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As a learner, what factors do you think were most important in influencing your decision to pursue language studies as well as in terms of language choice?

What recruitment and marketing strategies did you experience? What impact, if any, do you think they had on your career and decisions as a language learner?

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What recruitment practices would you consider ethical and unethical?

Please think of and briefly explain two examples (1 ethical + 1 unethical practice).

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In the program or department where you are currently employed, what recruitment practices are in place? Who in your program initiates and/or is involved in recruitment-related activities?

If you are personally involved, please feel free to share your experience.

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In your opinion, what are some possible advantages and disadvantages of delegating recruitment to a third party?

At the University of Arizona (or elsewhere), are you aware of any program or language institution that employs a third party for recruitment? If so, please briefly present one example.

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Hi Federico, first of all thank you for the brilliant presentation and for providing examples of recruitment strategies used by other universities. I have to say that as a language learner who studied in Italy, I was not immersed in the same recruitment discourse that takes place in US colleges and universities. The reason why I chose to study Foreign Languages and Literatures was because I felt really drawn toward the subjects taught there. I remember the website was not very easy to navigate and the graphics and all weren't appealing, but I think they'r doing a better job now. I also did not want to live in an expensive/big city, and I wanted to be far enough from my parents' home so that I had an excuse to rent an apartment and enjoy my university years. In the US recruitment is vital, especially for language programs; some of the strategies I have seen/experienced are addressing some of the advantages of learning a foreign language on websites, with videos of students who studied abroad ect. But also strategies for student retention, such as individual letters of excellence; talking to students about all the cool things they will learn in the next level; organizing fun events; they are all part of recruitment strategies that l2 departments are using.

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Honestly, I don't know whether the Italian Dept. uses a third party. I don't think so. It looks like the Director is more involved with that, but as a GTA I have also been directly involved in recruitment when I was asked to introduce myself and talk to students of ITAL 101 about major/minor, study abroad, and what they would be learning in the 102 level and show a fun activity. I am not sure about the implications of hiring a third party: recruitment would be led by professionals, and it would reduce the amount of time that faculty spends on it; but it may be expensive, and it may not have the same direct knowledge of the students population and discourses around language learning, etc.

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If talking about my own education, I have to say that Russia is not big on educational marketing. Whatever interests students develop in studying foreign languages, they do not usually come from advertising. For me, I think, the great incentive of studying foreign languages throughout school was the possibility of studying abroad and travelling. The opportunities for study or service programs abroad were not largely advertised and I had to do research to find out partner schools in Germany to be able to go there. In higher education, I think that the situation is very similar. Students are either driven to go abroad – and then they have to do their own research – or part of their education is conducted in a foreign language (mostly English), so they are forced to take language classes to be able to keep up (even if they have no interest in languages at all).

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I think that a lot of recruitment that RSSS does is a part of a larger COH program. As far as I know COH does have a very good marketing team that develops beautiful digital and paper-based materials for the entire college. In RSSS, one of the professors take the local recruiting efforts onto themselves (I think it is a rotating schedule). The professor responsible for recruitment conducts class visits in the 4-5 week of the semester to recruit majors and minors and participates in the COH recruitment events. Additionally, they organize a lot of events from webinars on “hot” topics to parties at the mall that also are aimed at promoting the program. The language instructors are required to promote the program as well by passing on the information about events and being open to student’s questions about it. The language part of the program is not usually promoted separately, I think. But in my experience students who come into language classes first are either fulfilling their language requirement or want a challenge or they have friends who recommended the language / program to them. I think out of almost 30 students I have this year, 6 of them came to 101 on someone’s recommendation.

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Federico,

Many thanks for this wonderful presentation about a topic I know you’re very passionate about  — just like me as I told you! (ps. I definitely stole the idea of including definitions from you)

Your cluster #1 questions are definitely questions I’ve thought about recently. Very similarly to Giulia, recruitment isn’t big in Europe — excluding the UK — because students don’t play the same role in terms of money and resources to the university, although they play a role to a large extent since without them, programs wouldn’t exist. In that sense, I didn’t experience much recruitment strategies as a student.
I think like Giulia, I was always very interested in learning English and American history, which is why I went to an American Studies B.A. in Paris. They clearly didn’t market anything directly. Similar to Giulia’s experience, their website wasn’t the best. Students knew about the reputation of the program, the best in France, so they would naturally show up — indirect recruitment strategy I guess? (not all language programs have it easy like that I think)

What I’ve noticed language programs do in the US is of course much different as a lot of time, people and resources are dedicated to thinking, designing and implementing recruitment and marketing strategies to draw more students to the program each year. The ones I’ve been involved in are mostly sending private letters to students who perform well (A or B) in the class. I’m not sure if the direct impact of it has been studied but what I’ve noticed this year is that it’s more effective to have me give a good grade on a paper test and write a note like ''You’d do wonderful in a French minor/major''. They consistently seem to tell me they’re going to contact the undergraduate advisor to get more info, and they do (I ask them to cc’ me). I’m actively thinking about recruitment strategies and wish to do research on this. One side of it is definitely branding, marketing (notably on the websites, about how to have a dual major, study abroad opportunities, etc.),  but I think another side of the coin might be how to improve the curriculum (I’m not inventing anything new here as you know) with more authentic culture about politics, science etc, to target and ready a wider range of students and get them interested in knowing more.

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I briefly mentioned a bit in my other answer but yes, there definitely are recruitment practices in place to get people in the Basic Program into the French major or minor. I believe it’s going to be the same plan as for you and Giulia as we’re in the same department?

Basically, the department head schedules a brief meeting with all of the TAs and tells us we’re going to receive an e-mail from Stephanie Topete (SILC) that includes a list of our students. We’ll have to highlight the names of the ones that do very well so that SILC sends a personalized e-mail to them saying their instructor recommended them for a minor/major. This email typically contains information about the major/minor, different hyperlinks, a recruitment video of an alumni promoting the major/minor, etc. We also get the option to send a private email to the students directly — which I tend to choose as I’m sure they’ll open it. In that, the department head, the DBL and the TAs are involved in recruitment-related activities in coordination with SILC.

Then, I’m aware COH (the college) also plays a role in recruitment, especially under the leadership of Dean Durand who’s very concerned with this topic. They don’t operate in the same way as TAs and department staff typically do — rather, they’re in charge of designing flyers, leaflets, powerpoint for outreach sessions in local Tucson high schools, taking photos to provide the different departments with for their websites, D2L sites, etc. As far as I’m aware — that’s how it goes for the French program. I’ve decided to launch discussions with the French head to go give a French-focused talk to high schoolers this year. We’ll see if that helps.

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I agree with your point Giulia.

I think doing so might definitely help faculty or even the administrative staff of the department. But then as you said, we're the experts at the end of the day and we also know what to put forward when we advertise because we've used these skills in our career, we've been on a study abroad program during our studies at some point, we know the target country, etc. A third party maybe might be the most useful as general consulting about what strategies, wording, media, visuals to use to convey what we want to convey. I really wonder how much that would cost in reality...

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(Kate) Student Information Systems (SIS)

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(Kate) Student Information Systems (SIS)

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Han's (2014) concluding sentence highlights that new SIS and statistical analysis can lead to improved recruitment strategies, and this is where I think recruitment should be moving to - leaving behind the flyers, tabling, and public forum posts described in UCR's video. UA and other institutions have an immense amount of student data. An arguably unethical application would be Prof. Sudha Ram's work tracking catcard data to determine students likely to drop out in their FR year. If language programs used that data to exclude students who would not likely continue in their language classes, that would be unethical. However, students send dual enrollment credit, AP scores, HS transcripts, and placement scores to the University, so I do not think its unethical for a language program to make use of this data for recruitment purposes by identifying students who may be interested in studying the language, but have never enrolled or met with an advisor. Students every registration move from adding courses to a shopping cart, to registering/dropping/waitlisting are recorded and trackable - but I am not aware of any language program that uses this data source to find students that have shown interest, but maybe didn't go so far as attending the course. Finally, language programs tend to have few offerings that meet upper-division minor or major requirements, and course scheduling time constraints could be addressed by using data analytics to cluster students' other course times to determine the best availability for increased enrollment.

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This is a Tedtalk by UA's Prof. Sudha Ram, where she mentions her catcard study briefly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vGR3VaFxJM - While my unethical example talked about a fictional use of her data/this project, I think tracking student movement via catcards without our knowledge is still arguably unethical.

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Creating a smarter world with big data: Sudha Ram at TEDxTucson 2013

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To begin, I am seconding Asya's statement that "For me, I think, the great incentive of studying foreign languages throughout school was the possibility of studying abroad and travelling." That was, and absolutely remains, my biggest motivator, although now having moved to different cities than my small hometown, I also recognize that there are connections to be made domestically with more language skills (and not just internationally).

I don't feel that I was recruited to a program, or encouraged to stick with it through any departmental outreach. But, Han's mention of cost and being first-gen were major influencers for me. In college, I stuck with French because that was what I had studied in HS, and it allowed me to graduate early.

Finally, to echo Lorraine, I feel as though there is a curricular resistance in the department - despite calls for CLIL-like offerings, or interdisciplinary collaborations where courses can double-dip requirements, there are very few of those offered to students, even though I believe they would assist with recruitment and retention.

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Global uses third-party recruiting to target different student demographics in different regions of the world. However, I think there is a fundamental difference between recruitment for a University and recruitment for a language program, as the latter is largely recruiting from those already at the University, rather than being the primary motivator of students selecting said University. (This is with the notable exception of flagship language programs where I have read - but of course can not now find - that the FL program DOES serve as a recruitment tool for the larger University). For a small department, I don't think it makes sense to use a third party recruiter - because, to echo my cluster #2 post - the department already has such an extensive large dataset on students that the third party would not have access to (just rarely the department has a data scientist assigned to work with their advising team/admin). I've met with the COH Student Success and Retention Expert (a new grant funded role at the UA to support data-driven advising practices) and he had not done any recruitment work with language programs (because of no requests) - but to me, that's such an untapped resource.

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Asya, you mention that word of mouth recruits a number of new students. Do you feel that students are also heavily featured in recruitment materials? E.g. TikTok/Instagram videos, etc..? Han (2014) talked about recruiting millennials, but I think we're already at the point where advertising/marketing is changing so much to recruit Gen Z.

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My interest in languages was incidental to a time during the Cold War in the 1980s, where we were seeing a lot more about people living in the Soviet Union and hearing the language. I found the language beautiful and decided that I would study it. I taught myself some Russian and decided that it would be my major along with engineering or something professional. No recruitment to languages, but I was highly recruited by US universities.

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I subscribe to all of the ethical practices that NAFSA's code of ethics, centered on the student, promotes. I've linked out to those in the Ethics section of Content/Week 14, I think. We'll discuss this in greater depth there. The student's best interest should always guide any recruitment. I've recruited language students all over the world and have overseen a lot of recruiters, marketers, and have seen my share of unethical actions. However, the most unethical I've seen is still in practice by some universities, that I will not name in writing here. These universities accept students conditionally without proof of English proficiency, imply that they are fully admitted, then they administer an English language proficiency upon arrival and relegate the students to a pre-academic program rather than allow them to continue to academic study. This is a bait and switch unethical practice that used to be done by the other guys. But now, the UA actually accepts Duolingo as a test for admission, and that, in my mind is just as unethical, because some of those students do NOT have the proficiency to succeed and we have accepted them into programs that they will wash out of.

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I have managed educational consultants/recruiting agents and monitored them at CESL.  The UA only just recently began using them.  I have a lot of issues with this approach for a variety of reasons that are based solely on bad experiences with some agents and too much time in the field.  The advantages to this approach are that you don't have to be everywhere to recruit.  The drawbacks are that it is expensive and you cannot control the messaging.  Many times when I was abroad, I'd hear of agencies that would recruit with deceptive practices.  I learned a lot more when I visited the recruiters locally, than when I met them at fairs.

I also used to recruit recruiters at fairs conducted by ICEF in Beijing, Miami, and Toronto.  I was mostly focused on those countries that could diversify our CESL student body (another advantage) and had students who could afford to pay for a US education.

I can't say I got used to using agents for recruiting.

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It was over 20 years ago at this point, so I don't recall motivation exactly, but I suspect my decision to study Spanish had to do with my family's working-class values and my seeing that so many workers spoke Spanish; I think my 11ish year old mind equated things and decided that I needed to speak Spanish too.  People would always ask me 'why Spanish?' and I would always say 'because this is California.'  I was supposed to be a Spanish and Math double major, but when you drop out of school for a few years, you tend to forget your Linear Algebra and Differential Equations, so when I finally got around to transferring to a 4-year university, I applied as a Spanish major (except for SDSU, they weren't accepting Spanish majors, so I applied as a math major—and was rejected).  Anyway, I ended up a Spanish Literature major, which was okay, but the required Intro to Spanish Linguistics class changed things and here I am.

I'm going to break things down here regarding recruitment/marketing strategies between undergrad and grad, because I think this is relevant.  In my case, I'm going to break it down a step further, because I went to community college, just like everyone else in my family.  So, in terms of high school recruitment or college fairs and the like, none of that had any impact on me because I always knew I was going to Solano Community College down the road.  You all are free to talk to me at any time you'd like about what I think the benefits to this are, so I won't bore you all with them here.  When I finally finished community college and looked to transfer to a 4-year, I had no idea about what their Spanish programs looked like.  I applied to four schools: Berkeley and UCLA for their reps, Santa Cruz for being nearby with a beach, and San Diego for being near Mexico and with a beach.  So reputation and location were the biggest factors for me.  I never really thought about how I'd pay for it all, I just figured that part would work itself out one way or another.  Then for grad school, here is where word of mouth comes in way more.  I'd asked my undergraduate advisor for a list of schools with Spanish Linguistics programs, then went through and looked at their websites to narrow it down from there.

I'm getting the sense, reading through other people's responses, that none of us were exactly swayed by recruitment, we all already sort of had an idea of what we wanted and then hunted it down ourselves.  I think recruitment has two big roles: getting those minors, people that already have a major but could be convinced of the marketing strategy behind a Spanish minor; and just making people aware that something exists.  I only this semester found out that ASU has a Romanian program! I'm friends with the Spanish BLP director at ASU and even she didn't know that until I told her.  For those of us that already know what we want, it's a matter of making the program/option easier to be found, because we'll find it, we aren't necessarily found ourselves.

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First of all, Kate, if you see this, thanks for the TedxTalk link, because I wouldn't even have thought to check YouTube, I was on her UA page scanning through her publications trying to figure out what you were talking about.  I've watched the video, and I see what you mean about being possibly unethical.  I think this is easily fixed into being undoubtedly ethical, since CatCards aren't the only way to do business on campus (I use my credit card, for example), they can just make more widely known the ways in which they're using the data, thereby giving students the ability to opt out.  And obviously they're not hiding it, hiding it would definitely be a red flag.

I was very surprised by Nick's mention of using Duolingo as proof of English proficiency, so I went and googled it.  I found here https://grad.arizona.edu/admissions/requirements/international-applicants that the Graduate College does not accept that, but it was harder to find about undergraduate admission.  Here https://everywhere.arizona.edu/english-proficiency it says that Duolingo will only be accepted for Spring 2022, which I'm not sure whether it's a response to relative difficulty in getting the more standard tests done in the Covid climate.  I use Duolingo, it's one of my few sources of Romanian, and while I would question the validity of a Duolingo test as proof of English proficiency, I also recognize that they have been making a lot of changes, hiring PhDs, etc. trying to improve their product.  English, Spanish and French (as well as some of the other 'big' languages) get more of this attention, however; I've seen the changes to Spanish over the years, but Romanian and Catalan remain relatively ignored.  I would argue that (relative) impact of a lower proficiency in English would depend on the program in question, but I do not argue that the impact could ever be zero.

My first reaction to the 'challenge' of coming up with an example of unethical practices in recruitment was regarding a misrepresentation of statistics.  As we all know, statistics can be manipulated to serve a particular narrative, and given the tendency to recruit by touting alumni success, different measures of central tendency can show a vastly different situation and suggest a higher probability than can be reasonably stated that you'll leave the program and get a job, get a job in the field you want, get a job in the field you want in the pay range you want, etc. etc. And there's always the programs that hire their own graduates and keep that particular statistic looking decent (whether or not this is unethical is debatable, though, I'm sure the alumni is happy to have a job, any job).

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Sometimes the front office will send out an email about departmental events and ask us to forward it to our students, so I do.  The idea here being, of course, that the more they're involved with the department, the more they feel a connection, the more likely they are to sign up and minor in Spanish.

> The language instructors are required to promote the program as well by passing on the information about events and being open to student’s questions about it. (Asya)

Same, I'm supposed to push declaring on them. Idk, to a large extent everyone is just trying to stay afloat this semester and I don't feel comfortable just yet trying to put more on their plate.

> We’ll have to highlight the names of the ones that do very well so that SILC sends a personalized e-mail to them saying their instructor recommended them for a minor/major (Lorraine)

Similarly, I'm supposed to do this on my own, identifying students and reaching out to them myself to talk to them about declaring.  I'll probably talk to people closer to the end of the semester, at the beginning I think we haven't built a relationship yet and in the middle we're all just so busy.

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Hi Federico! Thank you so much for your thoughtful presentations on the topic. I have learned a lot as to think about different recruitment strategies and approaches. In regards to this first question, I think the deciding factor for me when it comes to the decision to pursue language studies would be that I actually enjoy learning languages and find it fascinating to know more about other cultures through language learning. In terms of language choice, with English, it was pretty much a given as it was a requirement in school. Furthermore, I wanted to pursue higher education in the US so learning English was just a part of that. With Korean, I think it has to do with me really liking Korean cultures and from there, I want to be able to know more through language learning.

I think the idea that if you learn English, you would have the opportunity to study abroad and all of that, was very appealing to me. Also, since I come from a smaller country, the only way to be able to be more global was to pick a language that was considered a lingua-franca and English happened to be that at the moment. People also based their language learning choices on what would be considered a language that was in high demand and if they could make money off of their language learning journey.

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I don't know personally if the Writing Program resorts to a third party for recruitment; however, I can imagine having a third party would have its perks and its downsides as well. I think, regarding the advantages, it would take less time for the staffs and the faculty as they don't have to go through the process themselves. It will also bring in different perspectives as to what would be best for the recruitment process. I also think that the process would also be more seamless as they can have everything set up while other people in the program can weigh in if necessary. In term of disadvantages, I think the people who are involved directly with the program would have more experiences and knowledge of what to expect from a recruitment standpoint, and it might help with the set up as they know exactly what they want. And of course, it will cost more money...

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Thank you all for sharing your thoughts! It was super interesting to read about your experiences with and perspectives on recruitment as both learners and educators. I also really appreciated the links resources that some of you shared as part of your contributions. It was a pleasure to facilitate a very lively discussion on a topic of great interest and relevance for language programs. A presto!
- Federico