Strayer University began running new ads in April, promoting their online courses. The message: “Stay safe. Stay home.” The problem is, Strayer University campuses have graduation rates that range from 27% to 3%, according the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. Students’ median total debt comes to tens of thousands of dollars. Whether the school is a “safe” choice is debatable at best.
Colleges and universities are spending a lot of money on advertising during the pandemic, particularly for-profit colleges, according to a new study by the Century Foundation.
“I think when you’re at a point where students … from low-income, first-generation and minority backgrounds are taking out high sums of debt and unable to pay it back so that schools can ramp up marketing, that does become a problem, particularly when the educational product that they’re receiving suffers as a result,” said Yan Cao, a fellow at the Century Foundation.
The progressive think tank has been tracking higher education marketing on Google and social media from February until May, focusing on the 100 colleges with the largest online enrollments before the pandemic started, based on Department of Education data.
It found that a minority of schools made a shift to pandemic-themed advertising, referencing COVID-19, essential workers or today’s “uncertainty.” Some colleges advertised scholarships and opportunities related to the pandemic.
But perhaps most notable was how much colleges across sectors were willing to spend on ads during COVID-19. For example, Columbia University, the third-largest higher education display advertiser in May, spent $75,300 on a single ad about switching careers to health care. Western Governors University spent $1.3 million on YouTube ads from March to June. The report estimates, using data from Adbeat, that New York University spent about $500,000 more on marketing just this June in comparison to June last year. Grand Canyon University paid $148 per click for an advertisement to appear in searches for “rn to bsn online programs.”
It’s not just for-profit schools putting major cash toward marketing. Some nonprofit and public universities hire third-party contractors for recruitment for online programs with similar spending patterns, making the “lines blurred,” said Cao. But it’s for-profit colleges that have historically spent over 40% of tuition revenue on advertising, and “when for-profit colleges develop a marketing tactic, even one that’s unscrupulous, and nothing happens from a regulatory … standpoint, that lowers the bar and they start to out-compete their peers who are trying to stay within the lines.”
