Honors Program Theses

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Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

Michael Klassen

Abstract

Hawkeye Community College (commonly referred to as "Hawkeye" in the remainder of this thesis), is located in Waterloo, Iowa, which is in the northeastern county of Black Hawk. Hawkeye had a Fall 2009 enrollment total of 6,343 students. Only 107 of these students were of Latino background, which is about 2% of total enrollment (Hawkeye, 2009). In Spring 2010, this number increased to 127 Latino students out of 6,292 total students; this is notable as in a typical spring semester, the number of students at the college decreases from the fall semester (Hawkeye, 2010). This increase could be a result of a number of factors: layoffs, economic conditions, or increased recruiting efforts. However, Latinos make up over 3% of the Black Hawk County population, so it is obvious that this group still has a great amount of potential as a key audience of potential students for Hawkeye Community College.

Therefore, I chose to work with Hawkeye for my thesis project in order to develop a marketing campaign that is targeted toward Latino families with high school and college-aged students living in Black Hawk and surrounding counties. With this marketing campaign, I hope to increase the number of Latino students who are looking at Hawkeye Community College as a possible opportunity for them either immediately or a couple years after their high school graduation. As far as a long-term goal, I intend to help increase enrollment numbers of this potential student population in the next 5 years for Hawkeye.

The research that I did for this project helped me to get a better understanding of this population as a whole. I evaluated a number of sources that helped me to assess the main reasons why members of this population chose not to enroll in institutions of higher education like Hawkeye Community College. I found that both family responsibility and family attachment presented issues to this population when it came to pursuing their education, and I wanted to incorporate this knowledge into my project. Therefore, I chose to use a family-focused campaign, rather than one aimed specifically at students in this population, because I realized that it was important for an educational decision to include the whole family.

Year of Submission

5-2011

Department

Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

5-2011

Object Description

1 PDF file (39 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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