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Home > Forums > Interest Groups > Educational Issues & Concerns Edit Settings  |  Search Forums New Campaign Aims to Get More Undergraduates to Take the GRE Posted on 10-13-2008 klg14 Hawthorne, CA The Chronicle of Higher Education Wednesday, October 8, 2008 New ETS Campaign Aims to Get More Undergraduates to Take the GRE By ELYSE ASHBURN Chronicle of Higher Education Several months ago, the Educational Testing Service began planning a campaign to encourage more college juniors and seniors to consider graduate school—and to take its Graduate Record Examination. The timing may prove fortuitous. In a rocky economy, people often seek shelter in the halls of higher education. Graduate enrollments, in particular, tend to swell. And ETS, the nonprofit company that owns the GRE, began its campaign this fall—just before the stock market nose-dived and the country began shedding jobs in earnest. “I’m telling students today that you really need graduate work” to be highly competitive, says John J. Contreni, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. That was true even before the current economic troubles, he says, and it’s especially true now. Purdue is one of 100 institutions—as varied as Morgan State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Vanderbilt University—that ETS has chosen for the first round of its campaign. The company’s splashy advertisements describe the test as “insurance.” One ad shows a tanned guy sporting camouflage board-shorts on a windswept beach, complete with a beat-up van and a surfboard. It urges students to visit http://www.takethegre.com—and to take the test: “A backup plan in case the ‘I don’t need money to be happy’ notion wears thin.” ETS has placed that ad and several others in student newspapers, and on fliers and posters in campus bookstores. “The goal of the campaign is not to say to every student, you should go to graduate school,” says Maurice C. Taylor, dean of the School of Graduate Studies at Morgan State and chair of the GRE’s board. Rather, the goal is to say, “Among the options that you consider, you should consider more education rather than less.” That extra education, Mr. Taylor says, can pay off—literally. In 2007, men with bachelor’s degrees earned a median of $57,397, while women earned $38,628, according to the most recent estimates available from the U.S. Census Bureau. But men with advanced degrees earned a median of $77,219, and women $50,937. David G. Payne, executive director of the GRE, says the campaign not only seeks to expand students’ options but to increase the pool of domestic talent for graduate schools. In particular, he hopes the ads will grab the attention of underrepresented minorities and low-income students, who are in short supply in the graduate-school pipeline. A first step, he says, is talking about the GRE. The company is focusing on students in their junior and senior years, when they’re thinking seriously about their future. People are also at their most test-savvy in college, Mr. Payne says, and many institutions even offer free test preparation for their students. Robert A. Schaeffer would like to see more undergraduates go on to graduate studies. But the ETS campaign focuses too much on taking a single test, says Mr. Schaeffer, public-education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group. The campaign, he suspects, is more about improving ETS’s bottom line than students’ job prospects. Mr. Payne, however, notes that the GRE board, which is made up of graduate-school officials, not ETS staff members, had to sign off on the plan. “Their job isn’t to increase ETS’s revenue,” he says. “It’s to do what’s best for graduate education.” In any case, if ETS does see a bump in test-takers, it may be hard for the company to tell if students were swayed by the campaign. They may simply have been scared to enter the rocky job market. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education   [Reply] Page 1 of 1 1 Reply To Topic In order to post a response to this topic, please login below or click here to signup. Email Address: Password: Page 1 of 1 1 Home > Forums > Interest Groups > Educational Issues & Concerns Edit Profile Post Content Sponsored Content Create an Ad Follow Us! Link To Us! Do you have a website? Link to HBCU Connect! Have a Question? Call Us Direct @ 877.864.4446

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