More college branding

[leggman01]

While reading through the Canisius College branding thread, I saw this banner ad, which I thought was interesting....

the ad is 100% accurate in my case, but I'm not feeling this as a campaign, particularly because this does not appear to be anything like the canisius "don't go to college..." tagline, which gives you some interesting alternatives like "just to read text books" which support their "go exploring" message - when i clicked on the banner ad there was no catchy completion of the tag line...in fact, it was pretty much just a request form

so unc has purchased banner ads which tell students up front they probably won't be admitted...it doesn't seem to me that such a highly selective graduate program needs to resort to "tricking" people to click the ad...

your thoughts?

[dfwabel]

Their idea, since it is an online MBA, is that many other online competitors, specifically for profit online colleges will accept anyone. UNC-CH and Indiana are the only two Top 20 MBA programs with such online MBA degree programs which mirror their on-campus program and that add is to attract better talent than other online programs as well as to avoid the perception which online MBA programs currently have.

Read the story on UNC-CH from Fortune.

While online MBA degrees have been proliferating like daisies in an open field in recent years, Kenan-Flagler's program is significantly different because it is the first time a top 20 school has put together an online effort with the publicly stated goal of making it the world's best MBA program delivered over the Internet.

UNC's partner, 2tor Inc., a startup with over $68 million in venture funding, is investing more than $10 million into this one effort alone. It also has online degree programs in nursing at Georgetown University as well as social work and education at the University of Southern California. Kenan-Flagler has 20 of its full-time professors, many of them considered the school's best faculty, deeply involved in the online initiative, developing and recording special lectures and teaching live classes online.

Together, 2tor and UNC aim to make online education both respectable and credible. If they succeed, the number of MBA candidates in this two-year, $92,725 program will vastly exceed Kenan-Flagler's full-time MBA student population on-campus and the program will reach a worldwide audience.

"We're not Phoenix," insists 2tor CEO Chip Paucek, dissing the massive for-profit online education player. "Online education has been dominated by the for-profits, but nothing is even close to this in terms of quality. We're doing this at the highest possible level."

When UNC's faculty voted to approve the move online, it did so with the understanding that MBA@UNC would be held to the high academic standards of its mainstream MBA program. "It's the same faculty, the same students, and the same curriculum," says Doug Shackelford, who teaches tax policy and business strategy at UNC and heads up the academic team for the online program.