A Facebook “like” is the first step for Ohio University admittance for many students, but in the future, OU officials hope to see more diverse students clicking.
OU’s marketing team — Undergraduate Admissions, Enrollment Management, and University Communications and Marketing — is responsible for responding to students, bringing them to campus and convincing them to stay. The team works to target diverse students but compared to other state universities, OU is one of the least-racially diverse.
In the past four years, OU received an average of 80,000 inquiries for additional information, about 13,700 applications and about 4,000 newly enrolled students.
“We just have to continue to be able to get the word out about Ohio University,” said Renea Morris, executive director of Communications and Marketing. “(OU) is sort of a best-kept secret, almost. We’ve done a lot to take the lid off that secret and let people know about our marketing efforts and expand them beyond before. It’s an ongoing issue.”
According to The Post’s analysis of enrollment data for Ohio’s 13 public universities, OU had the third-least racially diverse campus in the state when classes began in fall 2010 — with white students making up 82 percent of the enrollment.
OU’s racial breakdown was better only than Miami University (82.4 percent white) and Central State University, a traditionally-black college that is 95 percent black. Enrollment breakdowns for Youngstown State University were not available.
OU officials say more marketing is the key to improving OU’s student diversity rankings.
“If we had unlimited time and an unlimited budget, our numbers might be different,” said Candace Boeninger, OU’s director of Undergraduate Admissions. “We’ve had moderate success with the resources and time that we’ve had to work with.”
OU’s Multicultural Center hosts visiting programs for incoming freshmen to encourage ethnic diversity and markets to high schools in urban and suburban areas, Boeninger said.
The university also runs an advertisement in Winds of Change, a quarterly magazine published “with a single-minded focus on career and education advancement for American Indian and Alaska Native peoples,” according to its website.
The majority of the marketing team’s media is distributed throughout Ohio, in places deemed by an outside company as potentially beneficial to reach students.
However, Morris said one way to improve campus diversity could be to attract more students from across state lines.
In 2010, about 82 percent of students on OU’s Athens campus were from one of the 88 Ohio counties. Five other universities in Ohio — Ohio State, Miami, Central State, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Toledo — have a higher percentage of out-of-state students than OU.
But attracting out-of-state students is costly and requires deliberate marketing, Morris said.
“It’s a process,” she said. “It would be great to do recruitment-type activities outside of the state of Ohio, to be able to do that out on the road. It’s an expensive investment.”
OU’s marketing team has analyzed “key markets” such as Washington D.C., New York City and Boston for advertising potential, but the cost of advertising in those cities is too high, said Craig Cornell, vice provost for enrollment management.
The team has an academic marketing budget for media distribution — including commercials, radio spots, billboards and newspaper advertisements. In the 2011-12 school year so far, the team spent almost half of its $750,000 budget, a number that has not drastically fluctuated in recent years. With $600,000 as a base budget, they had $150,000 carried over from previous years.
This year, 70,000 students received OU’s viewbooks, the university’s primary outreach publication, Cornell said in an email. Printing and mailing the viewbooks cost $72,000 a year.
The team also travels to between 250 and 500 university fairs each year — expenses which are difficult to calculate because the cost is split among the marketing team and the budgets of OU’s various colleges.
“OU is trying to not only target students in the sea of darts being thrown at them from every university, but we are trying to tailor a message to those students who are looking for this sort of experience that OU is a place where they can maximize their potential and realize their promise,” said Brian Bridges, vice provost for Diversity, Access and Equity, in an email.
And that sea of darts has gotten even deeper with the increased use of social media by colleges and universities for recruiting.
“The university is doing a very good job targeting all students, but the competition for students is so fierce in today’s digitally connected world,” Bridges said.
sj950610@ohiou.edu
