Recruitment Rock

For colleges that rely largely on student fees to meet their expenses, hard times are giving birth to the hard sell. Faced with a shrinking high-school population, some institutions have gone head-hunting with coast-to-coast billboard blitzes, offers of tuition discounts and mobile recruiting vans. Until alumni complaints forced it to stop, Eastern Oregon College even offered a bounty of $60 for new students from Oregon, and $100 for out-of-state catches.

Several other colleges have tried to turn on teen-agers with music. The University of Akron has a radio commercial backed by folk music; Franconia College has one supported by Mendelssohn. Mississippi State hands out records that proclaim, to a driving rock beat, that M.S. is "the groovy place to get it all together." But Chicago's Loyola University has now outhuckstered them all by saturating the local airwaves for a week with its very own soft rock song.

Sung in moony-croony fashion by Clark Weber, a local radio talk show host, the Loyola jingle asks: "Does the world need a vision or a better way to see?/ Would you rather find an apple, or learn to grow the tree?/ The question is now, the answer is life/ And life is what Loyola's all about."

Many colleges still consider virtually any form of advertising as vulgar as graffiti on a mortarboard. At Loyola, the singing commercial seemed to please the faculty but it outraged the student newspaper. Labeling the pitch "degrading and embarrassing," an editorial declared: "Loyola is not a used-car dealership, or a carry-out Chinese restaurant or a discount department store. For the sake of St. Ignatius, aren't we a university?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.