The significance of diversity positioning in higher education for branding and marketing

ABSTRACT

This study offers important context for understanding why educational institutions ought to modify their recruitment marketing strategies to incorporate a multicultural perspective. African American, Asian American, Hispanic, International, and Native American student ratios are greater in institutions with a broadly varied faculty. Yet very few schools use metrics related to racial and ethnic diversity for brand marketing and benchmarking when utilizing online, offline, and social media tactics. The discovery has implications for creating admissions brochures that are designed to convey the institution's inclusiveness. This is a crucial component of every college’s and university's recruitment campaigns. Genuine interactions between students and faculty from similar demographic backgrounds should be portrayed in photo illustrations. For more than 2000 Carnegie-classified schools, we rank faculty and student diversity indices and provide higher education marketers with quartile statistics to utilize as a differentiator.

KEYWORDS:

• benchmarking
• branding
• diversity metrics
• higher education marketing

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Michelle Casario, Jared DeLisle, Jeff Harris, Iris Junglas, Andrew Karolyi, James Malm, Baniyelme Zoogah, and participants at the 2021 Academy of Economics & Finance Conference for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the editor, Rami Ayoubi, and two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions which substantially improved the manuscript.

Data availability statement

These data were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) dataset maintained by the National Center for Education Statistic (NCES) at https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/; the NCES Digest available at https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/; the Demographics and the Economy section of the State Health Facts reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation at https://kff.org; and, data available at https://data.census.gov and collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Diversity metrics for the universities in this sample can be obtained from the authors upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).