Selling the dream: Marketing an education

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the manner in which a Christian Brothers boarding school, founded in 1891 as an altruistic response to the socio/economic distress of Queensland’s Irish Catholics, undertakes the marketing of its educational product in a contemporary setting. St Joseph’s Nudgee College has displayed a remarkable capacity for compromise, balancing from its first year of operation the philosophical heritage of Irish Catholicism with the pragmatic aim of promoting social mobility amongst a group conscious of its outsider status. It is this inheritance of compromise that has ensured that there has been no perception that marketing an education in a religious institution raises any ethical dilemmas. This is even more remarkable given the evolution of the College into one of the State’s elite educational institutions, yet one still publically committed to education serving as an agent of social change. The challenge for the Development and Communications Department of the College is far more pedestrian than a clash of world views. For they operate in a milieu divorced from the traditional core business of the College and must therefore operate as promoters rather than producers of the institution’s core product of teaching.