The Standard reveals some dangerous attitudes towards advertising and MBAs.
Why should universities, which are all publically-owned, be advertising to try and take students off each other? I mean, it’s one thing to compete on quality but this kind of vacuous ‘marketing’ nonsense just shows we’re losing our universities.
How confusing – so they can compete on quality, but they’re not allowed to put out public messages explaining why they are a quality education institution.
But even more fundamentally – who says they’re competing “to try and take students off each other”? One of the problems of marketing, is that it’s very easy to make ads that convince people that your product class is something to buy, but harder by far to convince people that yours is the one to purchase.
So a lot of what universities are doing is advertising education in general – increasing the size of the pie, not their own slice.
Universities were once places to learn how to think, to discover; they were places where you went to gain a broad range and real depth of knowledge. This ad and the emphasis on rubbish like MBAs shows they’re becoming places for preeners to network and get pieces of paper to show what great businessmen they are.
Clearly Mr
range and real depth” of knowledge. They also pay real money for the privilege – when I last checked, many times what any other course charges. Funnily enough, in the best programs you usually need to have experience in the real world to gain acceptance, which again comes back to my earlier point about the “size” of the pie.
If this country is to have a competitive internationally, we need top quality MBAs to run our businesses in the most efficient and flexible ways possible.
By our universities providing business courses, graduates also have an opportunity to be exposed to other diciplines in sciences and humanities, which is not always the case overseas where business schools are often a stand-alone concern.
Something should go here, maybe later. 
4 responses to “Marketing Universities”
scubone: Don’t be ridiculous.
What SP was looking at was the amount of resource that the universities are expending on marketing to get a bigger slice of the cake. It is highly unlikely that they’re increasing the size of the cake, the labour market does that quite effectively.
As to the second part of your argument, there are far more than sufficient graduates coming out in areas like business and law. What characterizes the big growth areas in the education market is that they are relatively low-cost, and therefore higher margin courses. The areas that are expensive to train people in, science, engineering, technology, and IT have far less marketing going into them.
These are the areas that have major skills shortages that limit growth. But that isn’t even the major limiting factor. We need finance that isn’t rapacious venture capitalism to be able to grow nascent businesses. We need coordinated assistance to be be able to get those businesses to enter markets offshore (always the worst step).
What we need in this country is a source of local finance to support innovative companies and the people to drive that innovation. What we don’t need is universities advertising to try and get students into courses that give them high margins in the short term, and are of limited value to country in the long term.
FYI: I have a BSc in earth sciences from waikato, an MBA in operations from Otago, a number of papers in IT and a major programming obsession. I work as a programmer for exporters doing the tricky bits of the systems. I’ve been involved in setting up a number of businesses and writing the code and systems that drive them.
BTW: I also think that your opinion shows a distinct cranial vacuum about what actually fuels non-agricultural/resource growth for NZ
Oh and by the way. There are about 14 people who write posts on the standard. The Standard itself is a program running on a machine.
It is the height of stupidity by you to ascribe an opinion to a program. I write the damn things, and generally people outperform them by many orders of magnitude in an ability holding opinions (even those as daft as yours). Similarly the same thing happens with intelligence, except of course where it is crippled by the opinions of someone like yourself.
“The Standard reveals some dangerous attitudes”…
“Clearly Mr Pierson (who wrote this) has an attitude problem “…
“It is the height of stupidity by you to ascribe an opinion to a program.”
I’d reply and say it’s the height of stupidity to reply to a post you have not actually read.
Your first line ascribed the ‘attitudes’ to the site.
“The Standard reveals some dangerous attitudes towards advertising and MBAs.”
Seems more than faintly ridiculous at many levels, especially when the sysop of the site has an MBA.