Community College of Philadelphia announces rebranding campaign to attract and retain students: ‘Rise from Within’

The ad features a student, the straps of a backpack on his shoulders and a look of determination on his face, with the words “Rise from within” against a bright yellow backdrop.

Nothing could tout the look and feel of Community College of Philadelphia better, said Sabriya Marshall, a student who provided feedback on the college’s rebranding campaign, more than two years in the making.

“Ultimately, it’s up to you to further your education,” said Marshall, 35, a health studies major from South Philadelphia. “You have to rise from within. Sometimes you’re not left with anything else.”

» READ MORE: ‘Colonial Phil’ is out as Community College of Philadelphia’s longtime mascot; ‘Roary,’ the lion, is in

The college unveiled its new logo, website, tagline and ads on Thursday at a campus block party, featuring food, music and lots of free new swag, including sunglasses and T-shirts. Images are beginning to appear on billboards, buses, digital screens outside subway stations, even on pizza boxes. High school counselors will receive new CCP pennants.

It comes as the college continues to try to recover enrollment lost during and before the pandemic and combat an erroneous notion or stigma that community college is like 13th grade.

“It can be perceived unfairly as a fallback option rather than a destination of choice,” said Shannon McLaughlin Rooney, vice president of enrollment management and strategic communications.

College officials hope the campaign will attract more students and help retain the ones who already attend by building even more pride in the institution.

“It’s a very crowded space, not just in the community college and public higher education sector across the commonwealth, but right here in Philadelphia and the surrounding area,” said CCP president Donald Guy Generals. “There are a lot of colleges. So we have to be deliberate and proactive in pronouncing our existence and who we are and what we do.”

» READ MORE: Community colleges fueled much of the enrollment growth seen this year for the first time since the pandemic

CCP hit its enrollment peak of 19,119 students in 2014. A decline ensued, quickening after the pandemic hit, and falling to 11,636 in fall 2022. But last fall, it began to rise again to 12,224, a 5% increase.

The college last rebranded in 2006. In 2019, it unveiled a new mascot, Roary the Lion, who replaced Colonial Phil.

» READ MORE: City-funded scholarships make community college free for Philly students: ‘Honestly, I don’t think I’d be in school’ without it

The new logo features a large “P” for the Philadelphia in Community College of Philadelphia.

“We’re leaning into the P, installing CCP as one of the iconic P’s in the city,” Rooney said. It’s “a way to talk about ourselves that will reflect the pride we have in being a real vital component of this city.”

The base of the “P” looks like the number one to reflect “one college, one city, one community,” Rooney said.

The college consulted with faculty, staff and city stakeholders about what they thought the college’s brand should be and talked with groups of students, Rooney said. It also got help from some external agencies.

At one point in the school’s history, the college’s colors coincided with the city’s blue and yellow, then moved into black and gold during the 2006 campaign, Rooney said. The new look features both.

The college is planning to paint and landscape on campus to match the colors. In all, the new campaign will cost the college several hundred thousand dollars, Rooney said, noting that much of the work is being done in-house.

The campaign also will feature poems from alumni, some of whom had participated in the college’s “Drop the Mic” spoken word poetry competition. The poets were hired and commissioned to write works that would capture the spirit of the new brand, Rooney said.

One is by Eboni Ferguson, 39, who graduated in 2017 with a degree in communications and theater.

“We stand resilient as a community of leaders with brilliant ideas ... teaching us to be bold and unapologetic ...,” Ferguson said with emotion in one of the ads that will run. “Published author, screenwriter, movie director straight out of community college.”

Ferguson, who recently completed her first film about the city, which was edited by New York Times bestselling author Omar Tyree, said in an interview that she loved participating in CCP’s spoken word poetry event, which she described as the heartbeat of the college.

“If theater and poetry had a baby, it would be me,” she said.

Ferguson said her sister, who also attended CCP, now has her doctorate.

“You can do anything you want if you make the best of it,” she said. “People think that community college is the easy way out and it is not. They are not easy on us here.”

» READ MORE: North Philly to Oxford: College once seemed unlikely for Hazim Hardeman. Here’s how he became CCP and Temple’s first Rhodes scholar.

Hazim Hardeman, CCP’s and Temple University’s first Rhodes scholar, has said the same thing. He got his start at CCP. It was in the college’s honors program that, Hardeman said, he began “falling in love with the life of the mind.”

The college in 2020 announced the creation of a city-funded scholarship program to help city residents from low- and moderate-income families afford CCP. The scholarship program is named after Philadelphia educator and civil rights activist Octavius Catto.

To continue to build the new brand, CCP in the fall plans to unveil a bronze lion statue near the athletic center. College officials hope students will proudly take their picture with the lion and post it on social media — just as people do with Pennsylvania State University’s Nittany Lion.