College mounts old-school campaign

Nevada State College is a gangly adolescent, which means there are a couple of directions it could go: pimply teenager with no friends or social butterfly.

Which do you think its leaders want?

So, market research. Billboards. A new Web site. TV and radio spots. An all-out marketing campaign launched a few months ago aimed not so much at redefining the college, now seven years into its existence, but at giving it a definition to begin with.

"It's taken us years to get to the point where people aren't saying, 'Oh. It's the best kept secret in higher education,' " said Lesley Di Mare, the provost.

Di Mare doesn't want it to be a secret anymore. She joined Nevada State two years ago. She and others have noticed that Nevada State, launched without a real building, seemed to lack any significant presence in the public mind.

Most people, if they thought about the state's newest college at all, didn't really know what it is, said Spencer Stewart, the associate vice president for college relations.

"The depth of understanding needs to be improved," he said.

What Nevada State is: A mid-level institution, somewhere between the community colleges and the two research universities. Its mission is simple: Produce college graduates, especially nurses and teachers.

At first, its growth was phenomenal. From an initial sign-up of literally a few dozen students to a couple of thousand only a few years later.

It has, perhaps predictably, struggled to keep up. Below average graduation rates and trouble with retention as defined by the establishment.

The initial growth and an adjustment period are coming to an end. So now what? In order to keep attracting new students, those potential students should know it exists. They should know that it has 35 majors and minors available. That it costs less than UNLV, but you can still get a bachelor's degree.

Though it spent its first few years in a remodeled vitamin factory on the outskirts of Henderson, it opened a state-of-the-art new building last year. It has plans for several more, though the state's budget crisis has put a crimp in those plans for now.

The college serves mostly first-generation students, with a lot of students who have transferred from elsewhere thrown in.

But the truth is, many people didn't know anything about the college, a survey showed.

So its leaders scraped together $500,000 to fix that. They redesigned the Web site, knowing that its the first thing most people look at these days to get a read on a place they've never been.

They put up billboards and ran the commercials. They believe it's working.

While UNLV's enrollment is growing very slowly, the community colleges a bit more, Nevada State officials expect theirs to jump by around 10 percent this semester once final numbers are in.

They attribute it to the marketing, the lousy economy that always sends people to school, and to a new enrollment management strategy that focuses not just on recruitment, but on what the new boss of that department calls "customer service."

Lee Young, the vice provost of enrollment management, said his job is to convince students that the school can help them make their lives better.

"You must be more than simply existing," is his message.

Young, who joined Nevada State a year ago, started looking at students who had dropped out. He wondered why. He called them to ask.

He tried to talk them into coming back. Some did. He emphasized the college's strengths: affordability and personal attention.

"I think this is a major reason why our numbers are going up," Di Mare said.

And the truth is, this is the sort of thing many established institutions do. They pitch themselves to potential customers. They tout their strengths. They sell sell sell.

They, in short, do their best to define themselves. Just like adults the world over do for themselves.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.