Marketing English Department Majors to Prospective Students

In 2016, Iowa State University hit its all-time peak in student enrollment at 36,660. Now, in the midst of a natural enrollment drop, in the words of Natalie Meyer, an associate teaching professor and Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) representative for the English department, “the idea of college and a college degree has changed. People are very much looking for return on investment.” And each department is looking for ways to maintain enrollment and engage the prospective college audience through effective marketing strategies. As one of the driving forces in the English department’s Marketing and Recruitment Action Team, Meyer is leaning into the opportunity to help students see the value of the BA degrees that the department offers.

Many of today’s students focus on “taking courses that are going to set them up for success in their professional careers,” Meyer claims. These students want to see a clear path from what they learn in class to their first job offer. As the cost of tuition rises, students seek out more of a guarantee that their time in college will yield results that they couldn’t get anywhere else. Part of Meyer’s task is to show that the majors in the English department also “offer a lot of valuable skills and practical applications.” Speaking metaphorically, she states, “if you get a chemical engineering degree or an accounting degree … you have a hallway, there’s a door at the end, and you expect to get a job in [that field]. Whereas with some of our degrees in LAS … you have a hallway and there’s a whole bunch of doors you can go through.” As such, many of her marketing efforts focus on conveying to students the broad applicability that majors in linguistics, technical communication, and English have.

To this end, Meyer is contributing to a marketing strategy that reaches out to prospective students expressing an interest in English department majors. As an initial move, the marketing team sends out handwritten postcards to students who have been offered or have already accepted enrollment and expressed an interest in LAS. The message on the card encourages them to consider a major or minor in an English department program. On top of that, the screens in Ross Hall now advertise LAS’s Curiosity to Credit program with information about interesting classes, which helps students branch out from their initial degrees. Following a push to get more English courses into that program, the department is advertising more in order to introduce students to the range of topics in English.

Also, the marketing team has advocated for a more active English department, resulting in the department’s having an event in this past year’s LAS Week for the first time in years. The event, titled Blind Date with a Book, drew in more than 100 donations of old books. Wrapped up to obscure their covers with a short blurb about the book written on the wrapping, the books were left for students to pick up and discover. As students shopped through the wrapped books, the posterboards and screens set up around the table advertised some of the exciting English courses. The team documented the entire process so that future faculty can easily set up a similar event. Meyer hopes for more English LAS events and a more involved marketing effort from the department as a whole.

But the most important task for the English department action teams is “building a sense of community. All these committees,” Meyer thinks, “are doing that.” The department’s efforts in this direction are aimed at providing quality teaching and making Ross Hall a more welcoming space for students with updated furniture in the undergraduate lounge. Meyer is also planning a student ambassador program to help spread the word about the English department and its majors to prospective college students through the lens of active students who can describe their learning and experiences. The ambassador job is a paid position that will likely be posted on the Student Job Board in CyHire when it is available.