myUface Blog

When it comes time to apply to universities, most students think of themselves as a potential client of a university.  The application process, therefore, is one in which you – the client – makes a bid for a product which the university is selling: namely, an education.

While there is some truth to thinking of the application process in this way, today I’d like to encourage you all to think about applying to universities in a slightly different way.  What if the university was the client and you were the “supplier.”  The university puts out a request for a particular product – “we need 1,500 freshmen with these particular specifications” – and you put in a bid to partially fulfill that request.

It may seem strange to suggest that a university is “buying” you when, in fact, you’re the one that pays tuition.  But universities do look at students as “assets” they’d like to acquire, and not merely as individuals who will pay tuition.

It’s useful to think about just a few of the many different ways in which you are an asset to a university:

1. Most obviously, you pay tuition.  This helps the university covers its operational costs (paying teachers, heating bills for the buildings, etc.)
2. Your educational background and experiences will form a crucial part of any classroom in which you’re a student.  The questions you ask, the essays you write, and the comments you make will either improve or degrade the quality of the educational outcomes for that class.
3. Your social characteristics – your ability to make friends, your interest in participating in hobbies and sports, etc. – will contribute to the on-campus atmosphere of the university.  This is important. If a university admits 1,500 excellent students who all pay full tuition, but they’re all anti-social and hate other people, do you think that university will be a nice place to work or study?
4. When you become an alumnus, you will have the opportunity to contribute to the university both financially (through alumni donations) and socially (through giving the university and its students access to your personal and professional networks).

There are a number of other ways you are an asset to a university, but let’s stop at these four for now.  What this means is that a university views a potential student as an asset that covers costs, improves the quality of the university’s product, maintains a healthy atmosphere on campus, and develops the university’s professional and academic networks.

Now, if you think of yourself as a potential asset, then in applying to a university you have to sell yourself by convincing the university that you’re a stronger asset than other students.  We’ll talk at great length about how you can do that in later posts, but the crucial point here is just to realize that an application for a university is very much like an advertisement for a product:  if you create a good advertisement, the chances that the product will be “bought” are much higher.

What do you think? Are you an asset?  Should universities view students this way?