'Marketing can work'.

LU HARDIN SAYS HIS FAITH IN THE power of advertising to change the culture of Arkansas developed during his six years as director of the Arkansas Department of Higher Education.

As director, he asked Arkansas Razorbacks Football Coach Houston Nutt to appear in TV ads encouraging students to qualify for and apply for the Academic Challenge Scholarship, a state program aimed at keeping Arkansas students from leaving the state to attend college. The program routinely had money left over, he said.

The Nutt ads produced by Combs & Co. got immediate results.

"The number of Academic Challenge Scholarships doubled to the extent that I didn't even have the money in my budget to pay for them," Hardin said. He had to ask the Legislature for supplemental funding.

The overwhelming success of a relatively simple ad campaign was a revelation, Hardin said.

"I became a passionate advocate that marketing can work in higher education like it does in other areas."

As soon as he arrived in Conway in the fall of 2002, he slashed the University of Central Arkansas-Netherlands program and started what he calls "saturation advertising" of a sleepy university whose enrollment was 4 percent lower than it had been five years earlier.

"I canceled the UCAN program and made three students unhappy and changed the history of UCA," Hardin said last week.

From 8,553 students in the fall of 2002, UCA grew to 12,330 in the fall of 2006. This fall the school expects enrollment to be up no more than 200--"by choice," Hardin said, "to play infrastructure catch-up." (See story, page 19.)

During the same period, other four-year colleges around the state also grew: UA by 12 percent; Arkansas Tech University by almost 20 percent; the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Arkansas State University and Henderson State University by less than 5 percent. But UCA's growth has been matched by Pulaski Tech, the two-year college in North Little Rock that boomed from 5,700 students in the fall of 2002 to 8,455 last fall. (And 10 years ago it was under 2,500.)

Pulaski Tech's growth helps explain UALR's much slower growth, according to Conway Rucks, chairman of the Marketing & Advertising Department at UALR's College of Business.

"There's a widespread belief that they are taking away a lot of our students, or students that we traditionally got," he said.

Students at Pulaski Tech can take core courses for about one-third the cost of taking them at UALR, Rucks said, and UALR is required to accept those credits when students transfer into the four-year program.

Getting students to do just that--to complete a four-year degree--is the next cultural hurdle Lu Hardin wants to take on. Statewide, only 45 percent of students who enroll as freshmen complete a bachelor's degree within five years, he said, and even UCA's graduation rate is an unacceptable 55 percent.

"That's an area that we need to do a better job," Hardin said.