Why university marketing is so hard to cut through

Rob: Good day and welcome to the Choosing Your Uni National Virtual Expo. I'm your host for this session, Rob Malicki, and welcome to this session on getting beyond the marketing hype. Let's face it, choosing a university is one of the bigger decisions that you make in your life. Not because you can't change your mind, but because it is something that will eventually take years of your life and literally cost tens of thousands of dollars. So you want to make sure you get that decision right, which is actually exactly why we decided to run this National Virtual Expo.

Rob: Today's guest, Jason Ensor, the creator of After ATAR, knows quite a bit about getting beyond the marketing hype and we'll have a chat with him in just a minute. But before we do, remember: if you've got any questions or comments, you can drop them in the chat as we're going and we'll try to get to them by the end of the session. Anything we don't get to, we will be answering on the Choosing Your Uni Discord. You can find the details in the session description down below. And if you're a parent, we do have a Facebook community just for you and the specific questions that you might have about looking after your student. Details in the session description down below. I'm coming today from Garigal land in Sydney, so I pay my respects to the traditional owners of this land. Let's go and have a chat now with Jason Ensor from After ATAR.

Rob: Jason Ensor, founder of After ATAR, welcome to the National Virtual Expo. Thanks for joining me. I think this is one of the most important sessions of the whole National Virtual Expo, because obviously when somebody's trying to make their choice about which university they're going to go to, there is so much marketing out there, isn't there? From Google search, paid advertising, to articles, to videos, there's just so much stuff and it's really hard to cut through the noise to understand what information is relevant to you as a prospective student. What do you think?

Guest: Yeah, 100% correct. There is a lot of noise. We've got two sons. We had one go through Year 12 last year and we've got a second one going through it this year. And having been on the inside of the sector for 30 years, part of what After ATAR is trying to do is help dilute the stress around where am I going to go. There's obviously, as you say, a lot of qualitative information out there, a lot of marketing spin, a lot of "we are the best at this, we are the best at that, we are ranked here, we are ranked there." They provide signals, but the amount of data that's actually available within public portals and state portals and national portals tells a different story. How well is the university doing on dropout rates? How well is it doing on equity? How well is it doing on offers versus applications? There's marketing spin that says "we have a high reputation, we have high prestige signals, we have a high selection bias," and then you look at the data and it says, well, actually you make 100% offers to 100% of applications. That's great. You should get that out there. It shouldn't be about preserving how the institution appears in society. It should be making the pathway from being a high school student to a university student as frictionless and as painless as possible.

Rob: I was so excited when I discovered After ATAR a couple of months ago. As somebody who's been in the sector like you for 25 years, I've known about these data sources and personally I would have gone and looked up literally the original spreadsheets where all of this data lives, and I would dig through things to find what I'm looking for. But finally, to have a site where all that stuff is really accessible is incredible. So I'm really excited to get into that. But by way of getting there, I'd really love to look at the global rankings side of things first, because obviously when we start looking for universities, the first thing we see, because it's made so visible through marketing, is "we rank X on this global ranking" or "we rank highly on the sustainable development goals ranking." It looks really impressive. Can we have a quick talk about those big global rankings, how they work, and in what circumstances they might actually be useful for a student?

What global university rankings actually measure (and what they don't)

Guest: Yeah, it's a really tricky one. I sort of start to feel that the idea of league tables and bestseller lists and top 10 and all that kind of stuff is very much a 20th-century concept. I don't think it applies as much in an age where we're working towards hyper-personalisation and hyper-individualisation of how people learn and how educational pathways go. The focus on rankings should be noted: there are lots of different ranking providers out there. They are provided externally, like Times Higher Education and so forth, Academic Ranking of World Universities. You do a Google search and you'll find probably half a dozen of them. Institutions don't just participate in one. They participate in a number of them. One of the main issues is that if you've been part of the process, you get to see how one ranking system's requirements and conditions contradict those of another.

Rob: Can I pause you there? Take us behind that curtain. Most people watching this won't realise when they see a ranking, they just think: it's been independently evaluated, therefore it must be a good source of truth. But what you just said is very interesting. It sounds like universities can do quite a bit to influence those rankings.

Guest: Well, yeah, it's an application process and you provide evidence that supports the metric that the ranking system is requiring from you. As with any application process, there's a skill set involved in making the best argument and putting the best evidence forward. One of the things that strikes me is that there might be a ranking that's focused entirely on commercialisation of research and it completely doesn't look at what they call the cultural externalities that might come from something else. Then there'll be another ranking that focuses on impact on society but not on commercialisation. In fact, they can work against each other. Finding the ranking that best positions you so that you can say "I'm number one, or number two, or eighth" might not necessarily reflect what you are actually good at. It's the ranking that works well for your particular application architecture.

Rob: So when I get asked about rankings, I tend to say: what's the story you are hoping to tell about your experience? Who are you as a person? And you've got to be honest with yourself. So if you are interested in prestige on your resume, and that's probably more important to an international student audience than a domestic local audience, but not exclusively, then the fact that a uni has a huge global ranking may be important to you. But it's important to you. It's not necessarily important to a prospective employer. If prestige matters to you, you actually need to build that into your story when you're talking about why you went to this institution, what you put on your LinkedIn profile. The fact that this uni is ranked number X or has the best ranking in climate change, that's got to be part of your story too. And in that case, that can be genuinely useful because you are basically leveraging a brand as part of what you're trying to present to the world. So that's quite a complex process, isn't it? It's almost master's-level personal branding, if that makes sense.

Guest: Yeah, that story can be very compelling. I'm just thinking about social impact. Without naming any institutions, a number of them talk a lot about their social impact and how they rank really highly. That really speaks to you as an individual who wants to do good stuff in society. But that doesn't mean it's going to make any difference to your actual experience at university whatsoever. You can leverage the fact that it's got this huge ranking and have that on your LinkedIn profile once you've been to that institution. You can say "I went to this university and it was number one in the world for social impact," and that reflects nicely on you. That's quite a high level of thinking.

Rob: I think it's useful, as you say, to start the conversation. It's a starter. It's like "I read this great book, it's currently number one." It starts the conversation, but then you go deeper into: well, what's it about, what's in it, what's the data like? And that kind of conversation where you're not just exchanging a signifier that somebody else has created for you, as opposed to your own understanding of the institution based on the information that's actually available out there.

Guest: Yeah. That focus on brand, that quick easy signifier that everyone wants, you see the logo, you see the colours, you see the ranking, it's like "yep, great, less effort, I don't need to think any further on that." After ATAR makes a pitch: here's the data, here's how it all joins together, and some effort will be required to work through it. I started by looking at Reddit forums and Discord forums. That's where students congregate. That's what they're actually talking about. And to be fair, rankings don't come up nearly as often as institutions would like. The colour of their brand doesn't come up. Students want to know: are campuses busy? How many people will succeed in this course? What kind of jobs am I likely to get? Will I enjoy it? Who are my cohort? It's the everyday stuff, the minutiae of actually doing the course. There's a lot of effort from institutions to get applications and preferences during the pipeline, but the support and equity aspects after you're enrolled, that's the stuff that needs visibility.

How to use After ATAR to research courses and entry requirements

Rob: How about we jump into After ATAR and have a look? Obviously when you go to look at data, there are so many different sorts of data, and as we've been alluding to through this conversation, it really depends on what you're looking at and what's relevant to you. After ATAR is a free website for you to jump in and explore. Do you want to pull up a screen share, Jason, and we can walk through some of the key questions that students might have? Some of the things you've already mentioned: entry requirements, what percentage of students that apply for a course actually get admitted, what percentage drop out, what does it cost. Those are really interesting questions. How about we explore some of those questions and the ones you think are most important, right on your site?

Guest: Sure. So let's say you want to pick a particular programme and look into all the information about it. Retention is obviously a big subject coming up. Every university has national ways of calculating retention versus how institutions actually do it internally, and there can be some disconnect there.

Rob: For people watching along, retention basically means you stay in your course. You come back for a second year, a third year, and so forth.

Guest: Correct. How many finish, how many make it to fourth year, what are the likely starting salaries, what's the student satisfaction. Those are the kinds of qualitative signals around whether students actually like going to that institution. So, interestingly, you've got those colour signals here that show where an institution sits, whether this is a strong rating or not necessarily a strong rating.

Rob: That's correct. So let's say we click through to the course. Here we go. "How are students admitted?" And this is where we get the breakdown. This one here is clearly 73% ATAR-based. Let me see if I can find one that's a bit different. Here you go, Bachelor of Agricultural Studies. What's interesting with this one is the published rank looks like the selection rank is 75, but the actual lowest admitted is 70. Part of what this is trying to surface are those different signals. So a student could go into After ATAR, look through to the university, dive down into the particular course they're potentially interested in studying, and then compare what's been advertised with the truth about where students have actually been admitted in the past. Of course past performance is no guarantee of future performance, but that allows you to say: okay, I'm working on my HSC, I'm looking at this course that's advertised at an 80, but I can see in the data that this university has regularly been taking students who got a 72. That doesn't mean you only need a 72. But maybe that takes a little bit of pressure off, like, well, I've probably got a better chance than it looks on paper of actually getting into this course, even if I don't necessarily hit 80.

Guest: 100%. That is exactly the question this is trying to answer. Yes, you're completely correct. It's about finding the alternative pathway into a course without that stress. And if our way of learning is becoming quite personalised, then our way of assessing what's going to be a good fit for us should also be personalised.

Understanding student dropout data and what it signals about an institution

Rob: Can we maybe pull up one more, and I'm thinking about that student dropout data? Maybe while you're pulling up an example, there are lots of reasons why students drop out of university. There's personal reasons, there's financial pressure, but there's a big element around expectations not being met. Some of that is because mum and dad have always said "you should become a fill-in-the-blank" and you end up in this subject and it just isn't you. Or you genuinely thought you were interested in animal sciences and it turns out you're not. It's always good to change, don't get me wrong. But what I think is fascinating about this withdrawal and dropout data is that it does show you what percentage of students are getting into this course and thinking "whoa, this isn't quite what I expected." Can you talk us through this example you've pulled up, Jason?

Guest: Yeah, it's a tricky one to configure because dropout, completion, and retention are all sensitive signals around the churn within an institution. You might have high application rates, you might have high offer rates, but you're churning through so many students that the institution is thriving or surviving while leaving a lot of pain behind it. So having a look here, we're currently looking at the University of Sydney. 96% came back for year two, which is really good, and they had a pass rate of 94%. So they do well generally speaking. The dropout trend has stabilised, and obviously, as we all know, the sector has been recovering and is still recovering from COVID.

Rob: I love those trend lines. That to me is something that people should look at because it tells you broadly how an institution is tracking. Even if one year's up and one year's down, if over the last seven years an institution has been declining in some aspect, that's a signal you should pay attention to. Do you want to go to an institution where things are improving or where things are declining? It doesn't mean absolutely yes or absolutely no, but it's great to be aware of.

Guest: Fully agree.

Using offer-rate data to set realistic preferences

Rob: The other thing you mentioned just before, which I think is fascinating, is the ability to see what percentage of students that apply for a particular course actually get in. We're trying to set our preferences, trying to decide what's our stretch goal and what are our most realistic options. How would you start to look at that kind of question?

Guest: You can get into the data via discipline. Field data isn't available at the required level of granularity in the current data set. I've got to go back to the government and say, "are you able to provide it at that particular level?" But you can go at discipline level. Unfortunately, they're really broad disciplines: medicine will include nursing and midwifery and so forth. You can go in via course name, via institution, via state, and so forth, and that'll bring up the courses you're after. Within the courses, you can look at the breakdown of the pathways into each programme. That's the most important data around how do people actually get into this programme. What's the offer rate? You might be working really hard for what feels like an impossible ATAR, and then you look at the institution and realise: oh, okay, 100% of their preferences receive 100% of offers. Really important data. It really takes away some of the stress if that's the institution and the programme you want to go to. It's also broken down to provide those contradictory data points: this is what the institution published versus this is what actually happens. And then the comparison within the sector: what are the differences between an institution that claims to be highly regarded in a particular area, and yet everyone is actually going to this other institution? There are signals there that need unpacking and I'm slowly working through it.

Rob: It's a fantastic thing that you've created with After ATAR, an amazing resource for prospective students. Maybe just by way of closing, what advice would you have for students and families going through this process? And if you want to make it personal, what advice would you give your younger self about choosing a university?

Advice for students: you have more options than you think

Guest: That's a tricky one. Obviously, use After ATAR to dive into the data. But beyond that, my advice would be: you have options. You're not making the decision that will lock you in. It's not like the course you're doing, that's it, you're done. If I've learned anything, my career has been and continues to be rather accidental. It's about applying yourself to different interests and different things. I would say to the young me: you can change your mind. I failed high school. I got 60 in history and 49 in English. It was just a horrible and difficult period, having to pivot from what I was aiming for and going into something else. I ended up doing drama and communications and cultural studies, and I never regret it. But that transition from the final year of school into the first year of university was hard. Being able to think "these are the things I'm interested in, where can I go to do them, and what's required of me in order to do that" is so important. The message is: you've got choices. You've got options.

Rob: My guest in this session has been Jason Ensor, who's the creator of After ATAR. I'll provide details about After ATAR in the session description down below, and you can also find it very easily via Google. Jason, thanks for joining me at the National Virtual Expo.

Guest: Thank you very much. Been a pleasure.