Who You Calling a Jesse?

Did marketing drive the coming meltdown in higher ed?

Seth Godin has an interesting post, The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer), where he focuses pretty strongly on the games being played in higher education to attract students and justify the huge relative increase in the cost of higher ed. Four of his five points are what everyone sees and I tend to agree. The marketing material designed to push people to apply and then (in the US) the more applications you reject the higher your rankings feeds back into the marketing material. I think that is a bit of a over-simplification of rankings but I completely agree the rankings game is one big driver of the madness in marketing.

His point on accreditation (his fifth point) has a big hole in it but there is something to this:

Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people. The question I’d ask: is the money that mass-marketing colleges are spending on marketing themselves and scaling themselves well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high? Does NYU have to get so much bigger? Why?

The access to the information might not be the value of higher education anymore but learning how to make proper sense of that information and evaluate it properly certainly is something that is very hard to learn outside of higher education. In addition to that, creating new high quality information is something academics are born to do. Certainly a lot of it is noise but nothing like the noise that I am contributing to with this blog post*. The other part, does an institution need to get bigger? Yes. But only if it is growing to build its research and commercialization activities in my mind.

For those that don’t get why we need higher ed, it comes down to who you want to rely on doing your research and driving our society in the future. Currently companies like IBM, Microsoft, Dow, 3M, etc are doing all the research in closed environments with profit as their motivation. Higher education institutions have tried to keep pace but the facilities are expensive and the space required is hard to come by for labs. Most research in higher education is open (once published) with a clear way for people to replicate the results (in Science at least). Engineers take the science, add a bit of their own, and put things together. Arts looks and how people interact with it. With marketing folks and MBAs (with the best intentions) driving the fix for the money/space problem by attracting more students the priorities of the institution appeared to have lost their way.

I agree with Seth Godin but I think a meltdown is a tad dramatic. I can see a shift back towards research and experience in Ontario at the very least. There is a recognition that the experience is what students are looking for and the research (along with commercialization of some research) is what could generate the revenue instead of tuition increases.

Like a recession, by the time you identify it you are already in the middle of it. A shift is happening, not a meltdown, but I think how much power/influence marketing folks have on the institution will diminish and the emphasis will go to the story tellers that share what value and experience really is in higher ed.

*yes there are lots of generalizations in here but I am not writing a research paper