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Photo by Jim Craven Southern Oregon University student Wendi Dimock succumbs to the sun Friday at Stevenson Union on campus. SOU hopes to fill even more seats with a hip advertising campaign. SOU learns a new art School launches ad campaign to compete for its share of students By JOHN DARLING ASHLAND -- The free ride is over. Southern Oregon University, once content with recruiting high school seniors at college fairs and sending out catalogs, now finds itself forced to play catchup in the wake of an all-out marketing blitz by other universities. Turn on the campus-based Jefferson Public Radio and you'll hear ads luring young minds -- and dollars -- to the University of Oregon. And Western Oregon University, whose campus is in Monmouth, advertises for students in Southern Oregon newspapers. Meanwhile, SOU is looking at a 2.1 percent enrollment drop from last year. The decline, said university Admissions Director Al Blaszak, can be laid at the feet of competition within the state university system as well as the presence of Rogue Community College, which began offering two years of college at lower prices in Jackson County last year. Driving the competition is a change in how state universities are funded, university President Steve Reno said. Enrollment now drives the higher education system. Starting July 1, universities keep their tuition revenues, rather than sending them to the chancellor of the higher education system for reallocation. Under the old system, schools were protected from enrollment dips and could get increased funding. Now, the only way to drive up revenue is attract and keep students. "What it means is the gloves are off," said Ron Bolstad, vice president for administration and finance. "When I started here in the early '80s, it was understood that colleges don't advertise, although I never saw it written anywhere. I haven't heard that anytime in the '90s." What it also means is things are about to change at SOU. While loath to go into competition with sister universities for a limited pool of students, Reno is heading up a broad counterassault, set for a midyear launch. The school has hired Funk & Associates, a Eugene marketing agency, to produce ads to pepper community college newspapers from Monterey, Calif., to Portland. And the school has retained the Ulum Group, also of Eugene, to pore over the school's minimal marketing efforts and unify them under a powerful director of marketing. That person, expected to be hired by July, will be paid $40,000 to $45,000 per year. That person's mission: get students at all costs, but without compromising academic standards or the school's attention to students. "Almost all universities have chosen to economize by paying grad students rather than professors to teach many classes," Reno said. "We haven't and won't. People know that." The new flock of SOU ads show whimsical, clip art-enhanced students snowboarding, bird-watching and cradling a football and laptop computer. One, showing a geology professor named Robert rappelling while holding a kayak paddle, lists his favorite class ("Geology of the Wild Rogue River. And the 5-day rafting field trip") what he likes best about SOU ("Working closely with all my students, not just at the graduate level") and what he likes best about Ashland ("The community, the friendly people and carefree atmosphere''). The message: We've got community, we value your individuality and we've got a killer education for you. In addition to community college newspapers, SOU is planning ads on radio and on buses in the Portland area, which cost $500 a month for 25 buses, said school Publications Director Jim Brown. The university will also target high schools with direct mail and offer student-parent visitation days. "Until recently, we didn't have a specific marketing function to do advertising," Brown said. "The focus was on direct mail and sending out an initial contact piece or catalog when they (students) inquired." The shift to proactive marketing, Reno said, was the main topic in meetings he had this week with staff, faculty, and in Salem, with legislators and higher education officials. "With Measure 5 (property tax limitation measure) Oregon has lost students to other states," Reno said. "It may be naive of me, but I want all Oregon universities to work together to increase the number of Oregon high school seniors who stay in the state so the total pool is larger." The marketing wars took a more vicious turn this month when the University of Oregon announced it would offer $1,000 scholarships to any applicants with at least a 3.6 grade-point average and $2,000 for those with straight A's. "We will continue to award scholarships very thoughtfully," Reno said. "We look at the GPA and the (test) scores, and we also look at what the students say about themselves and what their teachers say about them. We don't just want to recruit, we want to retain." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA