Viewbooks have been a fixture in American higher education for decades and are an important institutional artifact. They are marketing tools for colleges, but they also tell Colorado College’s history of what they want to represent and who they want to attract. A college’s recruitment and marketing is based on the institution’s assertion of qualities that it claims for itself. How can they craft an image and identity that will attract students and develop public prestige?

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In 2008, Matthew Hartley and Christopher Morphew, Associate Professors of Education at the University of Pennsylvania graduate school of education, analyzed the content of 48 higher education viewbooks from around the nation. Through systematically gathering both qualitative and quantitative data, they identified particular themes among all of the books. They emphasize the unrealistic, idyllic haven that nearly every viewbook portrayed and identify six thematic areas that are featured in all of the viewbooks: campus features, academics, co-curricular activities, admissions, value of education, and purpose of education. Harley and Morphew suggest that there are not major differences in the marketing of liberal arts colleges because they are prescribed to the liberal arts college manifesto.

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Inspired by Harley and Morphew's research, I decided to examine Colorado College viewbooks from its creation in 1874 to the present. In an effort to understand my sense of place at Colorado College, I have to ask myself why I am here and what audience is Colorado College reaching for?

I looked at every viewbook from 1874 to 2019 that was available in Special Collections of Tutt Library. Unfortunately, there were no viewbooks between 1950 and 1980, presumably due to a lack of donated books in that period for unknown reasons. While my methodology for collecting data on the viewbooks was not as precise as Harley and Morphew, I focused my analysis on the  first few pages of every viewbook. I examined the themes that Harley and Morphew articulated and expanded on them to relate more personally to Colorado College. I attempt to contextualize the primary documents, but because I covered such a large time period it was impossible to make narrow claims. I scanned and displayed only a fraction of the viewbook pages on this website because the scope of the project is too large for my given time constraint.

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The images below the description on each page are primary documents in chronological order.

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Hartley, Matthew & Morphew, Christopher. 2008. “What's Being Sold and To What End?: A Content Analysis of College Viewbooks.” Journal of Higher Education. 79. 671-691.