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You're listening to The Higher Ed Marketer, a podcast geared towards marketing professionals in higher education. This show will tackle all sorts of questions related to student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and so much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where the industry is going, this podcast is for you.
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Welcome to The Higher Ed Marketer podcast. I'm Troy Singer here with Bart Koehler. And this week, we speak with Dr.
Scott Feller. He's the president of Wabash College. It is an all-mins college in the state of Indiana.
And we talked to Dr. Feller about leaning in and marketing your distinctives. And he brings his message very boldly and very dynamically.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, Troy. It's a great conversation. I was really excited to have Dr.
Feller on the podcast today. He was an introduction via Ethan Braden from Purdue. And so Ethan really encouraged me to reach out to Dr.
Feller. He had heard him talk about trying to switch the emphasis to outcomes as opposed to selling the academics necessarily. And I think that Scott does a great job of articulating that and explaining how he leverages those distinctives of a small private men's college and to really the benefit that that students and families can understand.
SPEAKER_02
I'm excited to get into this conversation with Dr. Scott Feller. It's our pleasure to welcome Dr.
Scott Feller, president of Wabash College to The Higher Ed Marketer podcast. And Scott, before we get into some of the uniqueness of how you're marketing Wabash, if you could give our listeners a little bit about the college and some of the unique things about it for some of them that
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are not familiar that they should know. Thank you very much. We're a very unique college.
We're one of only three all male liberal arts colleges in the country. So we're located in Crawford Zill, Indiana. We have a 100% residential campus.
It consists of about 850 young men. I've been the president here for about 18, 19 months. But I've spent this my 24th year at Wabash.
I began my career as a faculty member, served as the college's chief academic officer. And July of 2020, I moved over
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to the president's role. Thank you, Scott. And one of the things that sticks out to me as we speak to you and reading about the college is that the college is unapologetically a residential
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liberal arts college for men in Indiana. That's very much right. We're we have a unique mission.
We know it. Every student, faculty and staff member knows our mission. We're very committed to it.
We know it's not for everyone. But we think that for many young men, it's a really excellent option. And and we're very committed to, you know, traditional liberal arts.
The education here is both timeless in terms of based on a liberal arts curriculum that emphasizes clear written and oral communication, critical thinking, moral reasoning, the ability to work with others. But it's also timely in that it's very much focused on sending young men from Wabash College out into the world.
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Thank you. I think some would even say that some of your marketing and how you compare yourselves to others could be bold. So if we can start out our conversation by how Wabash leads
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with the great outcomes. Yeah, we've probably been about three or four years in a model where we really lead with outcomes. I think traditionally small liberal arts colleges, we tend to lead with what we are, not what we get done.
Everyone says they're a unique small community. And they're right. But at the end of the day, I think students and their families want to know what is going to be my experience through and after Wabash College.
So we talk a lot about graduation rates. Young men are not graduating from college at great rates. So we're very proud.
We think our focus on young men and their success gives us an advantage there. We also know that families are concerned about the return on their investment. Wabash is quite an affordable option for families.
But we're still asking people to invest their time and their money. So we're very proud. We lead with the fact that 98 to 100 percent of our graduates are settled in their first destination a couple of months past graduation.
We lead with our position in national rankings. We end up at the top of some very good lists. One that we're particularly proud of is that we have the number one alumni network in the country.
As part of the secret of how we get these guys placed in internships and jobs, we also have some really enviable numbers from, for example, pay scale on the salary data 10 years out, salary data, big career, where we're among the top liberal arts colleges in the Midwest. So student can come to Wabash, student can get a liberal arts education and the student can set themselves up for a lifetime of both satisfaction and professional
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success as far as we're concerned. That's great. And I really like this idea of outcomes because I mean, I've been in higher ed marketing for a number of years and consistently over at least the last five or 10 years that whenever you look at the surveys from parents or even just from students themselves, they always want to know that return on the investment.
What is it going to be for the outcome? And I know that we've talked with, you know, Jeff Fanter used to be the executive vice president at Ivy Tech here in Indiana, the community college network. He was really pushing outcomes because their data was showing the same thing that a lot of high school students and even nontraditional adults who are likely to go to community colleges looking for that outcome data. And actually, we were introduced through Ethan Braden, a friend of ours from Purdue University that has been on the podcast a couple times.
And he said, you know, you really need to talk to Scott at Wabash because they're doing some really great things with outcomes. And I'm just always fascinated with that because I do think you've got something there is that people want to understand
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where they're going to be after this investment. And I think that colleges, especially traditional liberal arts colleges like Wabash, it's been easy for us as academics to emphasize learning for the sake of learning, right? The many benefits that accrue from studying the liberal arts. But, you know, we actually have to make sure that those of us who are not true believers, those of us who are not from the inside, we've got to translate this into the objective measures of success of a college.
So we think that learning, we think a lifelong love of learning is something that we impart in every student. But I guess at the end of the day, we don't maybe lead with that. We lead with things like graduation rate, first destination rate, salaries, awards that our students win.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that's interesting because I've also seen a lot of schools that are making a little bit of a pivot to, you know, it's called kind of story branding in the idea that you make the student the hero of the story. Traditionally, I think a lot of times schools tried to make themselves the hero to say, hey, look at us, look at what we've done, look at our accolades, our rankings, and not that you're doing that in any way. You were actually making the student the hero by telling them what they can expect out of their experience.
That's exactly right. On Friday,
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I spoke to about 100 prospective students at a visit day we had there. And my message to them was to talk to Wabash students, current students, so that they could understand the trajectory they could be on next year, because we do, we want the students to imagine themselves as a successful Wabash student. And that at the end of the day is very important to us.
We're very proud that we meet each student where he is. And so the student story is the important story. The student outcome
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is the most important story. That's great. Thank you.
Along with outcomes, you also have the philosophy about embracing comparison. And we'd like to know if you could share that philosophy
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with our listeners. Yeah, we decided we're going to be pretty bold and put this stuff out there. I think there are, it's a crowded market, residential liberal arts colleges in the Midwest where we're located.
And we've got to distinguish ourselves from others. So we emphasize often our place in rankings, you know, most accessible faculty, top career center, best athletic facilities, a lot of metrics like that, where you can see Wabash ranked among the top colleges in the nation. So when we look at something like, when we look at pay scale and we look at those salary data, they are incredible on their own.
But I think what's really incredible is to look and see the neighborhood of other colleges that we're with. It's the top colleges in the country. And quite frankly, those colleges, they roll a lot more students who had a pretty good head start life.
We continue to draw students, a lot of Pell Grant recipients, a lot of first generation college students. So the fact that our value add is really high. And we're not afraid to put that up and compare it with another college.
We're also very transparent, all our retention data, all our graduation rate data, everything about student to faculty ratios, you name it, we put pages and pages of that out there that we share with people because we're,
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quite frankly, we're pretty proud of it. And you should be. And I think that that's, I think that would be a good note for our listeners.
There's always something that you can share that's distinctive about your school. You know, we've talked to here, Wabash is a small men's liberal arts college. And you can say, well, you know, they're special because they're men's only, well, yes, they are.
But that also adds a general, that adds some challenges because you just cut your marketplace in half. So I think that one of the things though that I'm kind of thinking through Scott that you've talked about that I just want to kind of emphasize a little bit is this whole nature of really kind of leaning into who you are, and then making the most of it. And then, you know, and then being bold about that.
I mean, I love the fact that you might be the best college in America, you kind of claim that. And I think that takes some, some hoods, bought to do that. But I think you also have some things that you can very articulately put out there and say, this is why we think so.
And this is the data that supports it. And I think that I would really challenge a lot of schools to look at your data and find where are those places that set you apart from everyone else and try to stop being the me too in your marketing and start trying to be a little bit more of this is who we are. And I think you're going to find more mission fit students because they want to they're drawn to the places that they want to be.
Yeah, certainly
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we are looking for the mission fit students. You know, Bart, when you say we when we describe ourselves as liberal arts college men, we lose a lot more than half of the market with that state. Exactly.
Yeah, right. We definitely lose 60% at least of the liberal arts college market. And then the fact is that a single sex college is not what the experience everyone is looking for.
So we're going after a particular student who is driven, who wants to get somewhere. And so that's why I think our comparative approach to marketing fits so well with who we are. We're also very competitive here.
So we're celebrating on this campus last week, our wrestling team play second in the nation in division three, and our basketball team played the final four. This place is competitive. That's part of in our DNA.
So, you know, what we tell students is we're going to compare with others. We tell students, you're going to learn more, you're going to earn more, you're going to lead more, and you're going to play more. And so that's our that's our promise to students.
And as you say, we work, we work hard to back it up. Yeah, well, being an alumni of
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Anderson University, I can attest to the competitiveness because we always played Wabash in in football. I was not on the team, but I was in the stands cheering during those games. So that
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was that's exciting. Scott, a conversation that I've had the privilege of being privy to that Bart has with schools is for liberal arts colleges to really realize who the real competition is. And it might not necessarily be the other liberal arts colleges around you.
We'd like to know your thoughts about that and your approach to the schools and who you consider is your competition.
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, Troy, you're exactly right. You know, we we have some crossover with DePaul and Irland, for example. But that is dwarfed by our crossover applications with Purdue University and Indiana University.
The competition is about drawing students to private residential colleges away from, you know, let's say the the familiar names, the the large R1 flagships in their state. In Indiana, that happens to be particularly tough competition. Because in Purdue University and Indiana University, we really are competing against two very strong flagships, and we know it.
But when we go out of state, when we go to Texas, again, we're not necessarily competing with a Texas liberal arts college, we're more likely competing with the University of Texas at Austin. We're we're competing with, you know, University Texas Southwest. So that for us, we know that's where we lose the students.
We have to differentiate the college experience here. We think that we're in a great position to differentiate that. But we also know we have to work really hard to get people's attention.
Purdue and IU have such great built in ways to grab a student's attention. You know, if if I could be on ESPN game day every once in a while, I think I'd feel pretty good about our chances with 17 year old young men. But that's not the way the world works.
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That's right. And I think I think you're so right in that because I mean, I've often told a lot of my clients who are small faith based institutions here in Indiana, you can drive up Interstate 69 and hit five or six schools that maybe appear to be similar. They're they're very different.
But I've often told them that you're not competing against one another, you might cross up with each other. But at the end of the day, you're competing against, you know, the state schools. And sometimes you're even competing against life itself.
More and more students are looking at gap years, more and more students and families are considering other creative ways of looking at it. Because I mean, you know, let's be honest, even though schools make it affordable for students, the public many times, especially first gen students and Pell Grand recipient family households don't quite understand how everything works with with discount rates with scholarships with financial aid with grants. And so I think that part of it is recognizing who the true competition is.
And many times that's just life itself. And and what I would consider a little bit of just negativity with with some of the families that they just don't understand. And they think I could never afford a private college, because that sounds elite and expensive.
I'm going to have to go either to a public school or to a community college.
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How do you address those types of questions? You know, when I talk with a family, I tried share with them that we offer an elite education without any elitism, right? We want to bring everybody to the table. So we've worked really hard at a couple of things. Transparency and financial aid is one of the ways that we go about.
We're very straightforward with an Indiana student who's a Pell Grant recipient. For example, if he's been receiving free and reduced lunch, he's going to receive Pell Grant. He's going to receive a grant from the state of Indiana.
And Wabash is going to write off the rest of the tuition with scholarship. So we say that from day one, you're admitted to Wabash College, tuition is covered. And so that's been a big part of our messaging, as well as emphasizing our net price calculator, where people can find out what the cost is is going to be.
I don't know what the answer is in terms of a sticker price versus the net price and the dip counting. I feel that our, I guess I like our net price because it reflects how much we spend on students. And that's not true at every college.
But if you take our colleges budgets around $45 million and you divide it by 800, 850 students, you get our sticker price. Now, the fact is that our students are paying a fraction of that because of philanthropy, that our students are typically, if they have any kind of financial need, they're not really going to pay much more here than they would to go to Purdue or IU because this college runs on philanthropy. But admittedly, it took me a long time to explain that in this podcast.
It's not a sound bite. It involves developing a relationship with a family and trying to explain it. So I wish there was a slogan that would help people see through the fog of scholarship and pricing.
But on the other hand, I want people to know this is an elite education. Somebody is going to spend more than $50,000 on your education. At Wabash, around two thirds of that is going to come from our alumni and friends in philanthropy, either the accumulated philanthropy of our endowment or annual giving.
So that's the tricky one. How do I explain to people, this college is different. We're going to invest in you like no one else.
And someone that you don't know is going to slap down $2 for every $1 that you and your family bring to the table.
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Well, I love that right there at the very end. I think that's great. And I think also just, it plays in so well to your alumni.
I mean, you talked about that earlier, how that alumni network and the job placement and the, you know, after the outcomes with things. I mean, you've got alumni that are engaged with your students even before they even set foot on campus because of all of this. And I think that's just a wonderful story.
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A few years ago at the breakfast before graduation, I addressed the students. And I asked the students to stand if a Wabash alum had been part of their process to get to Wabash. And every single student who wasn't an international student stood up at that breakfast.
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That's great. That's really great.
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We know firsthand from our clients that Ximi is a must-have strategy for Gen Z. Check them out now at colleges.ximi.com. That's colleges.zee.mee.com and yes, Tellem Barton Troy sent you. Scott, being a All Men's College, we like to know if you've heard of the where are the men or where the men are and if you have with the shortage of men going and participating in higher education, how you are responding as a college or how you address that would like to hear your thoughts and
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approaches to that. You can't be the president of Wabash College without having people send you every editorial and news story about where are the men. So I wish I wasn't quite so familiar with that literature.
I think I'd say two things. First is often when we disaggregate the data on men's college attendance, what we see is that there is a substantial part of that loss that's happening in community colleges, for example, and is not directly relevant to Wabash College, but even in the private residential college sphere on most campuses, women outnumber men. So our response to it is, again, to double down on who we are.
We're a college for men. Everybody here is focused on young men's success and getting them to a graduation and getting them to a job. So what we can offer is perhaps an antidote to the observation that young men are not thriving in higher education.
They can come to Wabash College and this is the one place that that's completely committed to young men thriving. If young men don't thrive at Wabash, there is no future for Wabash College. We produce graduates because graduates are who primarily funds our philanthropy.
I like to tell the prospective students that the relationship between a student and the college is a little different at Wabash. It's not transactional. We aren't necessarily looking for your tuition check.
We're looking for you to come and have a great experience and a decade down the road for you to give back philanthropically, for you to complete that virtuous cycle. So I'm on the hook to give every student a great experience and you know, we don't just cash people's check and have them walk away because we lose money on every student. We've got to produce graduates because the payoff for Wabash College, it's not the tuition that comes in in the fall.
It's the philanthropy that comes
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in year round. That's great. That's very good.
And I think that that's so important that even there, I think a lot of other schools could learn from that because I think that it is important to create that experience. Not only will that produce retention because I mean, I think a lot of schools fall under the trap of, and Nate Simpson from the Gates Foundation made a comment on one of the podcasts that we work so hard to recruit them. And then when we hand them off to Student Life, we just hope they do well and we don't do much beyond that.
And especially at-risk groups like First Gen and Pell Grant recipients, I think that we need to do a little extra work and I'm so encouraged to hear the work that Wabash is doing, not only because it's the right thing to do and it helps with retention, but also it's going to build that legacy for the future. I mean, you're talking about, you know, Generation Alpha, the kids that are under 11 years old are going to benefit from, you know, the senior that's in Wabash right now that in another six, seven years might start giving to the annual fund that's going to impact that Generation Alpha student. And so I really love
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the way that that works at Wabash. Yeah, we're trying to be very intentional about that cycle. So my lunchtime meeting today was with a foundation that provides a substantial financial aid for Indiana students.
And we had 29 of our students there who are recipients of these awards to meet the folks that run this foundation. And that was as much, we obviously, we wanted the foundation to see the results of their philanthropy. But when I addressed the students, I asked them to, for them to reflect on how philanthropy is affecting them, so that down the road, they'll understand, okay, yeah, Wabash did a lot for me.
I'm going to find a way to support Wabash College.
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That's great. That's very good. We wind every episode of the podcast up with a question to our guests.
And it's if they have something, an idea, anything that they would like to share that could be impactful for our listeners soon after, maybe even immediately. Do you have something that you
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can share as we pose that question to you, Scott? I do. I'm going to use something and Bart made reference to it at the very beginning. I think the message is, you've got to be bold.
Okay, I think that most college leaders, and I count myself among them, you know, come up through the academy where we tend to, getting it right tends to take precedence over getting the work done quickly, right, and making an impact. I think also academics, you know, we also often assume our work stands on its own. But the fact is, students and families want to know what makes you great, right? They don't want to have to figure out how is Wabash different from DePaul, or how is Wabash different from Purdue? So I think be bold, differentiate.
These are the things that your families need to hear, so that they can understand. Don't expect them to figure out what the outcome is of great liberal
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arts education. Tell it to them. Thank you, Scott.
Well said. How would one get in touch with you if after listening to the podcast, they would like to reach out? Oh, the easiest way is email me
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at presidentatwabash.edu. Go to the Wabash email or Wabash webpage. You can find my phone number, but presidentatwabash.
edu is a great way to reach out. Thank you, Scott. Thank you for your time,
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and thank you for the wisdom that you were so generous with today. Bart, any last comments or
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thoughts from you? Yeah, I just want to kind of pull back and kind of highlight a couple of things that Scott said that I think is really important for audience to walk away with. And I really love the fact that Wabash has done such a great job of leaning into the distinctiveness that they bring to the marketplace. And I think that every school can do that.
You don't have to have a special, everybody has a special element. You have to discover that, figure that out, and be able to start promoting that. And so I would really encourage you to do that once you understand what that distinctiveness is, and be bold in that.
Don't hide it, don't apologize for it, lead with it, and lead well with it. Because I think that that's going to allow you to start comparing yourselves and contrasting yourself to other options. And it's also going to give you that value ad that somebody looks at and says, I think I need that.
And I think I would also really applaud Wabash and Scott on this legacy building that they do from day one. Even in the, you know, as he mentioned, he had the prospective students on campus recently and had them stand up on those who were influenced by alumni. And a lot of them were doing that.
Don't take your alumni for granted. If your marketing doesn't include your alumni, and you're not talking with them, and you're not building a relationship with them, and all they hear from you as the annual gift, you know, bell go off in November, be sure you're doing more with your alumni. Make it friend building rather than fundraising.
It's a friend raising, I think is what they call it, rather than fundraising, you have to do both. And so, you know, a smaller school like Wabash, you have, you know, not as big an alumni network, but even if your alumni network is really big, I'm sure Wabash is living in alumni network is in the 2030 thousands. If you have more than that, or if you have less, it's something that's worth doing and something to kind of take to your marketing team and figure out ways that you can kind of stay in front of that to build those legacies of, of not only enrollment, but philanthropy going forward.
So thank you, Scott. This was a great
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conversation. And thank you, Bart, for bringing us to a very powerful, but soft landing. The Higher Ed Marketer podcast is sponsored by Kailer Solutions, an education marketing and branding agency.
And by Think Patented, a marketing execution company specializing in bringing customization and personalization to your outreach. On behalf of Bart Kailer, the co-host, I'm Troy Singer. Thank you for joining us.
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