Lane Community College needs real marketing

During the past decade and a half, Lane has gone from being mostly funded by property taxes, which didn't depend on the number of students, to a new state funding formula that will make its revenues almost 100% dependent on the that statistic. This has led to a gradual awakening to the need for marketing college services to potential students. Students should be pleased with this.

So far Lane's marketing has consisted mostly of advertising and PR. These are important, but consumer marketing consists of much more. The college is overlooking principles that American business has found to be effective. Here are some examples, along with ideas to apply them so as to benefit both the college and its students.

1) Consumers love packages.

When students come to Lane and say they want to major in something like history at the UO, they get a laundry list of AAOT classes that will meet their requirements. But they are not told (at least not anywhere I can find on Lane's Web site) that experience has shown that an excellent two-year program consists of classes A, B, C, and D, with a few options. People who really want to tinker still can, but a large number will welcome a low-stress recommendation with the maximum probability of success. The college will stop wasting time pretending to be neutral when it's not, or shouldn't be.

2) Consumers respond well to guarantees and badly to uncertainty.

When students check the upcoming class schedules at Lane's Web site, they get a cold message that tells them that even if they find the classes they want, and even if they can get in, the course is not a contract and, well, good luck. This is after they also discover that classes in the catalog may never get offered and when they are, there may not be enough seats to accommodate all the demand.

One of the advantages of (1) above is that the college could actually make a promise about the core classes in its packages. It could say, "If you follow our advice and take a package, starting in September, we promise to offer the required courses in the terms you need them, and enough sections to accommodate everyone." There would of course be the fine print, but consumers are used to fine print. They still appreciate a heartfelt guarantee.

3) Consumers expect cancellation fees for high demand services.

When you get a cheap plane ticket for the day before Thanksgiving or book a hotel room for New Years Eve, you don't expect to be able to change your mind and walk away scot free. But students at Lane are given the chance to register speculatively and withdraw without expense to themselves during the first week of classes.

It's no expense to them, but it's a big expense to the college and to the students who may have wanted to get into the section. Leaving aside the chaos during the first 10% of a 10-week course of instruction, and the students who end up taking classes at times that are inconvenient, the college loses about $400 every time a seat that could have been filled is left empty. The habit of registering without a serious commitment could be brought to a halt with a $50 penalty for withdrawal.

4) Consumers respond to off-peak pricing and everyone benefits.

Check the cost of flying United at any online booking service. You'll see there are small variations in the ticket prices for different times of the same day, and for different days of the week. United is saying that, if you don't care when you travel, they'll sell you a ticket for a flight that doesn't have people breaking down their doors for a seat. As a sidelight, it means that if you really need a particular flight and are willing to pay for it, you can.

Lane has high demand for classes in Fall/Winter/Spring during weekdays at midday times, especially MWF. It has spare capacity late afternoons and evenings, weekends, and Summer. Yet everything costs the same. It appears to believe that after the prime sections fill, demand will transfer to others, but consumer behavior is not that flexible. If a single mother in Junction City with a child needing daycare can't get a workable schedule, she may just give up.

The UO has tried some discounts and considers them a success. Discounting off-peak sections would save some people money, make classes possible for others, and raise enrollment which would benefit Lane.

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I've been watching the budget crisis unfold for two and a half months and despite hearing that there would be fundamental changes considered, I haven't heard any even bruited, let alone seriously pencilled out. There are changes that could be made to benefit students while improving the budget situation at the same time. It's discouraging that they don't seem to be on the table.

Paying everybody the same

Someone is posting comments on an earlier entry regarding the LCC budget. Their point seems to be that the quality of instruction in computer networking isn't good. I don't know anything about this issue specifically, but it's certainly consistent with a thematic problem at Lane.

Which is that when it comes to compensation, there is just "faculty," not diffentiated between easy and difficult to find. Like so many things at Lane, the college's policy is based on an ideal: everyone with the same experience and qualifications should be paid the same without discrimination. Having decided this, it never examines the cost, which is that instructors in some faculties are easy to find for the salary and benefits being offered, but competent people in competitive specialties get better offers elsewhere. To offer all faculty enough to get good teachers in all areas would require a lot more money and consequently a lot higher tuition.

A similar problem arises with respect to employees with minimal skills. The ideal is that nobody works at the college unless they make a living wage with benefits. The cost of that is that by paying above-market rates for people who clerk at the bookstore or serve sandwiches, students are obliged to pay more. It's like KLCC. It sounds like public service, but in effect, it means that every full-time student is required to make a $40 annual donation to public radio.

Budget discussions at Lane tend to take place in a vacuum. It's always, "Is this good?" Never, "Is this good enough to require students to pay for it?"

Lane Community College - A Chance to Think Things Through

In its editorial on the LCC budget crisis several weeks ago, the editors of the Register-Guard began with "LCC hits budget wall," and sub-capped that with "There's no place left to squeeze." This is nonsense. The LCC budget is rife with places to spend money more intelligently. For instance, compared with complexity, simplicity is cheaper and others things equal, works better. Here are three examples where LCC could spend less and do better.

Simplify Advising: Lane has a large number of people giving advice on transfer-to-university programs. Their job is to steer incoming students, based on their intended majors, through the shoals of what seems like 100 different courses. It could be more, I haven't counted, but it's an intimidating array.

It's a waste of time and money on two counts. Incoming students don't really know where they're going. Ask them and they'll say they do, but they usually don't. Check university students on graduation day and see how many of them finished in the discipline they expected when they walked on campus in September, four years earlier. Not many.

The best advice that incoming students can be given is to start taking survey courses and preserve their options. Rather than, "Here's what you can do for two years," they should hear, "So you're somewhere in liberal arts? Take writing. Take the most advance math you can handle. Take one of these two literature sequences. Take Western Civ, US History, or Sociology. Throw in speech if you have a slow term. Come back in a year when you have a better idea what you're going to do."

I exaggerate, but not much. Students should be steered firmly and quickly into courses that will be interchangeable if they change their minds. Give them one survey course in their supposed major and predicate everything else on the likelihood that they'll switch. They'll be grateful later.

Simplify the course offerings: This follows closely on the previous point. To see what not to do, check the Spring class schedule. Look at Literature. Seventeen separate courses in order to deliver just twenty sections weekdays on the main campus. The needs of students could be entirely met with two sequences, e.g. US Lit and British Lit, plus a single term of World Lit to meet certain diversity requirements. "Horror films" seems to be popular, but it's not clear why this can't be handled with some Friday night flicks at the student union.

But why not, you ask? If students want a class, why not give it to them? Many reasons:

• It doesn't serve the students well. When a dozen boutique classes are offered, students can't get the survey courses they want and need at the times that fit their schedules.
  
• It isn't appreciated by the universities, who want Lane do foundation work and specifically do not want incoming students to have taken specialized classes.
  
• Class hours are a zero sum game, so it's a bad strategy to put students who spend very little time in literature classes into 3 credits of Latino/a Literature. What they will learn about this will be subtracted from what they might have learned about general American literature.
  
• It's expensive. The catalog is cluttered, advisors must be trained to explain extra choices, books are needed in the library, the workload for scheduling and curriculum rises, ...

Simplify governance: Lane has adopted "shared governance" as a strategy. It's a utopian belief that if everyone has a say, the results will be better and fairer. In actuality, it's either just expensive window dressing or it will bring decision making on campus to a halt.

There are about ten different councils now. Among others, councils for faculty, learning, facilities, and finance. The faculty council is just faculty, but the others are drawn from throughout the college community. Membership seems to be about ten each.

It's a little hard to see what the faculty is engaged in if not learning, and someone has already noticed that the purpose of facilities is to advance learning so those two councils need to be coordinated. What they will recommend depends on the availability of money, so everyone will need to talk to the finance committee. Except that the college budget is reviewed by the official Budget Committee and approved by the Board, both of which are irrelevant steps since in practice the budget is produced by the administration and not modified.

At the end of the day, somebody makes a decision and everyone up to that point just gives advice. There are vastly simpler ways to give advice. "Shared governance" borders on oxymoron. The cost of this charade is spread throughout the budget, but it must be considerable.