How “loyal” are people to their college or university?

We LOVE our alma mater, right?! We bleed gold & blue (or crimson & silver, or).

But what does “brand loyalty” look like for colleges & universities? 

Maybe it’s the wrong concept for education, but students are acting more & more like “consumers” of higher ed. And there are more options: over 4,000 C&Us in the USA, plus all the new certificates and boot camps and alt programs.

So are people “loyal” to their college?

In one emphatic, important, and high-dollar-value way, NO: 4 out of 5 people who graduate college switch schools for their next degree.

Yep: over 80% of people don’t get their PhD or MD or JD or whatnot from the same place they got their BA or BS.

Soooo we might LOVE our undergrad school, but we clearly have other priorities or imperatives when it comes to more degrees.

Further, over 1 in 3 undergrads transfer schools during undergrad. So even just there, there’s a fair bit of “brand switching”. 

And finally, if you use the household as a unit of measure (which most CPG panel data does), you find that in only 1 in 5 homes do all the kids go to the same school. 

All this was true for me: my BA was at Oberlin; my PhD was at UNM. And only 1 of my 4 siblings went to either of those places. (Bridget went to UNM for her MS.)

Is “brand loyalty” the right lens for education? Maybe; maybe not. But it’s a really compelling (and often eye-opening) thought that the norm in education is to switch schools. (Hmmm, sounds familiar…)

And as usual, I hate the word “loyalty” for brands: it smashes up the emotional & the behavioral in confusing, annoying, misleading & unhelpful ways. 

Some LESSONS:

🍊 Look at the data to see what normal brand switching is like in your category.

🍊Don’t expect 100% loyalty (not even to colleges).

🍊 Learn about better brand metrics than “loyalty” (bleccch).