Archives Digital Exhibits

When Recruitment Was A Broadcast Game Show

(This exhibit is a shortened version of Dr. Groskopf's spring '24 archival presentation.)

In the fall of 1971, Averett was a college in transition.  In 1968, after more than a century as a school for white women, the student body had been racially integrated and gone permanently co-ed.  By spring 1971, the college officially conferred its first degrees as a four-year institution, after decades as a two-year junior college.  These three changes, among many others, were a significant shift to Averett's institutional model.

It should therefore come as no surprise that Averett, at the time, was very concerned with rethinking its approach to recruitment, as the administration wrestled with the best way to convey that Averett was now offering a very different academic experience.  Some of the ideas they came up with should be unsurprising (having a new logo designed [pictured to the left], creating admissions flyers specifically for male prospects, etc).  Others, like the Averett College Scholarship Quiz, seem outlandish in hindsight but provide a compelling window into the complexities of advertising and marketing a college wholly changed from just a few years before.

What was the Averett Quiz?

Conceived and operated by the Averett Admissions Office, and their new Director (Professor of Religion, Dr. Watson Mills [pictured to the right]), the Quiz was a half-hour weekly game show.  It ran for two 21-episode seasons from fall 1971 to spring 1973, and was broadcast first on Danville Cablevision - a newcomer to the Danville television landscape - and then on numerous regional radio stations (encompassing at least seven cities) over the following few days.  The recruitment reach of the program was even larger than the seven-city broadcast area; student participants arrived from twenty cities in Virginia and North Carolina, with stray contestants from as far afield as Florida and Ohio.

The show was structured like a typical weekly quiz-bowl.  Four highly regarded local high-school students would battle it out on air in a contest to answer the most academic questions correctly.  Like many trivia-related game shows, it was a game of individuals in which each attempted to be the first to ring their buzzer to offer what they hoped was the correct answer.  Correct answers would win points, while incorrect answers would incur deductions.  The top point-earner each week received a small scholarship to Averett ($150-300).  At the end of the season, the sixteen weekly winners would compete for a slightly larger scholarship ($500-1000).  In the final episode, the four semi-final winners would compete for the grand prize (a $2000 scholarship).  The scholarships were, of course, only redeemable if the student chose to attend Averett.

Although no known video recordings exist, the Averett archives retains the radio broadcast tapes for eight of the episodes.

While it may seem strange that a college would operate a tv gameshow, they were actually not uncommon at this point.  At the national level, College Bowl, It's Academic, and High-Q, to name just three had all brought student competitors to network television.  Closer to home, the University of Richmond had operated the Richmond Scholarship Quiz radio program since 1952.  The Averett Quiz was more of a bandwagon idea than a trailblazer.

Game Show Structure as Branding

While the show could have been operated haphazardly, most of the components reveal a great deal of thought (or serendipitous accident), as they portray Averett as having very particular appeals.  Consider the following elements of the contestant pool:

• Though the student body of Averett had only been co-ed for three academic years by fall 1971, and was not yet anywhere near 50/50 enrollment, the Averett Quiz contestant pool is almost perfectly split.  Of 120 total contestants, 113 are known by name.  Among those, 61 are women and 52 are men.  A visible mass of male students on the program had clear value to a college that was actively attempting to shed the image that it was a women's college.

• While the racial integration of the student body had been an even slower process, and it is harder to determine the racial breakdown of a contestant pool when all one has are names and a few photos of faces, there is evidence of conscious selection for that market as well.  Of 30 contestants about which we can hazard a guess, at least four were non-white (two Black, one Indian, and one Asian).  While that is a paltry percentage, it represents an at least passable effort to be inclusive.  Averett was, at the time, making few if any other overt appeals to non-white prospective students.

• Ignoring all other identity concerns, all contestants had to be nominated by their own high school.  The entire contestant pool was, therefore, composed of highly intelligence students who were generally active in multiple extra-curricular activities.  It is obviously in the best interests of a school to describe its student body in such terms.

Note as well that the faculty and staff of the school were portrayed relatively appealingly as well.  Host Watson Mills, score-keeper Mary Louise Merricks (college Registrar), and time-keeper Sarah Eldred (Admissions Counselor and recent Averett graduate), were three of the youngest, most camera-friendly faces on staff.  Despite their cumulative youth, host Mills was well-educated and well-spoken.  It certainly couldn't have hurt to have the staff appear to be not only intelligent, but hip and groovy.

With questions drawn from the same fields taught at Averett (literature, history, science, math, religion, sociology), along with the implicit argument that Averett was enough on the cutting edge to be on television at all, the program was a branding agent's dream.

The End of the Quiz

Considering all the things the program did well, it's somewhat surprising that the Quiz only lasted two years.  While there are no preserved records for why the concept was abandoned so quickly, we can make some educated guesses.

At the simplest level, it may have not been cost effective.  Although much of the cost (studio recording time, contestant travel, hosting duties) may have been donated rather than coming directly out of Averett's budget, it is important to remember that this was an Admissions Office recruitment tool.  The target was always to recruit quality high school students.  Of the 113 known students, only nine chose to attend Averett.  Of those nine, only two had won even the smallest scholarship from their appearance.  Depending on how you work the numbers, that's between a six and eight percent rate of return.  And, considering the fact that winning a scholarship doesn't seem to have moved the needle, there is effectively no evidence that the handful of matriculants wouldn't have chosen Averett anyway, even in a world where the Quiz did not exist.

More troubling, however, it seems that the quiz was fundamentally broken.  Despite the fact that 54% of all contestants were female, only 29% of weekly winners were women.  Worse still, not one of the final four in either year was female.  In short, something about the structure of the game seemed to be giving male contestants an advantage.  (My guess is that the problem was cultural.  A 'buzz in' format, coupled with a threat of a point deduction for incorrect answers, rewards assertiveness and risk-taking.  Those two traits were more frequently encouraged in boys, especially in children who had grown up in the 1950s and 60s.)  This advantage is apparent every way one slices the numbers: boys win more contests than girls; boys buzz in more frequently than girls; boys are more likely to win against three girls than a girl is likely to win against three boys; etc.  It is hard to imagine the college wanting to continue a program which was inherently biased against female contestants.  And, considering the rate of return discussed above, everyone may have been pretty apathetic about the possibility of trying to fix the issue.

In short, the Averett Quiz wasn't a very successful recruitment tool.  It was a fascinating exercise in branding, but its budget wasn't coming from our advertising appropriation, so it wasn't going to be kept on the air for that reason.  Historically it was a fascinating exercise, but its lingering value is the evidence it provides of the vast rethinking of the Averett brand in the wake of the college's late 1960s shake-up.