How do We Sell your College?

Marketing is pretty hilarious generally, but for elite colleges, the status quo is to keep marketing subtle. Because, you know, God forbid *those* kids heard about your school and thought they had a chance to get in.

But anyway, my alma mater, Wesleyan University, unveiled its new website to pretty universal disapproval from both alumni and the student body alike. The problem? Desperation. In fact, the demographic I most see this appealing to is 17-year-0ld Ted "Ohio is where my parents from; I live in the moment" Mosby from How I Met Your Mother (a show created by Wes alums--and yes, Ted's character is also an alum). In other words, it caters to a specific sub-group of Wesleyan freshmen who learn after two or three weeks on campus how utterly irritating they are to the rest of the student body.

Wesleyan is a place that loves to consider itself a haven for the intellectual elite. And you know what? It is. Coming from a distinctly blue-collar background, Wesleyan kicked my ass intellectually. My learning curve that first year was steep; I remember feeling so behind my classmates who could spout out Foucault line-by-line and I didn't even know who the dude was. I remember my first paper actually had the words "See me" scrawled across the top. I went from being the valedictorian of my giant public school to--well--this.

But that's your first two months at Wesleyan. That's not your college career. And for one thing, I know if I saw a website like this that literally says, "Do you like to quote Hegel, Hume and...Homer Simpson?" as a high school junior, I know I would have been intimidated. Yes, this girl's not an idiot. But I sure as hell didn't know who two out of three of those H's were in 11th grade (I'll let you guess which ones).

I'm a pretty typical public school graduate as in Pocono Mountain was not a private-school alternative for the suburban elite. I think our average SAT score in 2004 was something like 970 out of 1600. Needless to say, Hegel was not in the curriculum.

Anyway, the point here is that admissions marketing is interesting in the sense that whatever message you send you will both attract and repel potential members of the next generation of leaders. Who you repel sometimes is more important than who you attract, especially in an age when elite private colleges struggle to recruit more than 2% of their student body from backgrounds such as mine (bottom 25% of the income distribution).

But beyond this, the idea is inauthentic. I'm not sure who came up with this marketing pitch, but it doesn't seem to resonate with the students who actually go or who went to the college. Again, we come back to the idea of desperation. A front that while probably accurate is one we keep to ourselves, knowing such an attitude is perceived as arrogant and elitist to most we interact with outside of our campus. And I'm sure this feeling isn't unfamiliar to other students who attend elite private schools.

Hence, using this feeling as an advertising gimmick strikes me as uncomfortable, for lack of a better word. It's making public what most of us keep to ourselves. Yes, I took ridiculous classes where we read books with titles like Sadomasochism in Everyday Life and wrote papers dissecting the symbolic violence hidden in magazine advertisements. I'm happy with those memories and ecstatic with the education I received at Wesleyan. But at the same time, I am uncomfortable with the distance it created between me and my high school friends. Between me and my family. Between me and actually most people who did not attend a ridiculously progressive, intellectually-rigorous liberal arts college. I'm very aware that who I am was shaped in part by Wesleyan and the learning experiences it provided for me, but at the same time, trying to capture that experience in words and sell it to high school students is inauthentic. Maybe just showing pictures of racially diverse students sprawled out on Foss Hill is trite, but it's not--at least for Wes--artificial.

I'm probably being terribly contradictory here, but I thought I'd try to figure out why this campaign bothers me. I'll probably change my mind at least six more times before I'm done thinking about it.