UTPB: Actually Reaching Everyone

Situation

Like most universities, UTPB had intentions to grow enrollment. One of the greatest challenges facing the university however was declining high school-to-college enrollment rates. UTPB is a regional campus of the University of Texas system located in an urban area of about 350,000 people (the Midland-Odessa metroplex) but surrounded by a vast rural area of about 120 miles in any given direction comprised of a little over 30 towns with an average population of just over 2,000 people. As is often the case in rural areas, interest in college was waning and in some of these areas the college enrollment rate had dropped as low as the upper 20s for percentage.

Solution

UTPB was not aggressively recruiting in these towns because of the ratio of opportunity cost to scale; in other words, they had not found it to be worth the effort to travel to these small local towns to recruit from the small high school senior classes. We helped them realize the opportunity and imperative of doing so: If they were not recruiting at these high schools then certainly none of the other schools in the state were, and recruiting those students to college and the opportunity and economic mobility that a college degree would provide was the mission of the university, particularly for that region of the Permian Basin.

While normally a lack of scale is a handicap in marketing and recruitment efforts, we turned the limited scale into an immense opportunity. Through state-level data we knew how many high school seniors there were at each high school. We decided to provide a branding opportunity to every single one of these high school seniors knowing that we could afford to do so because the scale was relatively limited. 

We developed a “College-Bound” branding campaign. We decided to provide every single high school senior throughout the Permian Basin a t-shirt that we wanted them to wear because it was branded with UTPB, that their teachers and school counselors wanted them to wear because it literally said that they were “college-bound,” and that they wanted to wear because it was such an attractive shirt and not just yet another t-shirt:

• We selected a long-sleeved, hooded, dri-fit shirt. A long-sleeved t-shirt is always more versatile and useful than a regular short-sleeved t-shirt, and the hood made it particularly attractive. The dri-fit style meant that it was perfect for any environment, warm when it was cool out but not heavy so it was wearable even as temperatures rose. The fabric also made it highly portable.

• We created a “College-Bound 2022” logo that meant that any time a student wearing the shirt looked in the mirror, they literally saw themselves as college-bound. Teachers and school counselors loved this idea and were eager to help us distribute the shirts.

• We included the UTPB logo as part of the college-bound logo. This made our logo more visible throughout the region as people wore it.

Success

And in fact it caught on like a tidal wave! Almost overnight we were receiving reports from every direction that they were seeing the shirt all over town, at the grocery store, at events and games, at restaurants and stores... We did primary distribution in the spring to maximize on the window when people would be wanting to wear a long-sleeve t-shirt, but even as the summer approached people continued to wear the shirt.

Just as importantly, this created the perfect connection between the university admissions office and the high schools. Admissions counselors were regularly visiting some schools, and trying to visit the rest of the schools, but often schedule conflicts or just the sheer workload of school counselors prevented college visits from getting scheduled. Now admissions counselors had a legitimate and valuable opportunity to visit the school: They were bringing this highly desirable shirt to the senior class. Even for schools that were less responsive, admission counselors were able to stop by the school because they knew almost exactly how many students were in the senior class and they could drop off the shirts for school counselors to give to their students (along with an extra few for the school counselors themselves!). This opened numerous doors that had not been available for one reason or another previously.

But most importantly, enrollment at the university grew! The school saw record enrollment for the incoming freshman class and they returned to pre-pandemic levels of enrollment based in large part on the overall efforts of this campaign.