Admissions and recruitment (two different functions often combined into one office) are hard: Much harder than people on the outside can understand. That, of course, doesn’t stop everyone from having an opinion about how you should do your job. Trustees, faculty, staff, and even students have lots of opinions. To be sure, some of them are dead on, but others are too frequently based on anecdotal, n-of-one, evidence, and are frequently devoid of critical context.

My undergraduate degree is in English, and my graduate degree is in Marketing, and I worked for over 40 years doing and supervising new student recruitment. I know that the things that attract students to a campus are hard to define, hard to explain, and even harder to manipulate quickly. But reading between the lines and focusing on language and meaning are things I love to do.

My experience tells me that a lot of recruitment offices (and the institutions that employ them) shoot themselves in the foot unintentionally. If you’re doing these things, you should think about taking some steps to change them.

Thinking about product attributes as attractors. I deconstructed recruitment publications for one of the largest public universities in the nation, and one of the smallest liberal arts colleges in the same state. In a list of about 35 stock product attributes (beautiful campus, caring faculty, small classes), the two institutions shared 29. Differentiation wasn’t a problem for the big institution, but making itself distinctive was a challenge for the small LAC.

Although the comparisons to pure product marketing are often distasteful, two examples from automobiles might drive this point home. When you ask people why they like their car, they don’t talk about the facts like horsepower, the gear ratios, the size of the tires, the volume of the trunk, or the number of inches of headspace. They’ll tell you it accelerates quickly, it has a smooth ride, it feels good cornering, it holds a lot of luggage, or they can get in without ducking their head.

It’s the benefits of those product attributes that are important. The work of Jean-Noel Kapferer helped me see this in a way that instantly made sense when I first encountered his work in the early 90’s. In fact, I am pretty sure I was the first to talk about brand at a higher education conference at AACRAO or SAACRAO in Atlanta in 1997 or 1998, basing the presentation on his work. The crowd was, um, underwhelmed, which meant my co-presenter Ron Wendeln and I were boring or ahead of our time.

Anti-lock brakes on cars worked identically across all brands when they were first introduced. But Volvo talked about them as making you safer, BMW talked about them as allowing you to drive faster, and GM said it made your Cadillac just like more expensive European sedans. One electronic circuit: Three very different benefits to consumers, filtered through the institutional brand.

Me, me, me. Colleges and universities love to talk about themselves. That’s always a critical element of product definition, of course. But consider some of the most successful taglines in marketing history: McDonalds with You Deserve a Break Today; Exxon with Put a Tiger in Your Tank; AT&T with Reach Out and Touch Someone, Las Vegas with What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, or Nike with Just Do It. They have nothing to do with the product: They have to do with the relationship of the product or service to the user, and the resulting benefits.

While you of course have to talk about yourself, the way you do it matters to. I’ve seen a lot of institutions burden their language with institution speak: Excellence University, located in Superb City, is known for….blah, blah, blah. Don’t do a Herschel Walker and talk about yourself in the third person. It makes you sound cold and impersonal. Lighten up, Francis.

Looking at the wrong end of the relationship. I cannot tell you how many times marketing officers tell me, “We asked our alumni what the best part of their educational experience at Excellence University was, and they said <insert something esoteric here>, and so we focus on that in our communications. If you ask questions like that, you should follow up and ask if they could have understood that as a 17-year-old high school junior, to which they’ll say something like, “no, you have to experience it,” which should be your first clue.

Talk about what’s important to prospective students, not about what was important to people once they graduated.

Lacking empathy. I’ve long believed that the best recruiters have an intellectual empathy; that is, they can understand the things the person they’re talking to does not understand, and then they bridge that gap. And yet, colleges use jargon and esoteric language and make insensitive assumptions about their markets. Consider something like We are an independent institution founded by the Most Holy Catholic Sisters of Saint Mary of the Bathtub Shrine, but we welcome people of all faiths. Huh?

Also consider things like “credit hours,” the “Dean of your college,” “syllabus,” “electives,” “grants,” and “General education.” A few students understand all of these; most understand some; and a few might be completely in the dark about what they mean. Unfortunately, that last group is often the one your “Mission Statement” says you want to focus on.

Thinking admissions officers are sales people. Of course, much of what admissions officers do while out recruiting involves face-to-face persuasion, fit assessment, and encouragement. But Toyota doesn’t care if you’re a good fit for that Camry, or even if you can drive it. If you have the cash, it’s yours. Students are not customers, as I wrote over ten years ago, after coming to that conclusion over 40 years ago. Think of them as members, and watch your orientation change: Suddenly, enrollment is the responsibility of the institution, not the 24-year-old, underpaid staff members spreading your message far and wide.

If you think every student can love your institution if just presented with more information, more persuasion, and a tighter personal connection to the admissions officer in charge of their file, you’re just flat out wrong. And if you have “territory goals” that include a certain hard-target number of new students every admissions officer is expected to hit, you fail to understand the thousands of things that affect students’ ability and willingness to affiliate.

Not segmenting your markets. If you try to talk to a prospective chemistry major in Brooklyn the same way you talk to a prospective history major from Los Angeles, your college in Chicago is unlikely to enroll either one. Segmentation is hard work. But you have to do it.

Successful enrollment outcomes are complex, driven by many things you can control (see above) and many things you can’t. It’s your obligation to control all the things you can, and to do them as well as you can. If you do, you’ll sleep a lot better at night.