Society
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StudentNation
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June 18, 2026
(Mateusz Slodkowski / Getty Pictures)
The TikTok brand seen displayed on a smartphone.
(Mateusz Slodkowski / Getty Pictures)
A teenage woman in a inexperienced crop high and sweatpants stands in entrance of her iPhone digital camera. Pulsing music performs over time lapses of the coed and her mates in school—filling out worksheets, doing TikTok dances, engaged on iPads. It could appear to be a typical day-in-the-life video posted by a would-be teenage influencer, however this video is completely different. This scholar isn’t posting on her personal or chasing private fame. As a substitute, she is selling her faculty as a part of public training’s latest recruitment technique.
In late March, Detroit Public Colleges Group District (DPSCD) unveiled an initiative to recruit and pay highschool college students to submit optimistic accounts of their time at DPSCD establishments. To get this job, eligible teenagers needed to create a 60-second reel explaining why they’d be an incredible match for the position. Then candidates attended social-media etiquette and content-creation lessons. These chosen obtain $250 a month to function scholar influencers. Among the ensuing movies are extra polished, that includes interviews with lecturers, whereas others are pure teenage power, filled with teenage slang and YouTube-like intros.
The movies are a response to the rising variety of education choices out there to college students and households. As nationwide enrollment declines, constitution colleges and voucher packages are leeching college students from conventional public colleges. In contrast to district colleges, which serve college students inside designated areas, constitution colleges don’t cater to any fastened geographic zones. When a scholar enrolls to a constitution faculty, a public establishment loses not solely that scholar but additionally the state and federal funding linked to their enrollment. Districts like Detroit hope influencer campaigns will help reverse that pattern and win college students again.
Davon Johnson, a sophomore scholar influencer at Detroit’s Demby Excessive, solely has 52 followers on Instagram, however he’s smitten by his new job. In a single video for Trainer Appreciation Week, he and his mates method a favourite instructor with a present bag and a poster, bringing her to (completely satisfied) tears.
“My era particularly—we’re all the time on social media. It’s simply turn into a each day a part of our lives,” Johnson mentioned. “So I do suppose if you wish to get in touch with my era, you might want to meet us the place we’re at.”
Public faculty advertising and marketing isn’t new, however this technique is, marking a transition from the standard mailed flyers and even Fb advertisements, to an method that district directors hope reads as extra genuine and student-centered. However the rise of public faculty advertising and marketing can also mark a departure from long-held values of public training, consultants say. The sheer quantity of data overwhelms mother and father, and the stress of packaging an expertise and branding colleges may distract educators, directors, and households alike from what really issues: high quality of training.
Present Problem
It’s not possible to extricate public faculty advertising and marketing from the subject of college alternative. For many years, most college students attended their native public faculty, with a alternative few attending principally parochial personal colleges. Then, in 1991, Minnesota handed the nation’s first charter-school legislation and without end modified the nationwide faculty enrollment panorama. Constitution colleges are publicly funded however run by an out of doors group, that means they’ve extra autonomy than conventional public colleges. Households are sometimes drawn to charters for his or her specialised packages, which can middle on language immersion, the humanities, or a sure instructional philosophy.
As a result of constitution colleges don’t have built-in enrollment like conventional colleges, their survival will depend on attracting sufficient college students to maintain operations. Rapidly, they turned to promoting and advertising and marketing to get their identify out and increase enrollment. All through the ’90s and 2000s, states handed their very own constitution legal guidelines and immediately, there are constitution colleges in 45 states.
With college students lured to charters by smooth web sites and compelling curricula, conventional public colleges realized they too wanted to get within the advertising and marketing recreation. Between 2010 and 2021, 2 million college students left conventional public colleges and enrollment in charters greater than doubled. Colleges should “constantly clarify why they’re price public funding—that’s now not a given,” mentioned Joel Cagne, CEO of Okay-12 colleges advertising and marketing and communications consulting agency Allerton Hill. “Public colleges, in the event that they do survive and proceed, have to actually sing for his or her supper.”
Conventional public colleges from coast to coast started promoting in competitors with constitution and personal colleges. There have been large advertisements on public transit, flyers in mailboxes, texts with reminders about software deadlines, and faculty excursions.
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic solely accelerated such advertising and marketing. “Covid has made faculty districts the political piñata for each the left and the fitting, in order that has put much more of the onus on them to market themselves [and prove] that they’re nonetheless a worthwhile funding to the neighborhood,” Cagne mentioned.
Common voucher packages supply even better competitors and extra choices to households by serving to allow enrollment in beforehand unaffordable personal colleges, although it’s unclear what number of college students are literally benefiting from the vouchers to switch from public to non-public colleges.
Social media, too, will increase the stress on faculty districts. A disgruntled father or mother can now have a large attain and public relations crises have an extended life. Declining nationwide fertility charges additionally merely imply fewer youngsters of college age.
Public faculty districts, Cagne mentioned, “have come to comprehend that they will now not function in a vacuum, that in the event that they’re not telling their story, any person else is and it won’t be with the most effective intention.” Consequently, advertising and marketing consulting firms like Allerton Hill and district-run initiatives like Detroit’s scholar influencers have turn into lifelines.
Detroit plans to spend $42,000 on scholar influencers and a neighborhood ambassador program within the first yr. The total advertising and marketing plan will value round $1.4 million. The district isn’t alone.
In 2025, the Newark Public Colleges faculty board authorised a contract of over $275,000 with Caissa Public Technique, a Memphis-based communications agency, to recruit over 300 college students by way of “secret buyers, door knocking, and market and pattern evaluation.” Indianapolis Public Colleges used Covid reduction cash to rent the identical firm to contact the households of scholars who had beforehand been enrolled in district colleges; on the worst level, college students have been leaving the district at a fee of 1 in 10. And through Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, New York Metropolis Public Colleges, the biggest faculty district within the nation, spent not less than $21 million on an advert marketing campaign that appeared on public transit and companies all through the town.
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It’s unclear if all this spending is definitely doing a lot; New York Metropolis public colleges nonetheless misplaced 88,000 college students previously 5 years to charters, privates, and households transferring out of New York Metropolis. And even when advertising and marketing campaigns do efficiently improve enrollment, thus rising the quantity of state and federal cash flowing to public colleges, some consultants fear that each one this fuss over advertising and marketing is misplaced.
Ideally, colleges would meet competitors by specializing in upgrading their curriculum, trying to find significant new extracurricular actions, and bettering instructor high quality, mentioned Douglas Harris, a professor of economics at Tulane College and a researcher of training coverage. However this isn’t the place colleges look first when confronted with better competitors. “The issues that will probably be persuasive are usually not essentially the issues that make colleges higher,” he mentioned.
Harris lives and works in New Orleans, a metropolis whose colleges are nearly fully charters. In his analysis, he discovered that one of many first issues colleges did in response to the atmosphere of maximum competitors was enhance the customer support within the entrance workplace. “Is that doing something to the standard of training? No, it’s not,” he mentioned.
Harris is much less involved concerning the cash spent, which he says is a comparatively small portion of whole district prices, than the way in which the deal with advertising and marketing and selection may replicate a change within the ethos of public training.
Public colleges are supposed to teach all children, getting ready them to be members of a wholesome democracy. However alternative and the ubiquity of selling create winners and losers, mentioned Catherine DiMartino, writer of Promoting College: The Advertising of Public Training. Reasonably than a set of sturdy choices, there are good and unhealthy colleges. Solely these whose mother and father have the time and sources to type by way of the avalanche of details about these choices will enroll in the most effective colleges, she mentioned.
Advertising is in some methods very useful to oldsters. Textual content reminders! A superbly designed web site! But it surely’s not so easy, DiMartino mentioned. Even engaged, educated mother and father can discover themselves misplaced and confused. When it got here time for her three youngsters to attend public colleges, DiMartino was rapidly overwhelmed by the choices in her charter-saturated Brooklyn neighborhood. “I ended up transferring to the suburbs, as a result of the thought for me of doing my homework for all three children, visiting the colleges, trying on the take a look at scores, trying on the after-school actions, going to the open homes, appeared actually overwhelming,” she mentioned.
DiMartino is an skilled in public faculty advertising and marketing. If she will be able to’t navigate the deluge of data surrounding selecting a college on your youngster, then who can? She worries that the multitude of selling surrounding charters and public colleges is harming mother and father’ capacity to pick the most effective faculty for his or her youngster.
“If alternative is meant to be about particular person free will to decide on what’s greatest on your children, how do you try this in a extremely marketized or extremely marketed atmosphere?” DiMartino mentioned. “As a result of promoting is all about image-shaping and influencing a shopper. Are folks actually making an goal alternative or is it a alternative the place the picture has been massaged in a roundabout way?”
Evidently public faculty advertising and marketing isn’t going away any time quickly. However, consultants questioned if it was having the meant impact: higher colleges and a greater training for the nation’s youngsters.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Writer, The Nation
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