Southwestern Advantage

American marketing company

Southwestern Advantage (formerly known as Southwestern Company), is an education material sales company based in Nashville, TN. The privately owned company recruits college and university students as independent contractors to sell educational books, apps, and website subscriptions door to door using direct selling methods. Southwestern Advantage is part of the Southwestern Family of Companies.

In 1855, Southwestern Publishing House was established in Nashville, Tennessee. The company's name reflected its location at the time, in the southwestern part of the United States. Founded by Baptist minister, James Robinson Graves, the company originally published a Southern Baptist newspaper as well as religious pamphlets that were distributed by mail. In 2022, Southwestern Advantage President Dan Moore retired. He worked for the company as a student representative in 1974 and earned enough to pay his tuition at Harvard University. After graduating with a B. A. in government, he joined Southwestern Advantage as a district sales manager. Every year, the company recruits American and European university students to work as independent contractors who sell educational books, software, and subscription websites during the summer months. Sales areas are predominantly suburban or rural. The company operates on a direct sales platform, where wages are solely determined by sales revenue minus expenses and costs of goods sold; they do not offer employee benefits or guaranteed pay. Students are responsible for their expenses (like food and gas) while operating in the field during the selling season, and foreign students must pay for their visas and airfare themselves. Some universities consider the program an internship eligible for college credits. The commission rate for most dealers is 40%. Attendance to weekly Sunday meetings with managers are also not mandatory, but if a meeting space is rented, dealers are encouraged to pay $10–20 each to share expenses. In 2019, student dealers represented over 240 college and university campuses around the world. an anti traveling sales crew bill intended to stop companies from putting their workers in dangerous and unfair conditions. The bill was passed, but in a form that applies only to sales workers who travel in groups of two or more.

Harvard University banned Southwestern from recruiting on its campus in 1977 for "irregular recruiting activities", though four years later Southwestern resumed recruiting despite this ban. In 2005, the University of Maryland banned Southwestern from recruiting on its campus; as of 2009, however, the university continued to receive complaints against the company. In the UK University of Durham's campus in 2005, the Durham Students' Union, stating that the "Southwestern Company 'experience' is not marketed as openly as it could be, and some students may be misled", banned Southwestern from Dunelm House and mandated the union president "to liaise with Southwestern Books to work towards marketing which is clearer and to ask the company to develop its recruitment process to ensure Durham students are aware of the risks and pressures that the job entails." The Guild of Students at the University of Birmingham passed a motion in May 2006 banning the company from its premises and encouraging the university to do the same. In 2010, the University of Idaho announced that Southwestern Advantage is prohibited from recruiting on campus due to misconduct and violation of university and Career Center policies after several complaints were issued, which were deemed "valid" by the campus' career center director. A non binding motion was passed at the 2010 AGM of the Students Association at the University of Edinburgh, banning the company from all union premises.