The synthesizer music throbs with an irresistible beat. Tightly edited scenes of attractive young people flash by--biking, dancing, working on computers, playing volleyball. Innovative video techniques superimpose moody graphics over live action. A seductive yet authoritative male voice narrates.
What's going on here? Is this the latest MTV rock video? A commercial for beer or soft drinks? The opening to a new teen romance movie?
Guess again. It's the latest college recruitment technique in an era when 18-year-olds are harder to find than they were 10 years ago, and reportedly fewer of them respond to the written word. In this case, it's a video promoting Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, a pioneer in the use of videos to sell four years of college. But it could very well be a pitch for any number of other schools.
About half the nation's institutions of higher learning--world-famous Ivy League universities and obscure junior colleges alike--are selling themselves to the VCR generation with snappy videos that extol their campuses as beautiful, academically excellent and \o7 fun.\f7
"We are dealing with a generation of students who respond to visual images more than their predecessors," explains Joseph Allen, admissions director at UC Santa Cruz, which has had a recruiting tape for two years. "It's a group that is used to taking in information that way."
It is also a smaller group than it used to be. The number of high school graduates has declined about 20% nationally in the past decade, and applications to colleges have been dropping, although immigration to California has eased the trend here. The national situation is not expected to reverse until the late 1990s when many children of Baby Boomers reach college age.
That is the main reason colleges are willing to spend $20,000 to $120,000 making videos and to brave criticism that they pander to the anti-intellectual.
Drake has played its 3-year-old tape on MTV amid Madonna and Bruce Springsteen videos. The video manages to combine the promise of computer-aided studies with the lure of college romance. In its closing seconds, an attractive young woman asks a shy young man for a date though a message on a computer screen--undoubtedly a powerful image for some males whose strongest relationships may have been with computer keyboards.
Drake officials say applications doubled because of the video and because of the school's new emphasis on computer technology.
