Re-imagining the College Application | Coleman

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Dan Coleman [email protected] 518.281.0261

Since its founding in 1932, Bennington had built a reputation as a small, artsy,

innovative college where Martha Graham taught dance, Buckminster Fuller built his

first geodesic domes, and students worked closely with teachers to design their own

educations. Like many visionary schools, however, Bennington had grown unsure of its

educational ambition, and by the mid-90’s, the college had become better known for its

pricey tuition than its distinctive curriculum.

As enrollment declined and costs skyrocketed, the college attempted to save itself

through a radical attempt at re-invention—overhauling its curriculum around a sharp

refocusing of its mission. The move generated full-length stories in The Rolling Stone and

The New York Times Magazine, pieces which recognized the boldness of Bennington’s

re-organization while questioning the school’s decision to fire a large number of its

faculty…and wondering whether Bennington would make it through its first century.

The college needed to show the world what was so right about what it was doing,

immediately, and in a way that would dramatically increase enrollment numbers and

stabilize finances.

the context

Redesigning Recruitment at Bennington College

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This task fell to an admissions office that had turned over its entire staff in six months

time, replacing experienced professionals with a small group of former high school

English teachers. Together, we spent the next four years overhauling the college’s

recruitment strategy in ways that dramatically increased the size and quality of the

student body without significantly expanding its marketing budget. My colleagues

and I re-imagined the trajectory we wanted prospective students to travel—from

their first encounter with our mailings to the personalized campus visits to the

congratulatory phone calls that convinced them to enroll. Along the way, we designed

viewbooks, applications, online discussion groups, brochures, writing contests, posters,

print ads, press releases, and a website. None of these tools had much in common with

those used by most colleges at the time, and they exploited areas largely overlooked by

our competitors.

We began by surveying the current landscape: posing as high school juniors, we

contacted a wide range of schools that included Bennington’s obvious competitors

as well as schools very different from ours: top ivy leagues, local community

colleges, schools with a strong vocational component. We wanted to see what we’d

hear back. And we were surprised to find that almost every college recruited us in

the same way: by mailing the glossiest brochure it could afford, a “viewbook” filled

with handsome students circled around wise and genial professors in the middle of

gorgeous landscapes. We knew we didn’t have the budget to win that game, so we set

out to change the rules—to find a way to make real to the outside world Bennington’s

particularity: to make prospective students feel the force of the education that could

happen here like it could nowhere else.

We started by asking ourselves some very basic questions about the whole process of

choosing a college—questions that our competitors seemed to have answered once and

for all. We wanted to find a way to map out the “choreography” of the process, to track

the back-and-forth between the range of factors that influence students as they move

through their college decision-making, and to isolate which ones were most powerful

and which least.

We began our research by talking with groups of students, parents, and high school

guidance counselors. But we soon realized that the people we were talking to couldn’t

give us the straight story: they had powerful reasons to make us—and themselves—

believe that the experience they were in the middle of was a rational and deeply

deliberate selection process.

So we tried out different ways of watching the process unfold directly, to study it “in

the wild.” We sat in the back of the room while guidance counselors marched a class

of high school juniors through the deadlines they needed to worry about. We stayed

after school to listen in while students talked over their choices with the teachers they

the project

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trusted. And we asked our former students to invite us over for dinner, so we could hear

them talking about college with their parents. One of our sharpest insights came when

a staff member sat with a student after dinner as he went through his stack of college

mail: he’d glance at the names on the covers of the viewbooks, sometimes flip through

the pictures inside, then toss them all in a box he kept under his bed—a far cry from

carefully weighing the different schools against each other.

When our staff came back together, we tried to capture what we’d learned by creating

a chart that tracked students’ changing energy over the course of the decision-making

process. What we came up with surprised us: the surface buzz we’d seen when kids were

skimming through viewbooks didn’t come close to the charge we saw when they started

looking at college applications and trying to fill them out. And we started thinking about

how we could catch students at the top of this energy spike.

When we examined other schools’ applications, we quickly discovered that very

few spent any time or money on them. Over and over, we found the same, generic

questions that asked students to discuss a “transformative experience” in their lives

or a “significant problem” they faced—and prompted them to write back with lifeless

descriptions of an ideal candidate they thought the colleges are looking for. And

because almost every school treated its application as though it were not a part of their

marketing campaign—like the strictly utilitarian “business reply” cards inserted in

magazines—most were poorly written, cheaply printed and minimally designed.

The application, we realized, was our opportunity for innovation: if we couldn’t compete

with other schools’ advertising budgets, or spend as much traveling to college fairs, we

could sure make a better application. So we decided to redefine our application—and

turn it from a selection tool into a recruitment tool.

We developed position statements for our team that aimed to capture what we’d

discovered about how stressful the college process could be…and how exciting. (We

included a quote from one of the students we interviewed: When I think about writing my

college essay, I imagine a long table with old men sitting behind it in black robes, waiting to see

what I say so they can decide what I’m worth.) These statements drove the design problem

we set before our writers: to create an application that would reduce the anxiety of the

process as much as possible while intensifying its challenge.

We started our revisions by visiting Bennington classrooms to find the most engaging

projects that our professors were assigning in their own classes—because we wanted

the application to put students in the middle of a Bennington education and give them a

sense of just how exciting it could be.

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We rewrote the application’s directions to eliminate their disembodied, public-address-

system tone, figuring that if our application spoke straight to students in an honest,

real voice then they would talk back to us in the same way. And we talked to our graphic

designer about developing a look that was edgy without being anxious. A layout that

invited you in, made clear what to do first and where to go next. In response, she shifted

from the tight, angular, text-heavy format of our previous application to a woodcut-

based design that combined a sense of energy with an open, relaxed, handmade feel.

new essay questions page 1

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Each time we developed a new draft, we printed up a number of copies to pass around.

We wanted to put our ideas down on paper where we could show other people—and

see for ourselves—exactly what we were thinking. By creating a series of quick-and-

dirty prototypes, we opened up our work to feedback that could drive our process

through rapid revisions. At first, we only showed these drafts to people close to our

team, but we soon realized the power of these draft versions as a marketing tool.

Once we had an almost-finished draft, we started sending out copies to high school

new essay questions page 2

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guidance counselors, with an informal cover letter explaining that we were reworking

our application, and could they do us the favor of telling us what they thought? Many

of these counselors, who never would have taken a second look at a glossy brochure

addressed to them as customers, responded with rich, detailed suggestions when we

asked for their help as colleagues.

As we continued to clarify what we wanted from the application, we grew increasingly

sure of the core principles that were guiding our approach to recruitment. We wanted to

make every element of the process—the application essay we asked students to write,

the interview that followed up on it, the campus visit—part of a serious, straightforward

conversation between real people about the work they care most about.

As we aligned the different points along this trajectory, we gave much greater

prominence to the first mailing we sent out to prospects, the “Me Box”:

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Most colleges begin recruiting high school kids by sending out beautiful pictures of

themselves: elegant buildings and grounds, a delicate diversity of smiling students,

enthusiastic professors…All this could be yours, these pictures promise, and this could

be you in the middle of all these happy people. At Bennington, we decided to start by

sending students a blank box and inviting them to fill it with themselves. Instead of

giving them us, we asked for them. A Bennington education, we wanted to make clear,

isn’t about receiving answers; it’s about facing questions—who are you? and who do you

want to become? and how will you design an education to get you there?—and that’s

where we wanted to put students from the first moment of their first encounter with us.

As we made these changes—and redefined the experience we were inviting students to

step into—we saw the numbers start to turn around. Applications rose 40% percent in

the next year, and yield (the rate of students accepting an offer of admission) went up by

50%. The quality of the applicant pool—as measured by average SAT scores and GPA—

increased one-and-a-half times. The application itself generated substantial coverage in

Time, The Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. When we asked new freshmen

what drew them to Bennington from Iowa, or Oregon, or New York, they often spoke

about how differently they’d been treated by Bennington’s admissions process—and

how they wanted to be in classes with other students who were eager to answer the kind

of questions we were asking.

the impact

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Re-imagining the College Application | Coleman