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

How to screw up the higher education system in Ontario

The Ontario Premier made his speech the other day that gave a big nod to the need for a stronger education system (no mention of the money to do it btw) but along with nod came some silly goals that demonstrate a clear misunderstanding with the state of higher education in Ontario. The globecampus.ca blog outlines some issues but I think it misses the point, we need revolution in education not just more bums in seats.

Here’s my view of the world (simplified/generalize for effect):

• Universities are tooled to create more academics, other outcomes besides professional accreditation are unintentional.
• The government has given money to build buildings over the last 10 years – not lecture halls but buildings – and no money to maintain the buildings.
• Budget cuts have peeled away operating budget of departments over 10 years but the pressure to deliver more has seen staff being hired without the flexibility or ability to look at how things fit within the larger organization.
• Staff are better educated than in the past and in many cases more skilled than the academics yet are seen as second class citizens within the organization.
• Most academics want to teach, do research, and focus on their vocation – they do not want to recruit, do marketing or communications, manage staff outside of their research group, or be a department chair, associate dean, or dean.
• Research funds rarely contribute to the well being of the institution or teaching. Heck they likely don’t pay for the power consumption of the toys they buy.
• Academic time and process rewards mediocracy and we all know mediocre products are crap (I say this while looking at my UW degree).
• Students are paying way too much in tuition and have earned the right to view higher education as a service not an earned place that expects, requires, and rewards hard work (not with a job but with that little warm feeling you get, currently most students think only about jobs).
• Like all of the publicly funded jobs, the leaders are gone or in the process of being chased out. As we head out of the recession a new exodus of the employable from public service will most certainly occur.

To tackle these things takes breaking out of the mediocre and into some pretty crazy thinking. We need to take risks, experiment, and challenge the establishment that is almost dysfunctional outside a few pockets of brilliance. What the Ontario government is offering is more of the same—rhetoric, promises, and likely funds earmarked and the established system not a revolution.

Of course that isn’t for the government to dictate. We need to figure this out and we need the leaders within higher education that are willing to do so. I see glimpses of it but I fear we won’t really go for it as there is little appetite or motivation to break out of the crisis management culture and throw away status quo. However, if I was king of higher education this is what I would try:

• Remove administrative or managerial positions that are just appointments of academics—make them apply against other professionals
• Create a product management office, force them on the world with a mandate to train people to think about their products and projects.
• Put post-docs in the classroom, formalize a new class of research focused academics which they are associated with and require them to ship a new product or service every 2-3 years
• Create a hybrid of distance education and intense campus education along with co-op
• Move staff from the silos of departments to special team pools that can charge out for services and rotate throughout campus (modern take on secretarial pools)—that way you can rally on time sensitive pushes and build expertise along with campus wide perspective
• Service Level Agreements
• More programs and services to students that are not related directly to academics but tied more to the local community (build more VeloCities).

Could be all crazy ideas but I would like to try at least one or two of them We need to think differently about higher education and how we function institutionally. If we continue down the cut backs, hand outs, and status quo we will surely self destruct within a generation.

Disclaimer: I would say this openly on campus and I am pretty sure it may offend some but these are thoughts being thrown out there. We need to start thinking and trying things.