Are you tough enough to attend Wheelock College, an 850 student,  predominantly female college in Boston? Wheelock, along with Suffolk University, another Boston school, realizes it can’t compete with the prestige of neighboring Harvard and MIT, so they’re trying a new angle: appeal to the working class and level some snark at white collar trust fund babies.

Read more about this odd marketing campaign in Charlie Tyson’s article at Inside Higher Ed:

Boston institutions try to grab attention with provocative marketing efforts

Each fall, Boston’s population swells by a quarter-million. With 34 colleges and universities in Boston proper, and many more in the surrounding area – from Harvard University, the nation’s oldest, to the Urban College of Boston, founded in 1993 – the city expands and contracts as students come and go.

With so many rivals close by, the city’s colleges and universities must jostle for elbow room. Two private institutions – Wheelock College, an 850-student predominantly female college, and Suffolk University, a 9,000-student institution with working-class roots – have launched unusual marketing campaigns in a bid to grab attention. Both appeal to working-class students in the region, for whom any private institution may appear expensive compared to public options.

Wheelock has eschewed the well-trodden images of smiling students sitting on a grassy quad. Instead — on its website, on billboards and on the sides of Boston buses — the college has opted for black-and-white close-ups of unsmiling students, framed by the words: “Are you tough enough?”

Suffolk’s strategy is more irreverent. One ad jabs at snobby students: “while most of our students don’t have trust funds, they do have a work ethic.” Another ad declares: “Suffolk students rely on their will to succeed, not their father’s will.”