"Attention high school graduates: The University of Oldenburg offers you more than theory and practice. It is manageable, innovative and open to your future!" These sentences come from an advert that the University of Oldenburg used to recruit students for the first time on the private radio station ffn in April. This is quite an unusual approach for a German university, as we are still a long way from "Dutch conditions": For our partner university in Groningen, in addition to the global budget, advertising for students has been part of everyday life for many years. Whether on milk cartons or buses, the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen is everywhere in its endeavours to attract potential students.

In the course of increasing competition between universities for students, we will also have to rethink our approach in Germany. University information days, taster programmes and other subject-specific events may no longer be enough to convince high school graduates to go to university. A targeted approach via "their" medium - Radio ffn has 400,000 young listeners per hour in Lower Saxony, Bremen and Hamburg - is an attempt whose success still needs to be tested. For example, the access figures to the website, whose address - www.uni-oldenburg.de - was particularly emphasised in the commercial, can provide information here.

To date, around 75 per cent of the 11,200 students at the University of Oldenburg come from the region. "Leaning back and hoping that this will remain the case would be the wrong approach. The continued existence of universities in the future will depend as much on the quality of their research as on the number of students," said University President Prof Dr Siegfried Grubitzsch in this context.

Incidentally, we left the production of the advert to a professional agency and did the copywriting ourselves. This quickly revealed the limits of what was possible. Neither detailed offers nor the qualities of a university can be presented in a well-founded manner in thirty seconds. This type of advertising can only be a signal and arouse the "desire for more". We are curious to see whether we have succeeded. After all, the media response to the Oldenburg campaign has already been remarkable.

Yours

Dr Corinna Dahm-Brey