The Slick Push for Business, Law Students

With glitzy campaigns that shower candidates with brochures, e-mail and sales pitches on CD-ROM, business and law schools are competing harder than ever for students.

Among the strategies attracting attention is a program at Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, which for the second year this spring offered to fly every admitted student to the Bay Area campus for a visit. As a result, the rate at which top students accepted admission offers from the school this year is up, officials say.

Competition for top graduate students in law and business has accelerated over the last decade. Typical is the campaign waged by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where prospective students receive a series of e-mails, something of a slide show over the Internet, complete with music and a cheering crowd. “It’s hokey, but it seems to work for us,” Associate Dean Dan Nagy said.

“What was a more gentle professional approach has become a more aggressive, competitive approach,” said Robert Saltzman, associate dean of USC’s law school.

In stepping up recruitment efforts, many schools have had to overcome the traditional reluctance of scholars to sell themselves, said Joanne Telerico, associate dean of Chapman University School of Law in Orange. “There’s always a tension [between] a pure business approach and the notion we’re the Academy,” she said.

Perhaps the most important factor, deans say, is the magazine ratings game. With annual rankings by U.S. News and World Report and others, parents and students can quickly compare schools.

“Anyone who says the rankings haven’t affected things is giving you a bunch of malarkey,” Nagy said.

While many undergraduate and graduate professional schools such as medicine and engineering also compete for students, their efforts do not approach the intensity of business and law, experts say.

Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of Cornell’s Higher Education Research Institute, said some schools look at these recruiting efforts as an investment. The better the students, the more successful they will be after graduation--and the more money they will donate to the school later in life. “My sense is a lot of concern of the business and law schools is concern about the long-run financial revenue that will come to the institution,” Ehrenberg said.

Recruiting is most intense a notch below the top-tier schools, such as Yale, Harvard and Stanford, said John Kraft, dean of the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida and president of the Assn. to Advance College Schools of Business, which accredits such schools.

“I think the reason for that is these schools aren’t in the traditional list,” said Otis Baskin, former dean of Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School. “They aren’t Harvard or Wharton, but they’re excellent schools competing to get the attention of these top prospects.”

Law schools have long paid travel expenses for a few prospective students who are especially desirable or who can’t afford to visit. Often those efforts are directed at minority students or those atop the heap academically.

But UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall appears to be the only law school in the country offering to help subsidize visits for everyone it admits, hoping a glimpse of the campus and the Bay Area will convince them that it is the place to spend three years in law school. The subsidy covers air fare but not hotels or meals.

Boalt, ranked seventh in the nation in the latest U.S. News poll on law schools, received about 7,000 applications this year. It accepts about 800 students for its 270 slots, and nearly all have offers from other law schools. So Boalt administrators, like those at other schools, must persuade those students to turn down Stanford, UCLA, Georgetown and other rivals.

Boalt spent $31,000 in public funds on its fly-in program this second year, and 123 students took Boalt’s offer. Edward Tom, Boalt’s director of admissions, said enrollment among admitted students is up from 31% in 1999 to 35% this year, much of which he attributes to the visits.

“We’ve found it’s the best way to recruit anybody that’s been admitted,” Tom said. “We’re in sort of a war with the other top schools.... For an applicant admitted to us and Chicago and Harvard but who had never been to the Bay Area, we believe if we can physically get them here, we have 90% of the battle won.”

Many law deans were astonished by Boalt’s fly-in program but agreed that visits are the top recruitment tool.

Duke University School of Law in North Carolina annually flies in the 25 or so students it wants most--those it offers full scholarships, much like other schools. “If [Berkeley’s program] is successful, other law schools will think about it,” said Dennis Shields, the school’s associate dean of admissions and financial aid.

Others are considering it. UC Davis will probably start a similar program next year, admissions director Sharon Pinkney said, and Chapman University’s fledgling law school may follow suit, mostly with East Coast applicants.

Like Boalt’s fly-in program, much of the recruiting comes after acceptance letters have gone out and students are deciding where to go. “That’s when we do a pretty good full-court press to make them see the light,” said Nagy of the Duke business school.

Duke sends its admitted students flash e-mails, first a congratulatory message, then a series on events at the school, from the serious to the corny. “It’s Marketing 101, but it seems to work for us,” Nagy said. Applications are up, and so is enrollment.

Many law schools now pay to promote themselves to professionals and academics who influence the magazine rankings. Neil Cogan, dean of the Whittier College of Law in Costa Mesa, said the number of deans who show up at American Bar Assn. meetings has more than doubled in 15 years, all touting their programs.

Deans say they can’t possibly know enough about the 182 accredited law schools that magazines ask them to rank. So many schools spend up to $200,000 a year on brochures and other public relations tools.

“We definitely promote ourselves,” said Randolph Westerfield, dean of USC’s Marshall School of Business. “We want to tell our story of scholarship and research.”

On the receiving end are those such as John Feerick, dean of Fordham Law School in New York, who said, “I could fill a room in a library every year based on all the communications that come in.”