A Tale of Two Pities – Latest Rankings

​As Australia’s sandstone universities ready themselves to put a brave spin on the latest ARWU rankings, out at 2pm today, another, less sought-after ranking has emerged.

While the nation’s higher education marketing leaders get ready to present at HE FEST in Melbourne next month, the team at EducatorData have published a sobering new insight – a ranking of the universities that delivered the lowest revenue return relative to marketing spend in 2023.

This is intriguing, and worth sharing because it raises a range of questions – as well as a range of responses that demonstrate the danger of seemingly objective metrics.

As anyone who has ever complained about a marketing team will know, there is often a suggestion that marketing are wasting precious resources making things pretty without having impact. Having reviewed 16 of the nation’s marketing teams, I can attest that A. that is sometimes true and B. the proposals ranging from tar and feathering to comprehensively defunding marketing teams put forward by aforementioned complainers are virtually never close to constructive or effective solutions.

But first to the chart.

Source: EducatorData

The analysis accompanying the chart finds that Charles Darwin U earned the lowest return on marketing spend for the sector, followed by UNE, Federation and UTAS.

The analysis points out that regional institutions tend to have a lower return on investment, but there are numerous points worth making here to add to the insights. I’ll try to be brief:

1. Marketing should relate to product (courses delivered, campus experience, research outcomes produced), people, price and other debatable P’s but in annual reports is almost always restricted to the one P – promotion. This is representative of the disdain for marketing expertise common across many institutions and the ongoing failure to consider marketing as a locus of expertise relevant to all aspects of institutional success, rather than simply creating something shiny to lure students in the door.
2. Scale makes life easier. Many of the lowest 10 are smaller institutions which will incur a proportionally higher spend simply to get visibility against the sandstone juggernauts.
3. It costs more to attract students and even build engagement for lower status institutions, whether they are urban or regional
4. Marketing budgets are inconsistently reported across institutions, particularly when comparing institutions with centralised vs decentralised budgets. The decentralised budgets are frequently coded differently (eg discretionary funds squirrelled away in the Deans office etc)
5. Marketing must deliver more than a financial return. Outcomes can range from research translation to supporting philanthropy and more should be spent on student retention.
6. Regional universities face many higher costs in acquiring and serving students that go well beyond the marketing budget, due to logistics, the size of the pool of students in commuting proximity, difficulties in attracting staff etc
7. One year of marketing return doesn’t indicate trend – and marketing spend on promotions typically correlates with the following year of student revenue.
8. Marketing an unpopular course offering generates less return than marketing a popular one.
9. Changes to the way an institution is marketed can deliver massive improvements in revenue – but that institution still may have a higher marketing cost per enrolment than others, depending on whether your course sounds boring, your academic staff communicate well, your campus location is undesirable, your application system impenetrable, your website too hard to navigate, or a host of other factors. Not all universities are created equal, so you need to maximise improvements on an institutional trend basis, with more narrowly defined benchmarking providing useful guidance.

So what does this chart actually mean, given these issues? Not a lot, but it is genuinely valuable in starting new conversations about the place and value of marketing in the future of HE. We just need to make sure those conversations start with facts. Evidence-based marketing reform can only occur when the change-makers understand how sector marketing works.

In the meantime, while we are examing contestable rankings, Australia's resident rankings whiz Angel Calderon will keep us updated with latest insights from the ARWU rankings on the Future Campus website after the iron veil is lifted from the results this afternoon.