were similar in their strong support of marketing and student recruiting. Chi-square analysis revealed substantial differences between the faculty groups involvement in these activities.

2) Administrators from independent institutions were more willing to participate and were substantially more involved in marketing and student recruiting than administrators from public colleges.

3) The faculty and administrators from independent institutions were in much closer agreement than their public institution counterparts regarding the role marketing and student recruiting should play in higher education.