Dive Brief:
- Women's rights advocacy group UltraViolet launched an online ad campaign via Facebook and Web browsers claiming that Dartmouth College has a "rape problem."
- The campaign is targeted at prospective and current students as well as alumni and has been seen 60,000 times in the last two weeks, coming as the Ivy League school is already battling a 14% decline in undergraduate applications this year.
- Dartmouth is fighting back with its own campaign, drawing attention to its efforts to combat sexual assault with harsher penalties, and those ads have been seen 204,928 times on Facebook and by 31,597 on Twitter.
Dive Insight:
Top Colleges consultant Steven Roy Goodman told Bloomberg that UltraViolet's ads could hit Dartmouth particularly hard when it comes to high-achieving students who have been accepted to several Ivy League schools. Still, it's not like Dartmouth is alone among these institutions when it comes to sexual assault issues: Harvard and Yale are also among schools that have faced significant complaints and investigations over their sexual assault responses in recent years.
Actually, it's kind of surprising that more advocacy groups haven't tried to utilize UltraViolet's tactic — or at least haven't been as highly publicized in doing so — to draw wider attention to this issue at the Ivies and beyond.