Incentives and Marketing of Higher Education

Dr. Seema Singh Rathore, Shikha Pareek

With the growing competition in higher education and the changes enforced by international, political, economic, cultural and societal expansions, which unavoidably lead to varying expectations of students’ inflowing advanced education, the educational institutions are paying more attention to the marketing strategies. The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework and to explore by the means of existing literature and theories the various incentives used to attract the potential students and for the marketing of higher education (HE) at different institutions. Increase extreme competition in the area of higher education makes it obligatory for higher education establishments to pierce into the high-class marketing of their chief components in terms of faculties, infrastructure facilities, placements, management policies, incentives for students etc. It is acknowledged that educational establishments have many customers: students, staff, faculty, alumni, donors, and others. This paper emphasizes on students the foremost customer of educational institutions and the incentives which are used to attract them. Different lucrative benefits are being used to increase the number of enrollments. All the Institutes want a big number of students with them and to sustain in this highly competitive environment they use various incentives in order to attract the potential students and to get higher number of enrollments. Higher education institutions are becoming increasingly aggressive in their marketing activities to convey an image that is favorable to the prospective students. The article is based on secondary data and shows that the various incentives which are used by the educational organizations in order to attract the potential students consist of rebate in fees for meritorious students, distribution of laptops or net books, scholarships, good infrastructure etc.