Studying for a degree - is it really worth it?

Is studying a degree good value for money? Are fees too high? Do graduates get paid more than non-graduates? Questions I’ll think about below then answer at the end of this blog.

I used to co-habit with people like this.
Some are now political campaigners.

I flew through university on a grant was happy living among the rats and vermin which came with the grubby private accommodation I paid as little as possible for. I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do afterwards; going to university to pursue my chosen subject was an end, joy and privilege in itself. The benefit then, as now, included but was not restricted to being able to earn more money than if I hadn’t been a graduate.

That was the early 1990s and I was, well, a bit dozy. It’s a different world now. It’s certainly not 1990 anymore. Today, when considering whether or not to attend university – and although you’re reading a blog on a university marketing site, higher education really isn’t for everyone - decisions about what to do after BTECS and A levels need are often made strategically, with the head and a focus on future employability more than likely winning out over the heart, where such conflicts arise. The promulgation of sites like UNISTATs suggest that evidence and comparisons are made in choosing between universities which have ever improving facilities and offers, but even before this, there’s the question of whether the benefits of higher education outweigh the barriers – a question even more prescient for more mature learners.

Since the early 1990s, fees have increased and the premium graduates enjoy over non-graduate pay has eroded. The premium is, however,still there, and this, together with unemployment rates lower for graduates than for non-graduates indicates, to me, that a university education is still good value, offering life experiences which would otherwise be denied and helping students build friendships and networks. At least it does for those who are good at that sort of thing.

Results of this year’s student experience research by the Higher Education Policy Institute (hereafter referred to as HEPI) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) came in just before the unfolding uncertainties following the country’s weird decision to BREXIT. But this was already a time when the Government was considering whether, in certain circumstances, to allow some institutions to increase fees in line with inflation and so put further pressure on the value of degrees. The findings from the research - not surprisingly - was a strong resistance to any fees increases.

Some prospective students will find fee differentiation useful as, rightly or wrongly, judgements are made accordingly. Others will be bemused by increased fees which will mean more of a tough decision for those who are debt averse. Given this and other changes in higher education, the widening participation agenda increasingly looking under threat. Luckily for us at Bedfordshire, we're confident that our portfolio and initiatives designed to get you ready for work and our student experience initiatives including our Go Global scheme significantly enhance our value offer.

And now, as promised, my views on the questions posed at the beginning of the article.

1. Yes, of course studying for a degree is good value for money. And remember you don’t have to start paying back fees until you earn at least £21,000;
2. According to the HEPI and HEA research, fees are too high; but going to university, whether it’s in a far off location or on your doorstep, can be an amazing experience and provide superb opportunities to see the world and the chance – in 2016 compared to 1991 - to stay in wonderful accommodation. So much more, in fact, than just a degree;
3. Yes graduates are paid more than non-graduates, even if there’s been some erosion in the graduate premium over the last few years. Bedfordshire students are also encouraged to develop their employability while studying.

But then again I would say all this wouldn’t I? Any other response would go badly against me from a ‘keeping my job’ point of view.

And, we're live!

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager

Clearing Campaign 2016 - microsite is live!

It's been months in the making, but we've finally gone live with this year's Clearing Campaign. Hurrah!

After all of the research, planning and photoshoots, it's all now starting to take shape, with the first set of ads going live this week pushing our 'Beat the Clearing rush' and 'Received your BTEC results? Apply now' messaging as part of our early targeting strategy.

Graeme, the Digital Marketing Officer meanwhile, has also worked his web magic on a brand new, shiny microsite (see above left) which you can check out via: www.beds.ac.uk/makeithappen. We hope you'll agree that it looks great; clean layouts, mobile responsive, clear conversion goals and call to actions, and dynamic visuals to sustain engagement. It's got a professional feel to it - strongly aligning it with our core marketing messaging.

It's still early days, so keep checking back over the next few weeks, as we add more rich media and dynamic content to the Clearing microsite.

For many our fellow Bedfordshire peers, I'm sure you've already caught a glimpse of this year's artwork in the latest edition of the staff newsletter @Beds. But for those who missed it, check out the images below to see how the whole campaign looks together as a full set. This year's campaign is led by 6 creatives: Media, Life Science, Performing Arts, Business and Computer Science (both of which double up as our generic visuals), and last but not least Sport Science & Physical Activity.

This year we've kept with the employability and student experience themes, and have continued to build on our creative proposition of 'Graduate as a Professional'. Importantly for us as Marketers, we've spent months developing this concept and the artwork, and every aspect of the visual has been carefully considered and composed. Think bold aspirational hooks, clear and uncluttered artwork, dynamic imagery of real students engrossed in real practical student experiences, central call to actions, and digital and social media integration. We feel this year's campaign is stronger than ever, and really feel it presents the University in a strong and confident manner. It's still early days, but we're really excited to see the campaign in full flow, in a few week's time.

And whilst our focus is now firmly rooted in the 2016 Clearing Campaign, we've spent some time reflecting back on last year's campaign activity, and have even managed to get another award submission in for the CIPR Pride Awards 2016, for our work on the 2015 Clearing Campaign, in the category of Best Integrated Campaign (we're hoping to retain our title, as a Gold Winner last year).

And so our first submission has now been entered for this year's @CIPR_Awards for Best Integrated Campaign. One more to write! #PRideAwards

— Sarah De Guzman (@Sarah_Hampton) June 3, 2016

This follows on from Kylie's earlier submission to CIPR for best Low Budget Campaign. We should find out the result in July, so keep everything crossed for us! And who knows, maybe next year we could be entering the 2016 campaign for a top award. Here's hoping!

Will we be beaming with PRide again soon?

So you know I always mention my open day campaigns – like a broken record! – well, I’m finally writing my first award entry for our September 2015 open day event.

I’m hoping to enter it into the ‘Best Low Budget Campaign’ category at this year’s CIPR PRide awards. We entered this category last year for the previous September open day and we won silver, so hopefully we can pull off a similar, if not better, performance this year – my evaluation report showed a good YOY increase and we substantially beat target, so fingers crossed!

I’ve also been helping out with the Clearing campaign. I’ve been editing some short student videos and also taken some computing related pictures, both are part of our Clearing social media campaign. I can’t believe Clearing is almost here again – it comes round so quickly – like Christmas?! (Yeah, I said the word Christmas in June – shame on me).

Welcome guides
We’re now also at the final stages of the 2016 Welcome guide which goes to print this week and I’ve recently briefed in the Nursing welcome guide – one publication ends another begins.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be working on some collateral for our new foundation years, creating some advice emails for our 2017 enquirers, and working my way through the last open day campaigns for this cycle.

On that note, I best get on…
Speak soon,
K

Another week in the Marketing Department

I can't believe it's Friday already (not that I'm complaining of course!). With the bank holiday on Monday this week has flown by!

On Tuesday and Wednesday the University hosted the US festival - a dance festival involving several universities within the UK. The two day event featured workshops from various practitioners within the dance industry as well as performances from the university students involved. On Wednesday I got to visit our Bedford campus to film some of the workshops and performances. It was a great afternoon and I was lucky enough to sit in on some amazing performances. I'll be editing the content next week so look out for when it goes live on the more than a degree site.

Today I'm also going to visit the Art & Design graduate show, Frame. Frame is an exhibition showcasing some of the work by our final year students and I'm quite excited to see what they've produced! The show will be running in the Alexon building until the 15 June so, if you haven't already, why not check it out?

Over the last couple of weeks I've also spent some time focusing on our Postgraduate offering. At the end of this month, we'll be hosting a Postgraduate Open Day so I've been working on some information emails for our second and final year students to let them know about the event. I've also been working with our CRM team and the library team to get some digital signage put up on the plasma screens and LRC screens to further promote the event to our current students. 

And continuing with the PG theme, I've also been working on the PG prospectus for 2017. I've been liaising with various faculties and departments around the University to ensure that all of my sections are correct and up-to-date as well as proof reading copy and selecting images for the prospectus. I'm pretty sure I've said this before but it's coming along very nicely and I can't wait for you all to see it!

A love affair with Northampton is a journey into space? Really?

Back in the dark ages, Luton Borough Council and/or another well-meaning civic body (or bodies) ran something called Luton’s Looking Up. Lurid yellow t-shirts with a vaguely Breakfast TV, vaguely Acid
House logo were run off and worn by a few local lunatics and well-meaning friends of the town. That's what passed as social media in the late 1980s. As I recall - possibly incorrectly - no one knew what was going on and the campaign didn’t amount to much.

I’ve written before about Luton’s image problems, although it appears that at long last, there’s a real and serious set of exciting initiatives which will transform our loveable old environs into something which hopefully will still be loveable, but new and shiny too.

On our doorstep - proposed new ground for Luton Town FC

While work is nearing completion on our very own eight-storey ‘state of the art’ library, even more exciting, for many townsfolk, are the plans for Power Court, within a stone’s throw of our main town centre campus. Readers of this blog may recall my fondness for the mighty Luton Town, so it’s hard to put in words how exciting the prospect of the proposed stadium is. We will rise again - by beating Arsenal in the 1988 League Cup, we gave Gooners like Nick Hornby plenty to moan about long before their perennial navel gazing and dreary irritation about always finishing fourth set in under current manager Arnold Fenders.

Last known happy Arsenal fan

Enough about football. Again. The Power Court development also includes restaurants and commercial enterprises, but most significantly, an 1,800 capacity music venue. This, again, is ludicrously good news for a town which, in addition to our very own Student Union, has always been well served by small venues like The Edge, The Four Horseshoes, The George, The Castle, the Hat Factory or the jewel in crown on the town’s live music scene, The Bear Club. When it comes to national acts, Luton has, up until now, had to rely on nearby venues like the St Albans Arena or the Bedford Corn Exchange – a venue of the size proposed will hopefully attract some pretty significant touring acts. Not that either St Albans or Bedford are easily reached on Thameslink.

And that’s not all Luton town watchers – light rail to the airport, the busway, bridge installations, a new shop called Smiggle and new doughnut shops in The Mall….. there’s so much going on, it’s hard to keep up. Luckily, the excellent Luton Developments on both Facebook and Twitter deliver regular updates on what’s going on in the town, building-wise.

Looking back, the Luton’s Looking Up campaign didn’t do any harm. This may have been because it didn’t leave a legacy. Unlike Northampton, whose musical invocations of a new Eden in middle England only 60 miles by road or rail from London is not only huge fun, but also ridiculous; anyone who knows their local history knows that the Garden of Eden was in Bedford.

Enjoy the Northampton song? The A-side is even more bonkers…….

We're feeling simply the Beds. with another award accolade

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager

After spending a week in sunny Las Vegas, USA, it's back to the not so sunny Luton, and a mountain of emails and campaign work to catch up on.

Another accolade to add to
the marketing shelf

Whilst ploughing through the hundreds of emails (yes really, and I was only gone for a week!) I happened to stumble across one particular email which caught my attention - from UKBA - the UK Blog Awards.

A while back, Andy our Market Research Manager and I decided on a bit of a whim to enter this here blog for an award, to see how we fared amongst the sector and our fellow marketing peers and HE professionals. I was pretty happy to see that whilst we didn't secure the big win, we did receive a 'Highly Commended' recognition from the judges.

It was great to see that we'd made the short-list in the first place as it was very competitive. There were 2,000 entries submitted for the award, and 79,000 public votes were cast resulting in our Marketing Blog beating off stiff competition to make it into the top ten short list. So we're very pleased with the result and to make it that far, considering our humble blogging beginnings.

UKBA sent us an email notifying us of the big result:

"Congratulations on being awarded highly commended at the UK Blog Awards. The judges assessed your Blog against a rigorous criteria of: Design, Style, Content, Marketing, and Usability which was then assessed against five sub-criteria’s. Some of our judges have said that the criteria is the most intense that they have critiqued against. Therefore, you should be super proud of your highly commended blog achievement!" - And indeed we are!

So, a big thank you to everyone who voted to help us secure the short-list, and we'll be sure to continue to share our marketing updates and insight and to build on the good work here, ready for UKBA 2017, next year!

A varied few weeks

Over the last week or so I’ve been away from my desk more than usual; helping with photoshoots and filming, and attending media presentations. The last few weeks and been super busy and really varied, from the more creative aspects (photoshoots) to the less creative (proofreading publications). But that’s what I enjoy about marketing, it can be so varied and it keeps you on your toes!

As Sara mentioned last week, we’ve had three days of photoshoots for our clearing and annual campaign. They were hectic but exciting, and we’ve just received the images from the photographer. We’ve been looking through all of the images and choosing the best ones to take forward for our campaign, taking into consideration the different platforms they will be used for. It’s now over to the photographer to work more of his magic and edit the selected pictures. We’re hoping to get these next week so our designers can start working on the visuals and we can start working on the microsite.  

I’ve also been filming student videos for a forthcoming e-zine edition – and as the weather has been so nice, I even took the opportunity to do the filming outside which was great! So I’ll be editing these over the coming weeks as a start to put my e-zines together.

There are also a few publications I’m currently working on:

1. The PG 2017 prospectus – this is at first proof stage, so I’ve been proofing my allocated sections; five sections down, one to go…  

2. The UCAS visitor guide – we’re hosting a UCAS Exhibition in June at our Bedford campus for the third year running and I’m working on the main guide. This is at final proof stage and I’m expecting to send it to print on Tuesday

3. Welcome 2017 guide – each year we produce a welcome guide that we send out to all of our applicants following results day. This gives an overview ahead of students starting with us – how to register as a Beds student online, social events taking place in the first week, finance, student support, campus maps and lots more! I briefed this in to the designer yesterday and first proofs are due wc 16 May

Our UCAS Exhibition guide

We’re also looking ahead to the 2017 cycle – I sent the first enquirer edition of our B4Beds e-zine last month, and we’ve got some email communications going out over the next month or so. This is the part of the year when it can often get confusing as we’re working on the 2016 cycle and the 2017 cycle at the same time. All in a day’s work! 

Speak soon,

K