Getting distracted from 290 and 294 assignments, I decided to blog for Marketing. As I surfed through the blogroll of section 101, I’ve come across a few interesting entries from my classmates. One of which that I found relatively relevant to my experience is Rena Zhou’s blog.
In her blog, she mentioned that the increase of for-profit colleges’ tuition fees is in a positive correlation with the admission of rich international students. These universities specifically target toward high-income, well-rounded kids competing to get a spot there. I have never thought of that before, but private universities in the States actually used a lot of marketing strategies to attract their target market, especially in such perfect competition.
So what kind of marketing strategies have they used? The richer the university is, the more scholarship they give out to students. Despite the high tuition fee, people are still optimistically believing that they might be a scholarship recipient. This is why we have a high demand, and low supply which leads to less than 10% chance of getting admitted every year.
Speaking of pricing strategies, people perceive these private universities as high values, so they wouldn’t mind paying $50,000 plus per year, just to get the brand name “Harvard”, “MIT”, “Stanford”, etc… Look at it as Louis Vuitton, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana… What’s the difference?
Also, universities in general apply two-part pricing to domestic students and international students. As an int student, I have to pay four times higher than other people to get the SAME education. If there wasn’t a high demand from abroad, I doubt that Canadian government would let this unfair pricing strategies happen.
Marketing ISN’T geared toward business solely. It happens anywhere, anytime even to public sector like education!
