Talking Points – Brand Guide

FOR STUDENTS

Issue a conversational/welcoming call to all life-changers and life-savers across all fields, helping prospective students to clearly see themselves in those roles.
Position AU as a launching pad for a consequential life – personally and professionally, materially and meaningfully, for students, their families, their communities, and our world.
Welcome prospects into an institution that takes them and their field of study seriously, respecting the weight and worth of the work they propose to do during their graduate or professional studies.

Disengage from comparisons with party culture or plush student amenities offered by some peer institutions; focus on relationships, learning environment, community warmth, and a defining culture of altruistic aspiration.
Explain why the college experience is different when it happens in a community of life-changers and life-savers, who are connected in their drive to help, heal, serve, create, solve, and build across every field and program.
Invite graduate and professional students into a community uncommonly driven to help, heal, serve, create, solve, and build, across all programs and student designations.

Highlight real-world, hands-on experiences, showing where rigorous classroom learning meets direct observation and participation.
Continue to directly, clearly, and proudly claim both the highest-caliber academic programs, research opportunities, and community and clinical experiences and AU’s foundational commitment to affordability, efficiency, transparency, and value.

Frame teaching and working at AU as an opportunity that offers a legacy to the next generation of those who will help, heal, serve, create, solve, and build.
Present AU as an institution that takes the potential of all its students, faculty, and staff members equally seriously.

Explain how the experience of working and teaching at a college is different when it takes place in a community of colleagues and students who are driven to make a difference.
Highlight relationships: teacher-to-student mentorships, colleague support, and connection to the communities changed and saved by each employee’s own work and by the advancement of their field.

Emphasize the pride that comes from delivering an efficient, cost-effective experience for students, which is also high-caliber, life-changing, and life-saving.
Explain how economic value translates into a stronger overall value proposition for the institution—offering greater clarity and stability in a moment when the value of higher education as a whole is increasingly called into question.