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Student recruitment strategies in higher education: promoting excellence and diversity?

Nicoline Frlich and Bjrn Stensaker
Norwegian Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU STEP), Oslo, Norway
Abstract
Purpose This paper seeks to analyse how excellence and diversity are addressed in student recruitment strategies, and how these strategies are developed in eight Norwegian higher education institutions. Design/methodology/approach The study utilises a theoretical perspective that asserts that strategy is developed through practice. The authors have combined document analysis with qualitative interviews to investigate the development of institutional student recruitment strategies, their characteristics and their links to the individual institutions prole and ambitions. Findings The study reveals that student recruitment strategies are often grounded in inherent institutional identities, while at the same time responding to external ideas about excellence and diversity. The study also nds that higher education institutions show signicant creativity in trying to adapt to these ideas and general trends, while at the same time maintaining their own characteristics and traditions. Findings suggest that student recruitment strategies are also used for accountability purposes. Given the importance of student recruitment, many higher education institutions attach surprisingly little importance to this issue. Research limitations/implications The study encompasses only a small number of institutions in a single country, limiting the possibility of generalising aspects of the prole and content of the student recruitment strategies. Nevertheless, the analysis indicates that the processes associated with the development of student recruitment strategies are quite similar, with more emphasis on specic quantitative analytical schemes and less emphasis on other ways of organising strategy development. Originality/value The paper reveals the importance of placing greater focus on the ways in which strategic processes are organised and identifying the potential for improving the creative organisation of the strategising process. Keywords Students, Higher education, Universities, Recruitment, Norway Paper type Research paper

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1. Introduction Higher education institutions (HEIs) throughout the world are facing multiple expectations as to how they should respond to a rapidly changing environment. Deregulation and increased competition within the public sector and between public and private providers are creating a more market-like environment, which inuences how universities and colleges prole themselves and compete for students (Gibbs, 2008). For HEIs in this situation, excellence and diversity are key issues for consideration when developing their institutional prole. The promotion of excellence is currently framed as a central strategy that will help HEIs to prosper in an increasingly open and competitive environment, primarily due to advantages HEIs will gain through knowledge transfer, high enrolment and prestige within the scientic community and among the public at large. The striving for

International Journal of Educational Management Vol. 24 No. 4, 2010 pp. 359-370 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0951-354X DOI 10.1108/09513541011045281

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excellence may, however, have unintended consequences. For example, there is the issue of whether and how the emphasis on excellence will affect diversity. Excellence and diversity may be mutually supportive, but they may have a more problematic relationship. In a market-like environment, HEIs may choose to identify their niche and highlight their difference and uniqueness, thereby avoiding competition (Barney, 1991). HEIs compete with one another in a number of areas, including funding, reputation, research grants and research output. They may also compete for students, especially talented ones. Student recruitment is essential to boosting excellence and enhancing diversity. Students represent potential future researchers. Graduates are not only holders of societys diversied body of knowledge, they are ambassadors of their alma mater as well, playing a crucial role in shaping an HEIs reputation. It is therefore becoming increasingly important to analyse the strategic processes associated with student recruitment. There is greater interest in strategy formulation within HEIs, which is leading to changes in the traditional governance and management structures of HEIs; there is also increasing focus on how research, teaching and learning are performed (Allen, 2003). There are few studies that focus on how HEIs develop their student recruitment strategies, particularly in a European context. Studies on student recruitment tend to focus on student behaviour and thinking: students choice of university (Ho and Hung, 2008); the information sources they use when making their choice (Bonnema and van der Waldt, 2008); and their loyalty to and degree of satisfaction with the institution where they are studying (Helgesen and Nesset, 2007). In one of the few studies on the strategy development process, Greenbank (2006) analyses the ways HEIs in the UK have tried to respond to national policy initiatives designed to widening broaden participation in higher education. In general, the term strategy appears to be used primarily in the contexts of research (Hazelkorn, 2005; Kyvik, 2008) and teaching and learning (Checkoway, 2001; Gibbs et al., 2000; Heikkila and Lonka, 2006; Ho et al., 2001; Kaldeway and Korthagen, 1995; Leathwood and Phillips, 2000; Loyens et al., 2007). This article explores how the recruitment strategies at a number of Norwegian HEIs[1] address issues of excellence and diversity. In Europe, implementation of the Bologna process and the Lisbon agenda has given rise to questions about how harmonisation, diversity and excellence may be tied together. Within national systems, excellence may be pursued by enhancing stratication at the national level or by promoting internal differentiation at the level of the HEI. Norway has, in accordance with the Bologna declaration, put into place a new degree structure (three-year Bachelors degree and two-year Masters degree). This new structure is a component of a higher education reform implemented in Norway (the Quality Reform), which has increased institutional autonomy, strengthened HEIs strategic capacity and introduced performance-based funding that rewards HEIs for the number of credits and graduates produced. The concepts of strategy and excellence in student recruitment may be considered novel, even radical, in the context of Norwegian higher education. Traditionally, strategic planning has been met with resistance and scepticism within the sector (Frlich, 2005). In student recruitment, primary emphasis has been placed on universal access rather than excellence and attracting talented students (Aamodt and Kyvik, 2005). In light of the implementation of the Quality Reform, this situation may change, or, at least, there may be more opinions voiced concerning the need to promote both

strategy and excellence. Diversity has been given higher priority in Norwegian higher education, particularly gender diversity (Aamodt and Kyvik, 2005). The objective of this article is to analyse the following questions: (1) What characterises the student recruitment strategies of Norwegian HEIs? To what extent are excellence and diversity emphasised in the strategies developed? (2) What factors and processes have inuenced the strategic process? (3) To what extent are strategies aimed at changing the organisational identity of an institution? 2. Theoretical perspectives on strategising 2.1 Developments in theories on strategy The eld of organisational strategy is multifaceted, consisting of a variety of approaches, models and concepts. To simplify matters, the eld may be divided into two basic perspectives (see also Tsoukas and Knudsen, 2000). According to the rst perspective, strategy is contextually driven: the environment determines the strategic options of a given organisation. Several authors have contributed here, including Porter (1979), who has advanced theories on competitive advantage and the ways an organisation may best position itself in a market. According to the second perspective, strategy is dependent on the intrinsic characteristics of a given organisation. Authors that have contributed here include Barney (1991), who has articulated resource-based theories on organisation, and Prahalad and Hamel (1990), who have offered thoughts on core competencies of an organisation. Recent developments within the eld of strategy have focused primarily on the challenges that arise when markets become hypercompetitive, more complex or undergo rapid change, e.g. in more knowledge-intensive industries. Creating long-term strategies in these types of situations may imply high risk. Consequently, according to Autio et al. (2000), strategy should be made more indirect, for example, by giving greater priority to developing the learning capacity of an organisation. Along the same lines, chaos theory and ecosystem theory have generated suggestions for addressing the uncertainty, risks and ad-hoc developments facing organisations, by, for example, improving the capabilities for local self-organisation and adjustment in sub-units, departments and divisions (Levinthal and Warglien, 1999). Another stream of research emphasises the gap between strategy as plans, objectives and targets, and the manner in which these are implemented or linked to the daily life of an organisation (Whittington, 2003; Jarzabkowski, 2005; Johnson et al., 2007). These authors view strategy as a process or practice. Their main argument is that formal strategies will and must change apace with changes in the environment and the organisation, and that strategy is a consequence of the strategising process. 2.2 Strategising as sensemaking This stream of research is highly relevant in the higher education setting, which has traditionally been characterised by piecemeal and fragmented organisational change, weak decision-making structures and complex social and power structures (Clark, 1983), rather than by strategic processes emphasising hierarchy, rationality and formal structure. Weick (1995) coined the concept of sensemaking, which blurs the classical

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distinction between strategy as externally driven and strategy as internally driven. In sensemaking, the boundaries between the outside world and the realities of the organisation blend together in a seamless fashion. The sensemaking perspective addresses the social psychological level of HEIs (Scott and Davis, 2007) and emphasises characteristics specic to these organisations, such as complexity and embedded practice. Employing this perspective to analyse strategy formulation entails a close examination of two dimensions of the strategy process. Sensemaking assumes that all strategy processes are inuenced by history and traditions, exhibiting a form of historical path-dependency. According to Weick, sense is not something that may be extracted solely from external events. Sensemaking and identity are strongly related and historically shaped. Identity is constructed on the basis of historical patterns and events that shape who we think we are and our role in a given social context. Sensemaking is also a retrospective process in which actors make sense of what has been accomplished once the result of an action is clear (Weick, 1995, p. 30). In other words, meaning is not attached to one experience that has been singled out; rather it arises from the attention directed toward the experience (Weick, 1995, p. 26). Enactment is also central to the sensemaking perspective. Enactment refers to the process by which members of the organisation interact to construct a picture of the organisational environment in which a strategy is to be implemented. Weick (1995, p. 28) asserts that actors do not need more information when they are overwhelmed by equivocality; rather, they need values, priorities and clarity about preferences to help them to determine what matters. Sensemaking may be said to be enactive of sensible environments. Enactment means that individuals construct all or parts of a given environment (Weick, 1995, p. 30). It is through the combination of these two dimensions that the sensemaking process takes place. In this process, the actors not only develop a common understanding, they also agree on a response selected among several alternatives. Path-dependency lends the sensemaking process an element of stability and continuity, while enactment is a more dynamic element, which the environment or important input factors are changing. The sensemaking perspective is best treated as a set of heuristics rather than as an algorithm. It is essential to look at how the actors construct what they construct (i.e. sensible events), why they do so and to what effect. Reality is seen as an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people make retrospective sense of the situations in which they nd themselves and their creations. Sensemaking is interactive: individuals make sense of things by imposing what they believe on the world that they see. Sense is not exact. Sensemaking is about accounts that are socially acceptable and credible (Weick, 1995, p. 61). Weick denes seven characteristics of sensemaking. According to him, sensemaking is grounded in identity construction, is retrospective, is enactive of sensible environments, is social, is an ongoing process, is focused on and by extracted cues, and is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy (Weick, 1995, p. 17). 2.3 The promise and limitations of a strategy-as-practice perspective A strategy-as-practice perspective may be difcult to differentiate from other processes within a given organisation ( Johnson et al., 2007), particularly due to the fact that it links the macro- and micro-levels in organisations. In this article, we have

restricted ourselves to studying the product (i.e. student recruitment strategy) resulting from this process, as well as the key events and characteristics of the process. The dependent variable here is not organisational change as such, but the intentions and ambitions related to change. In this respect we are employing a more traditional perspective on strategy, which is dened as the determination of an organisations basic long-term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for achieving these goals (Chandler, 1962, p. 13). We explore how goals and objectives are determined. Ideally, strategy describes the choices an organisation makes about which markets or clients to serve, the distinct way it seeks to provide its outputs, the tactics it employs and the output goals it sets for itself (Scott and Davis, 2007, p. 21). We look at the institutions decision-making processes regarding which markets and clients (students) to serve, and examine these processes in relation to organisational identity and path-dependency. We are fully aware of the limitations of our study. We do not claim that it will provide a complete picture of all the sensemaking processes involved in strategy formulation. Rather, we apply the sensemaking framework as an analytical tool to gain a deeper understanding of the strategy formulation process, studying in particular how strategies have been developed in relation to the (constructed) environments and the organisations identity, and identifying the knowledge base on which the recruitment strategies are founded. Our research does not involve clear-cut denitions and measures of whether and how excellence and diversity are treated in the formulation of strategy. Our research design is inductive, and we explore how the HEIs strategies address excellence and diversity. 3. Methodology The empirical basis of this paper consists of case studies of eight Norwegian HEIs: four universities and four university colleges[2]. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, 25 in-depth interviews were conducted with the management and senior ofcers in charge of student recruitment[3]. The interviews were semi-structured, with a duration of 30-60 minutes. They were recorded and transcribed. Strategy documents were compiled and analysed according to the topics of the interview guide. Given our assumption that the history, location and environment of an HEI are important to the identity of that institution and to determining the strategic choices available, we selected a broad range of universities. The University of Oslo is an old and diverse institution with a national prole, while the universities of Bergen and Troms are city-based institutions that play an important role in their respective regions. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has a specialised, national prole in science and technology. Among the university colleges, we selected three mid-size university colleges located in different regions (Vestfold, Hedmark and Lillehammer), as well as the countrys largest city-based college (Oslo). All the university colleges have a vocational and professional prole, offering programmes in teacher training, social work, nursing, engineering, etc. 4. Empirical ndings 4.1 Characteristics of student recruitment strategies In general, the scope and target groups of the student recruitment strategies of the universities and university colleges vary considerably. All the strategies place

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signicant emphasis on excellence and diversity, although these are dened in substantially different ways. A comparison of the recruitment strategies with the organisational identity and prole of these institutions reveals a relatively high degree of congruence. The recruitment strategy of the University of Oslo addresses the issue of excellence through its ambitions of recruiting the best students. According to informants, there is a general belief that the (elite) position of the university in the Norwegian higher education landscape should be reected in its proling, and that it is more important to remind students about the university than to try to convince them to apply. This is exemplied, according to one respondent, in the (understated) slogan, We offer knowledge! The recruitment strategy emphasises the academic quality of the educational offerings and the academic prole of the university. The University of Oslos national prole, status and selectiveness are underlined by the assumption that potential students ought to acknowledge the academic quality of the university and adjust themselves to the universitys standards rather than the other way around. The University of Bergen has long had ambitions of being a highly international institution, and excellence is dened accordingly. Its recruitment strategy is heavily inuenced by the belief that international student recruitment promotes excellence. NTNU is the leading national technical university, and its student recruitment strategy is relatively similar to the University of Oslos. Its aim is to attract the most talented students from all over the country a reection of the existing national and historical prole of the institution. Unlike the University of Bergen, NTNU does not attach great importance to attracting international students (although these students do nd their way to the university). The University of Troms, located in Northern Norway, is the smallest of the four universities. Its recruitment strategy emphasises excellence as well, but here it is associated with being small, different, and exotic. Excellence is understood as a characteristic inherent to the location of the university, as well as a characteristic arising from a high teacher-student ratio (which also partly reects the relative size of the university). The assumption is that a relatively high number of teachers per student promotes very favourable learning conditions. The main aim of the universitys recruitment strategy, however, is to increase the total number of students, including international students. It appears that drawing a larger number of students is more important than maintaining a good teacher-student ratio. A rather different picture emerges with regard to the university colleges. In general, excellence is not a key component of their recruitment strategies, with the exception of Oslo University College, which underlines its prole as the leading national institution for professional studies:
To us an excellent upper secondary school certicate is not enough; the students have to be motivated.

The rest of the university colleges place much greater weight on attracting more students. When excellence is addressed, it is mainly in conjunction with a description of the institution as the best in its region. The student recruitment strategies of the universities and university colleges are very similar with regard to diversity, as they all address two aspects of diversity. Ensuring adequate gender diversity is a priority, and several institutions have launched special initiatives to recruit female students to studies in science and

technology, e.g. NTNUs Girls and computers initiative. The institutions aim to improve ethnic diversity as well. Attracting students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds is a prominent component of some recruitment strategies. None of the strategies address the socio-economic aspect (i.e. students socio-economic background). The recruitment strategies of the University of Oslo and NTNU emphasise the importance of the geographical distribution of students, but this is primarily related to excellence not diversity. 4.2 Important factors, elements and processes in the strategic process As the discussion above reveals, the history and organisational identity of the institution play a very important role in framing the institutions student recruitment strategies. Institutions with a national prole mainly adopt strategies aimed at supporting and maintaining their position. Institutions with other organisational identities nd ways to link their prole to excellence and quality, by, for example, highlighting their distinctiveness or international ambitions. It has become more important to look at the ways in which institutions perceive their environments in relation to competition, market and internationalisation. All the institutions studied report that they nd themselves in an increasingly competitive student market since the implementation of the quality reform. In their recruitment strategies, the international student market is identied as a main target group, although this is not highly evident in the ways the strategies are employed. The universities generally have consistent practices and focus in their recruitment activities, using, for example, standardised routines for identifying key student characteristics, mapping the geographical areas where students come from and analysing students motives. Oslo University College is engaged in one of the most comprehensive strategy efforts, which is based on a thorough annual analysis of reports on study progress, drop-out, and the like. The college even asserts that the development of its recruitment strategy is research-based. Although not all the institutions are involved in such a broad-based effort, interviewees reveal that analyses of new students provide important information for formulating student recruitment strategy, and may lend stability to the strategising process. Mapping of existing students highlights more incremental and long-term developments rather than more comprehensive and dramatic changes due to the fact that the student bodys key characteristics remain relatively stable from one year to the next. Traditional ways of identifying the knowledge used to inform the strategic process still dominate the strategising process, and internationalisation, market and competition are to some extent simply trendy catchwords. There seems to be a gap between policy ambitions and external expectations, on the one hand, and the rather technical process of developing strategies in practice, on the other. The institutions located in more remote areas view internationalisation as essential to recruiting a sufcient number of students. The recruitment strategy of the University of Troms has become progressively more market-oriented since the implementation of the quality reform. The reform emphasises the importance of competition among institutions, and the new performance-based funding system has forced the university to recruit students who have a good chance of graduating on time. Decreasing birth rates in Northern Norway and increasing birth rates in the south also inuence the universitys recruitment strategy, as it has traditionally experienced

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problems in recruiting students from other parts of the country (see Dahl and Stensaker, 1999). It is therefore natural for the university to focus on the international dimension. The university is also developing study programmes that are unique in Norway. It recently launched a new programme in aviation, and there are plans to establish the rst business school within a university setting in Norway. In the effort to respond to the new environment it is facing, the university recently signed a merger agreement with Troms University College. Improving student recruitment and creating larger, more cost-effective study programmes are among the central arguments for the merger. Finnmark University College, located in the same part of the country, nds itself in an almost identical situation as the University of Troms with regard to student recruitment. Located in a sparsely populated region, the college was forced to establish a group dedicated to student recruitment a decade ago. Members of the group include representatives from the academic staff with competence in marketing and branding. As a result, the prole strongly corresponds to educational demand, especially in relation to regional businesses. The college quickly drops educational programmes with few or a decreasing number of applicants, and, like the University of Troms, it is in the process of developing programmes for international students. Other university colleges that experience problems attracting a sufcient number of students have been attempting to avoid competition by entering into agreements with neighbouring colleges. Hedmark University College and Lillehammer University College have been actively trying to divide the student market by deciding in cooperation which courses of study to offer. This cooperation may be regarded as a form of constructed diversity in which two similar vocational and professional colleges negotiate with one another to create distinct institutional proles. The research activities and research prole of many institutions, both universities and university colleges alike, play a much more important role in framing student recruitment strategy than the institutions themselves seem to acknowledge. At Vestfold University College, for example, research priorities are important for resource distribution, and the potential for developing Masters and doctoral studies is a key criterion when prioritising specic research areas. At the University of Bergen and NTNU, high-level research is also seen as an essential component of student recruitment. This may be due in part to Norways funding system for higher education, in which the long-term success of comprehensive research initiatives is dependent on resources from educational funding. 4.3 Strategies for change or continuity? Historically, in Norway, student choices and preferences have heavily inuenced the development of HEIs educational proles (Aamodt and Kyvik, 2005). As mentioned above, all the HEIs studied analyse developments in the number of applicants, examining which programmes are popular and which students apply to the specic institutions. As a consequence of the Quality Reform, which has given university colleges the opportunity to upgrade to university status, we are seeing considerable tendencies of institutional drift in the Norwegian higher education system (Michelsen and Aamodt, 2007). A number of new Masters and doctoral programmes have been developed with the aim of raising an institutions research prole, but these have had limited success in terms of student recruitment (Michelsen and Aamodt, 2007).

After the initial wave of creating new study programmes, the institutions we studied are now in the process of reviewing their education prole, particularly the number of programmes offered but also the programmes degree of academic specialisation. There are general trends toward reducing specialisation at the undergraduate level while increasing it at the Masters level and toward cutting the number of programmes offered. Although this may be interpreted as a process leading to change within the institutions and in their proles, it may also represent a step backward in relation to the quality reform. As part of the implementation of the reform, a number of inter- and multidisciplinary programmes were developed (Michelsen and Aamodt, 2007). Although we only have evidence from the institutions we studied, there are indications that reductions in the number of programmes and the degree of specialisation represent a return to a more disciplinary-oriented programme portfolio especially at the universities. With regard to the importance of the existing organisational identity for student recruitment strategies at the universities and university colleges, it is apparent that these strategies are intended to strengthen the existing institutional prole rather than change it. The only exceptions here are the institutions located in more remote areas, which have been forced to implement more drastic measures to address the problem of inadequate student recruitment. 5. Conclusions All the Norwegian HEIs we studied address the issues of excellence and diversity in their student recruitment strategies. There is, however, no consensus on how to dene excellence. Nevertheless, all the institutions appear to be attempting to establish a link between excellence and their organisational identity. They assert alternatively that excellence is a consequence of their research prole and academic quality, or of internationalisation; or that excellence is promoted by their unique history and location, or quantitative measures, such as a favourable teacher/student ratio. There is greater consensus on how to dene diversity, which usually only refers to gender and multicultural diversity. Very few institutions attempt to couple excellence and diversity. If they do, the argument is that diversity triggers excellence. In general, student recruitment strategies are seldom abstract or visionary. They are mostly rooted in the organisational identity of the institution, or heavily inuenced by geographical location (Frlich et al., 2008). This is supported by studies in the UK on how HEIs have responded to government initiatives on widening participation in education (Greenbank, 2006). Moreover, student recruitment strategies are often based on rather technical and quantitative analyses of existing or newly recruited students and their characteristics. From a strategy-as-practice perspective, this makes sense, as it appears that practice inuences strategy, and not the other way around. It is interesting to note that few of the institutions studied have investigated why students did not choose their institution, thereby missing out on important information from potentially attractive student groups. One may, however, interpret the strong link between the research ambitions of a number of the institutions and their study programme portfolio as an attempt to break this pattern. These institutions have only enjoyed moderate success with this strategy, which is perhaps a sign that changing an educational prole is a challenging, long-term task.

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We believe that strategy as sensemaking is a promising theoretical perspective, as it offers explanations of both stability and change. Our ndings reveal that the enactment, selection and retainment parts of strategy formulation are more prominent than the denition of unambiguous goals and the design of efcient measures and actions to full them. This perspective is well suited to application in the higher education setting, as it directs attention toward the micro foundation of HEIs strategy processes, i.e. strategising as an interaction between institutional identity and the specic institutional environments. Our ndings show that stability is key characteristic of the institutions organisational identities and their conceptions of how their students should be. It appears that in most normal situations the knowledge base for strategic thinking regarding student recruitment is fairly limited. Many institutions respond to concepts such as competition or market by increasing marketing and advertising activities. Raising the institutional prole is often interpreted as being synonymous with spreading information about the institution, rather than developing a more unique or distinct educational prole. Based on our data, it seems that only when institutions face more dramatic situations does the enactment process change, focusing on other factors than those usually associated with the strategic process. Although excellence and diversity clearly have a place on the student recruitment agenda in Norway, our study indicates that Norwegian HEIs place relatively little emphasis on student recruitment as means of promoting excellence and diversity. Excellence is dened in a variety of ways, and we nd a considerable gap between the numerous ambitious measures in the strategies we have analysed and the manner in which they are put into practice. The term has meaning for certain institutions in our sample, but is a minor concern for institutions facing pressing challenges. Given this situation, there is a risk that excellence may become yet another buzzword in higher education.
Notes 1. In higher education, different terms are often used to describe student recruitment strategies. In some countries, the term enrolment is used, while in others admission policies is the preferred term. In this paper, student recruitment covers both these terms. 2. University of Oslo, University of Bergen, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), University of Troms, Vestfold University College, Hedmark University College, Finnmark University College and Oslo University College. 3. Elisabeth Hovdhaugen conducted the interviews at the University of Oslo, University of Bergen and NTNU. Synnve Brandt conducted the interviews at Oslo University College and Finnmark University College; see also Frlich et al. (2008). References Aamodt, P.O. and Kyvik, S. (2005), Access to higher education in the Nordic countries, in Tapper, T. and Palfreyman, D. (Eds), Understanding Mass Higher Education: Comparative Perspectives on Access, Routledge, London. Allen, D.K. (2003), Organisational climate and strategic change in higher education. Organisational insecurity, Higher Education, Vol. 46 No. 1, pp. 61-2. Autio, E., Sapienza, H.J. and Ameida, J.G. (2000), Effects of age at entry, knowledge intensity and imitability on organisational growth, Organization Science, Vol. 43 No. 5, pp. 909-24.

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