September 2007 Lawlor Focus

More About This Generation

For higher education marketers and enrollment officers, the quest to understand what makes today's young people tick is never-ending. Here's a quick wrap-up of recent reports on some current trends among college-aged students:

• Harris Interactive and Alloy Media + Marketing surveyed 1,592 college students and found that social consciousness among this group has heightened, with 37 percent (up 4 percent from last year) stating they prefer brands that have fair labor practices, eco-friendly practices, and a record of charitable giving. The study also found 35 percent of students feel that people their age have the greatest ability to impact positive world change. "They have greater tools and technology to be heard and to be informed than their predecessors, and they look to corporations to serve the greater good," notes Alloy's spokesperson.
• The non-profit organization Excelencia in Education investigated why about half of all Latino undergraduates choose to enroll in the 6 percent of higher education institutions known as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). The study found Latino students are drawn to HSIs' low costs, accessible locations (in and near Latino communities) and open admission policies. By contrast, Latino students who enroll at non-HSIs are more likely to be swayed by financial aid, institutional prestige and the academic programs offered.
• As a slew of back-to-school articles in the mainstream media suggest, "helicopter parents" are still on the rise. USA Today highlighted parents who cannot manage to say goodbye when they bring their students to campus for the start of the semester; Philadelphia Magazine ran a feature story about a generation of well-intentioned "Bad Parents" who have raised clueless and entitled children; and USA Today reported the phenomenon of parents complaining about their first-year students' roommate assignments based upon their perusal of the roommates' Facebook profiles.

Lawlor Recommends

When it comes to understanding what motivates the majority of today's students, data from research like the Alloy survey, which suggest a level of altruism, can be misleading. Given the "entitlement complex" bequeathed to them by their hovering parents, the recruiting strategy that tends to work best is answering students' implicit question, "What's in it for me?" For more in-depth analysis of this topic, don't miss our next issue of The Lawlor Review (out later this month), which features an interview with psychologist Jean Twenge about the personality characteristics of "Generation Me."

With Latinos constituting the fastest-growing segment of the United States' population, private four-year institutions wishing to capture their share of this market must find ways to address the pragmatism that seems to inform Latinos' consideration and selection of colleges—which especially entails educating families about the intricacies of "sticker price." A tool that can be useful is the economicdiversity.org web site, which allows you to compare your data on student income, race and ethnicity with that of peer institutions.

In the news

National Public Radio recently conducted an interview with Alexandra Levit, the author of They Don't Teach Corporate in College. She points out that the newest generation of workers are "coming into the workforce really not prepared to do some of the grunt work associated with being an entry-level employee and want to do meaningful work right away," and that they "tend to want to be general managers by the age of 23." On a related note, The New York Times reported 65 percent of respondents aged 24 to 35 prefer to "look for a job in the place that I would like to live," rather than "look for the best job I can find" regardless of where it is located.

Did you know?

On a typical day, 19 percent of Internet-connected adults download video, whereas 62 percent of college students do. While only 57 percent of adult Internet users have ever watched online video, 93 percent of college students have.

Source: Survey U