Marketing Higher Education: Benefits and Risks for the American Academic System.
A new vocabulary is gaining respectability in academia. The terms have been appropriated from the field of Marketing and, although they still stick in many an academic throat, they are spreading rapidly through the system.* Deans make references to "market research." "Market penetration," "positioning," and "market audits" spill from the lips of up-to-date admissions officers. Committees of various stripe ponder "strategies" appropriate to various "market segments." In the face of very real challenges, Marketing and Market Research have caught the fancy of academic administrators. There are both benefits to be realized and risks to be avoided in these developments. Movements in academic administration have come and gone in recent years. Sometimes they have become fads, sent to an early demise by the backlash that can follow an overzealous and insufficiently critical adoption by desperate administrators beset by the complex pressures of contemporary academic administration. As the waters of the Marketing Movement rise, a critical scouting of the territory may help both marketers and colleges find the higher ground on which they can benefit from the