Apple’s Educational Prowess

Apple is by no means a newcomer to the education market. Graduating high school seniors wait for the start of the annual Apple summer sale, at which point they can get a free iPod along with the purchase of a Mac. With the iPod Touch occupying the top rung in the iPod lineup, the device is well worth the wait (of the end of the school year). But Apple does much more than give away free iPods to entice students and the education market at large! Apple has abundant resources that offer both faculty as well as school administrators the means to publish content online. This points business back in the direction of the iTunes Store as well as the company’s hardware products.

TUAW reported earlier this month that the University of Florida College of Pharmacy has made it a requirement that students own an iPhone or an iPod Touch. A college requiring a specific kind of cell phone or music player? Isn’t that a bit much? Isn’t college already expensive enough? The Alligator, an independent school news publication, reported on the story back on July 9th. In the story, the Dean of the College of Pharmacy said, “These are the instruments at the forefront that are developing applications for medical uses by the hundreds. We want our students to become adept at using these mobile devices early on because we see this as the future in pharmacy practice.” Quite a tall order to fill. But this wasn’t the first university-wide application of the popular Apple cell phone or music player. Earlier in the year, the University of Missouri implemented the use of an iPod Touch in order to help students retain information. Brian Brooks, associate dean of the Missouri School of Journalism told the campus newspaper about his decision to make the device a requirement for incoming freshmen: “Lectures are the worst possible learning format,” Brooks said. “There’s been some research done that shows if a student can hear that lecture a second time, they retain three times as much of that lecture.”

Can the requirements for iPod Touch/iPhone on college campuses be considered a trend that’s sweeping the nation? It’s hard to tell. The iPod has been around since 2001 and from the day it was born, Apple has yet to see significant market competition. Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings yielded a 7 percent decrease in iPod sales from the same quarter last year, but a 626 percent unit growth for the iPhone. Here’s what the numbers could tell us:

• The iPod line has reached its maturity stage and is already entering the saturation and declining stages or
• The iPhone has become the all-in-one desired by the masses and
• Looks to be eating into iPod sales

Since the iPhone is – as a rule – a higher-margin product, I can imagine Apple prefers that the last of those statements to be true.

Apple is also tacking names and selling Macs when it comes to unified educational sales. The State of Maine has recently decided on supplying its entire body of students in 7th through 12th grades with MacBooks. The state chose to issue the MacBook because the laptop is “durable, flexible, and goes with students to all points of learning.” Moreover, Apple may have hit another gold mine when it comes to the App Store. The College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida directs students to the free app Epocrates (click opens iTunes), which claims it is the “leader in mobile clinical software with more than 625,000 healthcare professionals relying on [its] references to make quick confident decisions at the point of care.” The University of Missouri’s school of Journalism is featured on the Apple website as a sort of poster child for Universities partnering with Apple: the university gets name recognition by a worldwide tech conglomerate while Apple receives real-life scenarios of how Apple technology helps real people.

Apple’s website boasts that the Mac is “the number one computer in schools and on college campuses.” iTunes U has recently become a gold mine for free educational content. Some of the top universities, both in the United States and abroad, have content in the iTunes Store available for not only their students, but also the public at large! Apple’s education website shows just how much Apple is integrated into the educational system: “Today’s students expect constant access to information—in the classroom and beyond. Which is why more and more faculty are using iTunes U to distribute digital lessons to their students,” reads Apple’s mobile learning page. And it doesn’t end there. From an Apple Reps program to advertising for Mac Labs, Apple has the Education market covered from president to student.

In the past, owning a Mac was trendy. Today, it looks like owning a Mac is simply a necessity in the education market: the computers allow students to learn rather than worry about technical issues. And if they already have a Mac, what better media player to buy than an iPod? What better cell phone to buy than an iPhone? The marketing behind all of Apple’s efforts fit together so perfectly, that it becomes very difficult to nit-pick. The credit is due to the pure genius in Apple’s marketing guru Philip Schiller and Retail Vice President Ron Johnson, not to mention CEO Steve Jobs. Is there any better way to infiltrate college campuses or college dorm rooms than the way Apple has laid for itself? I don’t think so!

This kind of marketing genius is sure to pay dividends: after its best non-holiday quarter ever, Apple projected even higher revenues for Q3 2009 at $8.7-8-9 billion. That’s compared to $8.34 billion in Q2. Increased Mac and iPhone sales are sure to be the leading factors that propel these numbers.

What do you think? Does Apple have the Education market covered well on your campus? Can we expect new growth in this market? Let us know in the comments!

Posted in Apple, Education, Marketing, Touch, Trends, iPhone