Creating homemade #highered solutions in a fast-food world.

I was having a conversation the other day with another friend who works in higher ed communications. She was telling me how she didn’t really think much of what was targeted at higher ed folks was really related to her being at a small, rural serving school.

It went something like this, “At what point do you just say the hell with all of it? I mean, I don’t have a big budget or lots of people at my disposal. I can only do so much in a day/week/year. When is enough just enough?”

Well, I think it’s important to consider just what cutting edge is. I remember this Air Force instructor once telling me that “we don’t measure everyone’s success here on the same scale. We understand that some people start from way back and for them to reach a higher standard takes a lot more than some other people.”

As you consider your own higher education challenges, this seems like relevant advice. Not every school has to take every idea they watch on #higheredlive or read in eduguru and immediately try to implement it. It’s no different than watching a cooking show. Work with me and I’ll try to illustrate.

Celebrity chefs make it look easy. They show the right way to do it and whip it up real nice. When you do it at home, it probably doesn’t look as good and the reactions from those in your house might not match those on the TV screen. (For instance, if your kids or significant others are fussy eaters, expect grimaces…) It’s no different than trying to sell something new to your own constituencies. You’ll get some grumbling and some grimaces. Working in the kitchen will get hot at times.

What I told her is that the key to evaluating the cutting edge doesn’t have to reach some sort of bleeding edge. You don’t have to measure your award-winning project against one that cost six times what yours did at a school far away from where you are. It’s about assessing your own institutional realities, challenges and goals to craft solutions that are relevant.

This conversation prompted an email where I wrote something worth sharing here:

1. Do your homework: If you know the institution, you’ll be able to really assess what’s wrong and how to fix it in a responsive way rather than a reactionary one. Your awesome project might be great for your resume and make a great topic, but the ones that resonate actually fix problems and give us a reason to listen.

2. Find Allies: This should be whoever you work for and/or with, but the whole adage of more heads together rings true here.

3. Plan: Here’s a four-letter word that you need to learn to love. It can be easy to want to shoot from the hip and just start doing things. But you can’t know your direction or communicate it, without knowing where you want to go and why.

We can learn from experts and let their insights guide us. But when it comes down to it, you have to run your own kitchen. Small steps are often better than no steps at all, but you have to plot where you want to go if you want to get there.

The bottom line is recognizing that you can’t make someone else’s wins necessarily fit you. It doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them; pick and carve what work.

Marketing College in Dystopia

This isn’t the title to a science fiction story I’m writing. It is the story playing out right now in the court of public opinion. In the wake of the New York Times story earlier this week about the crush of student loan debt load in the U.S., I was struck by a lot of the comments by people who’d gone to college in the 1980s who lamented the hightail lifestyle of students who “live in palatial suites, trying to maintain middle class lifestyles in college” and “major in useless subjects like ethnic studies and philosophy.” (Because business is apparently a lot better?)

This isn’t news to most folks who’ve been around higher education. With the news bubbling to the surface, it’s a conversation that’s going to end up in more offices and meeting rooms. The usual answers won’t be enough and often the people charged with putting a shine on the dullness of a particular scenario don’t get a lot of say in the mechanics of the actual changes. (Which themselves might be hampered by other issues…)

My big question is, amidst these doomsday conversations and the shift to develop more market-relevant programming at cash-poor colleges, are there broader implications for how folks in higher education marketing make the case for the true value of a college education to debt-riddled millennials and their future children?

College marketing has changed beyond just the superficial changes to the application process and the rise of the social web. Marketing to a generation that’s been weaned on products more than ever before, boast more disposal income than their youthful predecessors and are being born to the parents who increasingly boast their own debt loads in the tens of thousands.

There’s been a decent buzz in hacker circles (and others) about Paypal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel effectively calling out higher education.

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Thiel started a program giving twenty people under 20 $100,000 to start a company if they drop out of college. He has plenty of supporters who think this is just what’s needed to disrupt the grip college has on future prospects for young people who they believe don’t need it. Others disagree.

It’s something we haven’t questioned much, because for a lot of us we’ve seen the demonstrable effects of what a college education can do in a competitive world. It’s not about the degree itself. It’s a combination of access to perspectives, relationships and opportunities that you simply don’t get sitting at your local coffee shop, at your house or without access to capital.

These are all good things and I’m sure folks are thinking of many more. But how do you make the compelling marketing case for absorbing (sometimes) massive debt? The global economy has changed the game for a lot of folks. Is it just an issue of motivation? Willing students to choose more “practical” programs? 

What ought to be more practical is the approach to marketing a world dominated by sound-bites and user-generated content. Outcomes are fine, but they’re not the only thing people need to see. In a fractured world, it seems the best way to combat misinformation is to provide real information. It takes work, it takes time and the sort of patience and creativity that doesn’t often get stimulated.

If we don’t look under some rocks to uncover it, the fallout is going to be something that surprises people and there won’t be anything left to do but pick up the pieces.