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MOOCs

By Mark N – March 28, 2013

Imagine a high school student in China. His or her family is sufficiently affluent to support an American college education in the United States. Question: Would he or she prefer to learn via MOOCs or in residence at an American institution?

More pointedly, let’s say this student is given the option of taking MOOCs produced by the very top American institutions – MIT or Stanford – or attending a somewhat less prestigious institution such as Tufts University. Which would he or she choose?

To be in residence at Tufts. Why? Because that student understands that improving social and professional prospects involves more than mastering bodies of knowledge. It also involves developing social capital, which is best, or only, acquired in a residential environment.

It is worth remembering this hypothetical as the educational world becomes besotted with MOOCs. There will always be a place for residential colleges and universities that confer valuable social capital on their students. This cannot be conferred any other way.

What is actually rearing its head in all the talk about MOOCs is the widening disparity between the education of elites and non-elites in our culture, between a premium delivery of education and a Walmart delivery of education. Do we want to endorse this? Are we comfortable consigning a large percentage of our citizenry to an education that confers no social capital and thus limits their opportunities and growth? It is worth remembering this question as we move ahead.

 

 

Posted in Access, Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Trends.

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The Coming Realignment on Diversity

By Mark N – March 23, 2013

The smart money assumes that in the next few months when the Supreme Court issues their ruling in the affirmative action case Fisher v. University of Texas there will be a major realignment in what is legal for affirmative action at colleges and universities.

At the beginning of March, the NYT published an article about liberals who secretly, or not so secretly, acknowledge the need to some adjustment. Count me among them: Regardless of how virtuous have been schools’ affirmative action initiatives over the past 30 years, it is a scandal that today, at top universities, there is such a large preference based on skin color and none based on socio-economic status. The reason for this is not nefarious: especially at the top schools, there is a bright line drawn between admissions and financial aid. Institutions do not know a candidate’s economic status when making an admissions decision and therefore have no way to take it into account. It will be fascinating to watch colleges re-structure their admissions practices so that moving forward they can deliberately recruit students from different classes and not just races.

From the perspective of marketing messages the re-alignment is not going to be difficult. Colleges will no longer speak about recruitment for racial diversity as an end in itself. They will now make the argument that education for our new globally-interconnected world requires students to learn to navigate difference – difference that includes ethnicity, nationality, culture, gender, sexual preference, and, of course, socio-economic status.

We have already begun to test this new messaging for our clients in both admissions and fundraising contexts. The fact is, it is extremely well-received. Recruitment for racial diversity as an end in itself has always been more controversial than the elite colleges like to admit. The new messaging receives a much wider favorable response and shows a clear positive way forward

The hard work will be re-engineering the processes at colleges to incorporate socio-economic diversity into the mix. The goal, however, is widely agreed upon. Personally, I am eager to get started. It will be an enormous, and overdue, step forward for higher education in this country.

 

Posted in Access, Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Secondary Schools, Trends.

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There is no such thing as underground . . .

By Mark N – March 19, 2013

This quote is too spot-on to miss. It was spoken by film director, Harmony Korine in an interview in Salon. He had been asked whether he was “selling out” for making a commercially popular picture (Spring Breakers) when his previous work had been more indie.

I know this is a marketing education blog. This quote seems to perfectly encapsulate one of the great cultural seismic shifts of our era. Are we educating students for this world? Could we?

As far as the sellout thing goes: It makes me laugh. That term means nothing anymore. This whole idea of “sellout culture” or what’s high or low culture is an old person’s thought process. It’s counter to the truth of the moment. It does not exist anymore. It’s been obliterated.

There’s no such thing as underground, no such thing as sellout. There’s nothing high. There’s nothing base. It all exists in the air. Things are either interesting or not interesting. Good or not good. Things have a connection and a grace and an energy or they don’t. That’s all I care about. The way that people watch things on the Internet and modes of viewing and creating: How could anyone say there’s such a thing as an underground anymore?

Some of the most radical work is being done in the most commercially pop venues and some of the most boring work is being done in avant-garde territory.

Well put.

 

Posted in Door No. 2, Education, Trends.

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Fixing Law Schools: An Immodest Proposal

By Mark N – March 9, 2013

Law Schools are in terrible shape: enrollments are declining as students question the wisdom of taking on a large amount of debt given uncertain job prospects for new lawyers. Of course, not all law schools are suffering. Those at the top are doing fine. But most others are being forced to retrench and retool.

I know there is a great deal of discussion at the American Bar Association about how to address this issue. Here is my own recommendation for a relatively simple and straightforward step that can improve things significantly.

My point of attack are the perverse incentives that law schools have been pursuing for the past fifteen years in response to the rankings in U.S. News & World Report. As many know, USN&WR rankings have an even more pervasive impact on law school admissions than they do at the undergraduate level. America’s 200 law schools are divided into four quartiles. Students structure their search process around the list and tend to choose the highest ranked school at which they are accepted.

The perverse incentive has to do with the large weight given in the rankings to the reputation of the school as judged by peers. It is common knowledge that law schools spend considerable time and effort attempting to influence deans and faculty at other law schools through targeted mailings and similar marketing efforts.

The impact I am talking about is more fundamental – the tendency of law schools to orient their hiring toward prolific published scholars rather than practitioners since published scholars are one of the few ways to potentially gain recognition from peer institutions. Let me be clear – there is nothing wrong with hiring a productive scholar to teach on a law school faculty. However, if that direction is taken to gain recognition from peer institutions, rather than because it is in the true interest of that institution, it is deleterious. And this is precisely what has been going on throughout the law school world for the past fifteen years.

My proposal is simple:

First, the American Bar Association should contact the economists profiled in my recent post and have them develop a ranking of law schools based on revealed preference. This is a process in which all the law school would cooperate. It would not be open to manipulation, and would entirely eliminate the perverse incentives created by the current USN&WR rankings.

Second, the 200 law schools should en masse withdraw from the USN&WR rankings. They should no longer forward institutional data nor fill out the peer evaluations.

Prospective students would still have a ranking of schools but law schools would no longer be diverted from their true missions by concern of the lists in USN&WR. This is a small but significant step that will put law schools on a positive path. They should do it today.

 

Posted in Education, Graduate & Professional Programs, Trends.

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Marketing College to Men

By Mark N – March 7, 2013

One of the seismic shifts of our time is the rise of women as the dominant educational class. Prestigious institutions, like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, still maintain a 50/50 undergraduate gender split mainly because they are so critically involved with corridors of power, which still remain, as we know, predominantly male. But if special steps were not taken, they’d likely more resemble The University of North Carolina that is now almost 60% female.

There is a gender bias as well in educational marketing. So long as I’ve been conducting market research, there are noticeable differences between men and women. You moderate a focus group and ask what young high school students think about the materials sent out by college X, and the young women will generally tell you. They recall receiving the materials and have spent time reviewing them. Invariably there is a guy, if not several, who say something like, “Viewbooks? I never look at ‘em. Nor websites. I don’t have any recollections whatsoever.”

And although this male response is kindof lame, and the female response is much more substantial, we tend to do a little post-focus-group re-centering to make them equal. We report back to our client that many students tend to ignore the materials they work so hard to produce. We valorize the male response as valid and significant.

What if we didn’t? What if we just labelled it for what it is – lame – and dismissed several people in the focus group for being so inattentive that they had no meaningful response?

Well, of course, the gender split and colleges and universities would get even more pronounced and our inattentive guys would fall even further behind.

Years ago, when I was just starting out, I met a Chemistry professor at Oberlin who had a pet theory that any educational marketing, regardless of content, would exacerbate the imbalance between men and women, because women were more likely to be paying attention and so be impacted by the marketing messages. At the time, I did my best to resist his argument. Fifteen years later, I’m ready to admit he was right.

 

Posted in Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice.

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Work-study

By Mark N – March 5, 2013

Today’s New York Times published a letter from a philosophy professor at Brown about work-study. Here it is:

To the Editor:

Re “College Admission Roulette: Ask for Financial Aid, or Not?” (Wealth Matters column, March 2):

As a professor, I am dismayed that colleges sometimes use “a large portion of loans and campus jobs” to meet the needs of students whose families cannot pay full tuition.

Working part time while attending school can be a good arrangement for a student whose classmates are in the same situation and whose professors, when giving assignments, take into account the likelihood that most students have part-time jobs.

But expecting a student to take a part-time job at a campus where this is not the norm sets him up for failure by giving him less time for study than his classmates have.

FELICIA NIMUE ACKERMAN
Providence, R.I., March 3, 2013

I’m not sure what to say about this – quaint? touchingly deluded? For the life of me I can’t figure out why the New York Times devoted precious inches to this.

Those of use who study higher education student culture understand fully that students don’t use large chunks of their waking hours on studying – certainly not enough to preclude a parttime job or varsity sports involvement. Does this faculty member’s fantastic idea of how her students spend their time outside of class matter? Probably not. She only inadvertently reinforces a privileged view of her institution (I think).

Posted in Access, Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education.

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A New College List

By Mark N – February 23, 2013

There was notice last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education of a new college ranking developed by a collaboration of four prominent university economists. The list was produced independent of data supplied by colleges themselves, based instead on the “revealed preference” of matriculating students – in head-to-head match-ups between, say, Harvard and Princeton, how many students selected the former and how many the latter? Although the paper itself is only available to subscribers of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, you can read a working version of the paper and see the list here.

This list is certainly provocative but, as the authors acknowledge, not definitive because it is only based on a survey of 3,240 college-bound students. If their method was formally adopted by a consortium of top colleges and universities, it would be relatively easy to compile a much larger database and a more definitive list.

There are a few obvious advantages to the approach advocated in this article. One, it removes the arbitrary distinction in US News & World Report between “national liberal arts colleges” and “national universities.” In terms of student behavior, this distinction has little relevance. It is more accurate to produce a single list of top schools regardless of their Carnegie classification.

A second even greater advantage, touted by the authors of the article, is that their approach largely removes the potential for colleges to manipulate the rankings through their own actions, such as by accepting a large fraction of their class through binding early-decision programs.

For this second reason alone, the approach, or something akin to it, cannot be implemented quickly enough. Do colleges really enjoy the backflips and contortions they tie themselves into trying to gain advantage in the current US News & World Report rankings? Certainly not. They should all band together and endorse this alternate approach.

But will they? It is extremely unlikely and here’s why – although the top ranked schools benefit enormously from the prestige implied in the pecking order in US News & World Report, and although virtually every school in the top 50 spends time and money trying to secure and improve their ranking, at the same time, virtually all the top schools deny the validity of ranking scales whatsoever. They do not believe that you can judge the quality of an education based on a ranking system.

They may be right but in this they part company with their audience. Those who attend top colleges and universities believe rankings are valid. Why? Given the virtual impossibility of understanding the actual value of the education at one institution over another, most families assume that the popularity of an institution is a valid proxy for its quality. They believe that if more students are attracted to one institution over another, that says something valid about the “value” of an education there.

When you listen to these cosumers talk in focus groups, it is hard to completey dismiss their perspective. Indeed, very intelligent and highly educated people, even folks who work at colleges and universities themselves, believe this use of rankings is valid. But colleges and universities are officially invested in the view that rankings are invalid. They at once cow-tow to the rankings through their actions and dismiss them. As long as they behave in this way, there won’t be any reform and, unfortunately, the schools will be left with the status quo, regardless of how much they say they universally dislike it.

Posted in Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice.

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Consumerism in College Admissions

By Mark N – December 30, 2011

In the spirit of the season . . .

One of the great distortions in the selective college admissions process is the extent to which young people who desire entry to highly selective institutions treat the process like a prestige commodity purchase. They know that getting into a top school is not one of life’s necessities. No, it is a highly desirable bauble – an all important confirmation of one’s status in a materialistic and prestige-driven community.

There are two problems with this – one obvious and one perhaps a little less obvious. The obvious problem is that in treating the college selection process like a prestige commodity purchase, young people obtain a distorted view of the institutions they are considering. They tend to look at the wrong things – for example, the opulence of a dorm room on the college tour – and overlook important things that will actually impact the quality of their experience once they get to college.

The less obvious problem is that in taking a consumerist approach to college admissions, young people actually diminish their chances of getting in. The admissions officers who function as gatekeepers generally do not live in super-affluent communities, are not highly paid, and recoil from the thought that their institutions are little more than prestige commodities. The worst thing you can do if you actually want to go to one of these institutions is to telegraph through word or deed that you see entry as primarily a glittering prize.

None of this is particularly new or earth-shattering, but I’d like to add an additional thought. Although admissions officers recoil from the idea that their institutions are nothing more than prestige commodities, their marketing products – the elaborate viewbooks and on-line animations – can (inadvertently) reinforce that perception. With skill and savvy, it is possible to use your marketing to do the opposite – to undermine the commodification of higher education and convey a sense of an authentic educational experience. What a wonderful New Years resolution that would be – to make an effort to be conscious of and resistent to the role marketing plays in the commodification of higher education. Happy New Year to all. I hope it offers many opportunities to make a difference in our lives, families, and communities.

 

Posted in Colleges & Universities, Door No. 2, Education, Marketing Research & Practice.

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Typekit and Academic Websites

By Mark N – December 21, 2011

It’s been two years since Typekit launched their service for embedding non-system fonts into websites. Today it is possible, as never before, to build a website that takes advantage of the thousands of fonts also available in the print design world.

I’m not sure what the longterm implications of this innovation will be. Readability might actually suffer, since many of the print fonts do not perform particularly well in on-line environments. Will we someday look back nostalgically at the clarity and readability of Georgia and Verdana?

One thing that is clear is that your potential for projecting a brand personality on the Web has just expanded exponentially. The chances are now quite good that whatever fonts are stipulated in your graphic standards manual can be used throughout your website as well as in print.

Working with my talented colleagues at Door No. 2, we just launched a college website that takes advantage of Typekit’s capabilities. The website for DePauw University uses the same two typefaces – Adobe Caslon and Futura – that are used throughout the college’s print program. If you haven’t explored the potential offered by Typekit, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes poking around the site. You will find the same style sheets, employing, for example, the rather stylized Caslon Italic, operating throughout the site (save the athletics pages). This alters the user experience. To me, the site feels a bit less utilitarian and a bit more pleasurable. It certainly has a different impact than a site with more traditional style sheets.

As I wrote in my last post, the emergence of Typekit makes it pressing to review one’s identity manual to evaluate the applicability of your current typefaces to the Web. From here on out, graphic standard systems will need to take the Web side of the house seriously. We now have the potential to employ the same fonts in both Web and print. It’s up to the university or school communications teams to review the fonts that are currently being used, and retain or replace them. The convergence of Web and print technologies offers enormous potential for expanding the reach of one’s brand image. It’s up to institutions to take advantage of this great potential.

 

Posted in Branding, Design Aesthetics, Marketing Research & Practice, Trends.

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Updating Your Visual Identity System

By Mark N – November 28, 2011

What do I mean when I say “visual identity system?” I mean a set of graphic design parameters that an organization follows to give all their communications a family resemblance. Normally, such a system will consist of 1) a logo or system of logos, 2) specific colors, 3) stipulated font families, and possibly 4) design templates and grids for producing brochures. Ideally such a system covers both web and print applications although many apply predominantly to print. Sometimes the systems are produced then sit on a shelf gathering dust but sometimes they actually become the rulebook for an institution’s communications. Here’s a PDF of one I produced several years ago for Tufts.

So the question arises – how long is one of these things good for? Or alternatively, if I produced an identity system a while ago, does it need to be refreshed or can I just stick with it?

The answer is you should refresh it. If you produced an identity system more than five years ago, you should undertake a review of the system and consider updating it to fit evolving design tools and sensibilities.

What I am not talking about here is changing your logo. That’s not a refresh. That’s a new identity system. You only want to do that when the previous work was inadequate or inconsistent with your current strategic goals.

But even if you think your identity system is working well and you like your logo and your colors, it’s worth updating it to extend its useful life.

The main catalyst for such a review are dramatic developments over the past few years in font design and capabilities. The greatest of these is the ability, through services such as Typekit, to employ a wide range of fonts on the Web. Five or six years ago this capability did not exist, and most designers spec’ed Verdana, Georgia, Arial or similar fonts for Web applications. Today, the world of print typefaces has opened up for Web application. That doesn’t mean that all of these fonts are appropriate for the Web. But it does mean that it’s worth reviewing your system to see whether there are new ways to build a stronger shared identity between your print and Web communications.

There have also been enormous strides in font design over the past few years that give designers many new tools for excellence in design. Adobe, among others, has produced new font families that support corporate branding goals much more comprehensively with both serif’ed and sans-serif’ed communciations. An institution should not make a change simply for novelty’s sake. Consistency of appearance is what a good identity system is all about. But if you are operating with a set of fonts that a communications firm gave you several years ago, the chances are good that there are new fonts that might give your institution a better tool kit.

While you’re undertaking this review, it’s worth looking at the new colors that Pantone has released to see whether any of those can support your color system.

None of this is radical, or indeed, high priority work. I worry, therefore, that most institutions won’t go to the trouble However, if you want to keep your communications professional and effective, it’s worth reviewing and  updating your identity system from time to time – not to alter the design sensibility or intention, but to take advantage of new resources and the ways that design is evolving.

 

Posted in Branding, Design Aesthetics, Door No. 2.

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