Colleges Ontario

Campaign aimed at changing attitudes of parents, students

Joanne Laucius
Ottawa Citizen
February 11, 2009

OTTAWA-The advocacy body that represents Ontario’s 24 community colleges is spending $2.5 million over the next two months to convince parents that college, not university, might be the best place for their graduating teenager.

“It’s all about M.E.” proclaim the ads in big, varsity letters advertising the website myeducation.me.

The campaign, which includes print, television, Internet and transit shelter ads, as well as spots before movies at cineplexes, follows up on the $2-million mystery “Obay” campaign last year aimed at changing parental biases against college.

The television commercials open with a plea from a teenager talking about wanting to pursue fashion design, animation or another career taught in the college system. At the end, the teen says, “It’s all about me.”

“If you’re in love with your higher education choice, it’ll show in your marks and your attitude. Happier students are successful students — in school and in life,” says the campaign’s website, which includes a contest that urges would-be students to “fire up your webcam” and talk about why they’re choosing an Ontario college.

Colleges Ontario isn’t running the ads to drum up business. There are about 150,000 full-time college students in the province, with almost half a million when part-time students are included, said Linda Franklin, president and CEO of Colleges Ontario. This January, enrolment numbers were up almost 10 per cent compared with January 2008.

It’s all about changing attitudes, said Ms. Franklin. College administrators report that when they speak to students as young as those in Grade 7, the students often discount college and say they want to go to university. But only about a third of students who enter high school will go on to university.

Colleges in Britain face the same image challenge and have embarked on a similar advertising campaign targeted at parents, Ms. Franklin said.

“Parents have internalized the message that university is the way to success,” she said. “This is the first generation to believe in that connection so completely.”

A Queen’s University study of almost 2,000 teenagers asked students at six public high schools in Vancouver and Toronto about parental expectations. The study found that immigrant families were particularly insistent on choosing careers for their children — about one in four Chinese and South Asian adolescents said their parents wanted to choose, compared with one in 12 teens with Canadian-born parents.

Meanwhile, nearly three quarters of all the teenagers said their parents expect them to go to university — from a high of 89 per cent of the Chinese to a low of 45 per cent of the Canadians. About half of the teens reported that they felt the strain of living up to expectations.

Barry Avrich, a documentary filmmaker and the president of Toronto advertising agency Endeavour, which created the campaign, attended the university of Toronto and Ryerson, when it was still a “polytechnical” institute.

The primary target of the campaign is parents, with the secondary target being would-be students, he said. The varsity-style letters are a “gentle prod” to parents who may have attended university and are attached to the idea — and to parents who didn’t go to university, but still consider it the “gold standard” of education for their children, said Mr. Avrich.

“Ultimately, we wanted to establish a campaign that initiated a dialogue between parents and kids,” he said.

Last year, Colleges Ontario ran a series of mystery testimonial ads for a bogus drug called “Obay” that purported to control teenagers’ aspirations.

“Our teenagers don’t have their own goals anymore. Obay works like a charm,” said one ad.
“My son started thinking for himself. Obay put a stop to that,” said another.

The Obay ads attracted widespread attention when they appeared early in February last year. About two weeks later, Colleges Ontario revealed that Obay was fictitious and it was behind the ads.

Meanwhile, Colleges Ontario is considering its next potential student pool. Queen’s researchers Alan King and Wendy Warren have been commissioned to do another study of teens who don’t opt for any post-secondary education at all. That group adds up to about half of all high school graduates.

“That’s a huge opportunity,” said Ms. Franklin.