Buying Higher Education
By Paul Dumouchelle, Management Consultant, ADVISA
My son is graduating from High School this year and we’re right in the middle of the decision-making process on where he will attend college in the fall.
The process is complicated by the fact that he seeks to major in music performance so an on-site, in-person audition is required for each school to which he applies. We’re focusing on six schools, which means the campaign requires six university applications – plus additional application requirements for the school of music in some cases – and the aforementioned auditions. I keep telling myself not to think about the time investment and out-of-pocket costs for this campaign!
At the audition-day lunch at CIM, the Cleveland Institute of Music (the only location that provided a lunch – a nice touch despite the mediocrity of the food), I met two marketing consultants recently hired by the college to update their marketing strategy – this got me thinking about the topic.
Competitive Set
As with any marketing strategy, the competitive set is a critical variable. CIM’s consultants inquired about the schools we were visiting and they noted with interest that we had not applied to Oberlin, which I’d guess is an important competitor to CIM. Many of the schools we visited took pains to compare themselves to certain other schools – either because a program like Juilliard, often mentioned, is a true competitor or the school would like to think so, at least.
Segmentation
The consultants also noted that CIM was the only pure music conservatory among our choices – all the other music schools were incorporated into a larger university. The pure conservatory distinction is a major segmentation in the music school market.
Among the music schools embedded in a larger university, there are very different offerings with regards to how integrated the music program is with the rest of the place. At CCM, the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, they tend to wall off CCM from the rest of UC. For example, the music students are largely concentrated in a single dormitory. Rice University, on the other hand, prides itself on how all its students are mixed together in their living arrangements. Carnegie Mellon describes its mission, in part, as combining technology and the arts, and its music program integrates the technology (for which CMU is well-known) more so than other schools.
Another segmentation is the size of the program, is it relatively small and “Selective” or a large “Factory” (the latter term used by fans of the smaller organizations). This interacts with another variable, the performance opportunities, with larger organizations having more ensembles and variety.
Location
This is an important consideration for a music student since exposure to outstanding culture available in a large city becomes part of the curriculum. Rice admissions personnel described Houston as a cultural “hotspot” – which would probably surprise anyone not acting as a Houston booster. Location is a bit of a handicap for a school that merits high ranks in most other categories – the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington.
Another element of location is the importance of “moving away” for college, Ohio State is a bit too close to home for my son.
We have to make a decision by May 1.
