What Is in a Name? The Impact of Strategic Name Change on Student Enrollment in Colleges and Universities

Abstract

Many colleges and universities in the United States have resorted to using proven business marketing strategies to better market themselves. The practice of changing a firm's name to send a signal and to broaden consumer appeal is one such strategy. It is an expensive and controversial strategy when used by schools, but is it also effective? We hypothesize that an effective name change strategy will positively impact a school's enrollment. Using the time series quasi design approach, we analyzed the pre-event and post-event incremental change in enrollment on a sample 140 colleges and universities. We used a five-year pre-event and a five-year post-event analysis period. The results show that, on average, the strategic name change has no significant impact on the post-event enrollment patterns. The t-value is 1.61. A further analysis of the incremental enrollment patterns of the individual schools, shows that only 10 (about 7%) of the sample experienced significant incremental change in post-event enrollments (significance level of 5%, a two-tailed test). Hence, college administrators who are contemplating using the strategy as a marketing tool to boost declining enrollments are advised to proceed with extreme caution.

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