I want to share an interesting takeaway from a recent STAMATS webinar I sat in on with our admission office.
The importance of the university course catalog was much higher than we anticipated in terms of reaching prospective students. In several instances high school students ranked the catalog just below visiting campus in terms of helpful items used in choosing a college.
At Colgate we have slightly reduced the number of print copies we produce, and we constantly talk about making sure we're providing the right amount of copies to the right people. We also have a robust online component that includes the ability to see concentration requirements and course descriptions for every department through a single page and a dropdown menu.
It seems prospective students see the catalog as a non-marketing piece that provides information without any kind of "spin."
That's an interesting observation to me, and it reinforces our view here of how we write for the website homepage. In the communications office we see ourselves as a mini news operation and write short straightforward stories rather than press releases chock full of glowing adjectives.
We let students, faculty members, and alumni do the talking for us within the story, and I believe that better resonates with prospective students and their parents checking us out on the web.
