A few months ago I received a call from someone running a small private school near New York. They believed their school was objectively better than a larger, more famous establishment nearby, but had more difficulty attracting pupils. What should they do?
This is not easy. You see, however skilled your teachers are, what really makes a good school is often simply having a reputation for being good. When parents choose a school for their children, much as they pretend otherwise, they are not really choosing a school so much as buying a peer group for their offspring (and, to some extent, for themselves).
Yes, I know everyone talks about facilities and teacher-pupil ratios and so on when they talk about schools, but this is largely bullshit to maintain the pretence of rational objectivity. (Trust me, once you follow David Ogilvy’s dictum that ‘people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say’, understanding human behaviour becomes much easier.)
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