The president’s promotional message might seem overdone to those of us who hear it a lot or who are predisposed to notice it, but out in the real world many folks have never heard it before, so the Middlebury message bears repeating.

Thanks for posing this question, President Liebowitz.
As a young alum, I have some questions: what portion of midd students go directly into grad school? If a majority of the students do so, then I think publicizing needs to take the backburner–most grad schools know about us (is that safe to say??). If, however, most get thrown into the proverbial lion’s den of a job market, then yes, Midd needs to get the word out, and quick. Unemployment is crazy!

Some other questions: do you think Midd generally lacks qualified candidates? I think that, for a small town in Freezing, VT, Midd does a phenomenal job of attracting the best of the best of professors, students, and staff. Anyone who does even a little research will become aware of Midd. So as far as improving educational opportunities goes, a healthy program of attraction rather than promotion makes more sense to me.

I personally heard of Midd from a family friend. So I think the best kind of publicity Midd can engage in is to continue doing what it’s been doing. The world will learn what and who we are from 1st degree testimonials like my own.

The comment above about the right kind of publicity (ie Time Magazine) is also great– a colleague told me Midd was on ESPN and I thought, “Quidditch?” It turns out he was talking about Butch’s story. Butch is all the publicity we need.

I am sympathetic to students’ concerns around over-promotion — I think branding often represents reducing oneself to the lowest common denominator and selling out — but my guess is that we as an institution have a long way to go before we get there. Many Eastern schools are not widely known on the West Coast, including my alma mater, Brown. Indeed, my guess is that outside of a “Big 4″ — Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford — the only schools with truly national name recognition are state universities and major sports schools (e.g., Duke, USC).

For better or worse, name recognition and reputation help in the job market — when meeting with HR people who *had* heard of Brown, I often still had to counter its reputation as the “easy Ivy.” The more we can do to bolster the name recognition of Middlebury, the stronger the institutional “letter of recommendation” we will be giving our students.

At the same time, I am personally uneasy about the never-ending quest for the “very best students.” It’s not that we don’t want the strongest applicant pool and student body we can recruit or that Middlebury necessarily engages in the admissions arms race that has led many schools to boast of the percentage of valedictorians in their incoming classes, among other troubling metrics — I haven’t been at Midd long enough to have an opinion on that subject. I only mean to say that while I don’t see the institution as over-marketed now, that doesn’t mean it’s not something to keep in mind as we move forward.

I have always been a fan of what I like to call a “zero-based marketing budget” – which means using public relations (e.g. articles, profiles, etc) as a means to building awareness without seeming to be overly promotional. We used to joke in our business that our pr consisted of talking to reporters once in a while and hoping that they said a few nice words….(we were a bit more structured than that, had a pr agency on retainer – but nobody knew that).

My guess is you got more mileage out of the TIME magazine profile (I think it was TIME?) than most of other venues.

Short conclusion – a zen like approach may work – market without making it obvious that marketing is exactly what you are doing….

Regards…Keith T.