College "pop up" ads

Dont know about the rest of you folks, but I have low regards for any college/university that resorts to internet "pop up" ads! UOP, Strayer and others need to be on Ebay, right next to the guy trying to sell a 1972 Toyota Celica! They smack of cheapness, and seemingly slipped through the cracks somehow!
-Gavin
RA...my A**!

 

why insult the Celica?

 

This is an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, many people react as Buckwheat did, that pop-up ads for universities demean the image of those schools. The other side of the dilemma is that they work, and they work very well. Schools, like other businesses, are sensitive to what works and does not when it comes to marketing. If pop-up ads didn't work, they'd drop them in a minute.

I've never seen one. I installed Google Taskbar and enabled pop-up blocking. I've seen but a handful of pop-ups in the year since.

 

Buckwheat,

I know this is sorta off topic, but did you transfer any graduate hours into the Master of Liberal Studies (History) program at Fort Hays State University. I think(IIRC) that you are working on your degree there. I didnt see this in the literature( it may be there, and I not see it), but how many graduate hours can you transfer into the program. Also, good luck in the program to you.

 

I strongly agree. Frankly, if schools advertise that way, I just automatically assume that they are bottom-of-the-barrel and academically borderline.

I think that there's a law of nature: If a school uses pop-up ads, then nobody with that institutional affiliation ever publishes, collaborates, or wins academic awards and grants. These kind of schools resemble businesses selling a product (graduate degrees in business usually) more than they resemble conventional universities.

 

Re: Re: College "pop up" ads

I really agree with this. Where I worked, UoP, there was a very strong emphasis on meeting standards. Believe, me, students worked hard for their degrees. But there was absolutely no interest in excellence. Academic departments and individual faculty members were never measured for it. It just wasn't on the administration's radar.

UoP reminds me of the corporate training environment. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good in that. But they had one extra dollar, and could spend it either on academics or enrollments, you can bet where it would go.

The only way UoP strived for excellence in academics was in the hiring and approval processes for faculty. Those could get pretty stringent. But institutional processes to create it? No way.

Oh, and I think that aggressive enrollment processes (with enrollment counselors promoted based on productivity) denigrates the product, just as pop-up ads do.

I left full-time UoP employment because of opportunities to earn a lot more. But that shouldn't have been. I'm nothing special, and a corporation as large as UoP should have been able to hold on to me. Except that it didn't matter. They took one look at my first offer (not the one I subsequently took) and wished me well. Oh, and they asked if I would keep teaching....

 

And I very rarely see them as well since I installed the Mozilla Firefox browser.



Tom Nixon

 

Like it or not, believe it or not, admit it or not, almost ALL colleges and universities are competing for market share and selling a product.

I've found this isn't just my experience at schools I've been employed; my colleagues at other institutions share similar stories.

Colleges and universities advertise, hire recruiters, use marketing firms, etc., just like companies trying to sell you toothpaste or your next car. Does that demean the school? Not necessarily. Depends on how good their product is!

 

I've made this argument in defense of proprietary schools, and I think its a good one. But the point I was making is that these schools don't do anything to advance the field of higher education. They teach, and they often teach well. But they don't do outstanding things, either with/for their students or any one else. This is sad.

 

And what is that product, exactly?

Higher education, particularly at the graduate level, isn't just a warehoue full of... stuff... that schools market like Walmart sells socks.

If the goal is to prepare students to be creative in their profession, to not only regurgitate other people's ideas but to have some original ideas of their own, then schools have to be interested in something more than sales and revenue.

When I Google schools, there seem to be two broad classes:

One one hand, there are the schools that produce countless graduates, all of which seemingly come out of... nowhere, with no hint of the process that generated them.

On the other hand, there are the kind of places where people actually think about stuff, do things and receive recognition.

Ideally, a university should be an intellectually lively place. Students need to be exposed to the research process and given the opportunity to interact with more experienced people who are doing original work in their field. Even if students are just sent off to work by themselves, there should be some kind of evidence of their labors.

***************

Art professor creates art installations with computers and robots and serves on the editorial board of 'Leonardo':

http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/rolodex/wilson.stephen.html

2001 Excellence in Teaching Classics Award of the American Philological Association

http://www.apaclassics.org/education/awards/etca2001.html

Fourth Bi-Annual Conference on Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity

http://www.sc.edu/ltantsoc/sf4.htm

The Sutro Egyptian Collection:

http://humanities.sfsu.edu/museumst/sutro/

Cihuatan archaeological project

http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbruhns/cihuatan/

DNA fingerprinting at the zoo

http://www.sfzoo.org/cgi-bin/content.py?childID=40

Agaracales of the Hawaiian Islands

http://www.mycena.sfsu.edu/pages/hawaiian/Agaricales.html

Planetary Companion to 16Cygni B

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/issues/ApJ/v483n1/35587/sc0.html

Blue whales all sing at the same pitch

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/05/0517_040517_bluewhales.html

Genetic Variation and Phylogeography of Central Asian and Other House Mice

http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/abstract/150/2/835

The Search for Optical Counterparts of Chandra Sources in Omega Centauri

http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v34n4/aas201/18.htm

 

You've read my concerns about UoP's striving for adequacy, not excellence. But something else troubles me a lot more.

UoP doesn't have a placement program. None at all. It is inconceivable to me that the largest private university in the country, one with a quarter of a million students, isn't connected at all to the employment community. Ironic, since UoP strives to make clients out of employers, running career fairs and the like. UoP even has what they call "business development specialists" who work the corporate environment for prospects.

This disconnection is troubling not because UoP graduates cannot use their degrees. Far from it. It troubles me because it is one more example of UoP not caring enough about academics to stand behind them. Employers are one of three consumers of higher education (students and the general public being the other two). It is hard to accept that UoP is so dismissive of them.

Some might say that this is natural because UoP students are already employed. True, but irrelevant. Students often pursue degrees to change careers, or to advance in their present careers by either getting promoted or by taking better jobs. Connecting employers with graduates would not only serve to promote these changes, it would also better connect UoP to the corporate world.

But, no.

 

Rich has a lot of valid points!

 

Buckwheat has a point about Rich having a lot of valid points!

 

Rich,
Your points are well taken, but I wonder if UoP just believes it has carved out a niche, and that niche wouldn't be served by aggressively using placement as a service (as opposed to Sullivan University system, as just one example). Not saying I agree with their philosophy, just wondering about a possible plank of it.

 

I have no idea. UoP is certainly in its growth phase (and has been so for decades). Companies sustaining rapid growth tend to forgoe efficiencies, striving instead to fuel the growth. Money spent on developing and delivering a placement program, for example, will be invested in opening new campuses instead, making more money in return.

This also means that such companies also do without improvements to infrastructures, meaning they're slow to improve their processes. Again, the capital necessary for such improvements is sunk into growing, which brings better returns. They tend to pay low salaries, rewarding people with promotions instead (and stock). Companies like that tend to place a low value on their human capital, with accompanying high turnover rates. (I have no data on UoP's turnover, but there seemed to be a dichotomy: ambitious people take promotions and move around the country, or they leave UoP; another group of employees just settle and stay put.) Enrollment counselors, of course, are the exception. They can double their salaries over time if successful. The company "promotes" them in place; their duties don't change, just their compensation. Not exactly working on commission, but highly motivated to enroll each person!

Getting back to placement services, there are only two ways UoP would consider implementing them. Either UoP projects a rate of return on that investment as being better than they could get elsewhere (unlikely, given their growth), or they bend to pressure from students, state regulators, employers, and/or accreditors. And that doesn't seem to be happening.

I know this has drifted off topic, and I did the drifting....sorry.

 

The University of Chicago and Northwestern University in Illinois periodically place circulars in the newspapers. I get direct mailers from them as well.

Pop-up ads are only slightly tackier, in my humble opinion.

 

Let me speculate a bit. UoP gets major part of its revenue from employer tuition reimbursement programs, right? Then, won't placement services (that will aid in and encourage employees to change jobs) run against best interests of the very people that actually write checks?

 

Most colleges and universities have endowments, while UOP has research and development.
I feel sure UOP serves a valuble niche to many people seeking a degree, but pop up ads with their tuition rates??? I wouldn't be at all surprised in a few years they come under fire in the same manner Tyco did in regards to their infamous Toga party.
Simply put, they need to tone it down a bit!
Gavin

 

Not until it'll start affecting their stock price.

 

I don't understand either of these. First, what "research and development"? Market research? Product development? Perhaps. But according to Richard Ruch in "Higher Education, Inc.," schools like UoP gain approximately 95% of their revenues from tuition. (Compared to 40% for private, non-profits and 17% for state-run schools.)

Tuitions are high because that's what the market will bear. By the way, a year of (undergraduate) school at the University of Puget Sound costs $26,000 in tuition. That's about a grand a credit, depending on the student's course load!

As for the comparison to Tyco, that is unfortunate, but inaccurate. There is nothing to indicate such behavior at UoP. In fact, the opposite. UoP is a company that throws nickels around like manhole covers.

UoP might be the market leader, but they're not the only school in the business. When that movie came out about the guy who got fat eating at McDonald's all day every day, don't think the guys at Burger King were laughing. They were sweating.