Administrators have hit the ground running with marketing and recruitment efforts for Duke Kunshan University.
Since being approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education in mid-September, DKU has built a presence on social media and has begun holding information sessions in an effort to recruit students from across the globe for the Fall 2014 semester.
“It’s always better to have longer to recruit, and I’m sure we’ll be fully appreciative next year when we have a full year to do the recruiting,” said Nora Bynum, vice provost for DKU and China initiatives. “But we were well-organized and ready to go as soon as we got the establishment approval.”
Recruitment is currently ongoing for two graduate programs—a masters of management studies through the Fuqua School of Business and a masters of science in global health through the Duke Global Health Institute—and for an undergraduate global learning semester program.
Bynum noted that the marketing and recruitment plans directed at Chinese students and at international students are distinct.
The depth of the liberal arts curriculum is being showcased to Chinese students, while the opportunity for immersion in Chinese culture is being promoted internationally, said Wyatt Bruton, DKU international undergraduate recruiting coordinator. He added that the strength of the program’s global roots—a student body from around the world—is being emphasized both internationally and in China.
“In China…liberal arts are not something that’s offered at most institutions,” Bruton said. “This is something that’s very, very unique—for Chinese students to get to leave their campus for a semester, be in an environment with faculty from Duke and China and still be at home and surrounded by students from around the world.”
The undergraduate program aims to recruit 100 students, 50 from China and 50 from other countries, Bruton said.
Of the 50 international students, DKU hopes to have 25 American students—approximately half of whom will hopefully be from Duke, said Jennifer Boroski, the project manager for the Office of Duke Kunshan University and China Initiatives at Duke University. She added that there will ideally be five to 10 students from Wuhan University, DKU’s Chinese partner school.
Information sessions have been held at a number of Chinese campuses, including Wuhan University, Fudan University and Nanjing University, Bynum noted.
The first Durham information session for the undergraduate program was held last week. Twelve students attended, munching on dumplings and rangoons as administrators and faculty discussed the academic and extracurricular opportunities in the program.
Bruton said he was pleased with the turn-out. There will also be a number of additional outreach events in the Spring leading up to the March 1 application deadline, he noted.
International recruitment efforts will be focused on schools with which Duke has previously established relationships, he added.
“We’re working our strategy of reaching out to a number of partner institutions in the United States and abroad who have relationships with Duke University or who have sent students on our programs in the past at Duke,” Bruton said.
In addition to physical information sessions, the undergraduate program is advertising via social media. DKU had 136 likes on Facebook, 158 Twitter followers and 45 Instagram followers at the time of publication.
“We’re slowly building momentum and gaining a following and following our partner institutions that we’ll be partnering with throughout the United States and abroad,” Bruton said.
DKU also maintains a presence on Weibo, a Chinese social media service. While some material shared via social media is location-specific, much material is shared both within China and internationally, Bynum noted.
“It’s tailored to the audience—just as we would across channels here,” Bynum said. “But when it comes to content about the academic programs or faculty members we might want to feature or information about DKU itself and the content, we feel that that’s a broad general interest that we should be sharing in all of those places," Bynum said.
The two graduate programs are coordinating their own marketing efforts, supported by DKU and the Duke Office of Global Strategy and Programs, Bynum said.
Tuition has not yet been set for the programs, but enough information is available for the recruitment process, she noted. The tuition for international students will be set at international levels and the tuition for Chinese students will be discounted with scholarships to be determined by a pricing board.
“I think that there has been enough to make people feel pretty comfortable to know what ballpark it will be in,” Bynum said.
For the global health program, social media has been particularly important, said Geelea Seaford, associate director for communications at the Global Health Institute.
“With limited resources and no single staff person dedicated to program marketing, social media is a cost effective tool for conducting an international marketing campaign,” Seaford wrote in an email Friday.
The program aims to enroll 25 students, she added.
Representatives from the Fuqua School of Business declined to comment.
The deadline for the first round of applications to the MMS program was November 5, and there will be three further rounds. The MMS program website lists DKU information sessions to be held in the United States, China, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, South Korea and Japan in the coming months.
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