Stoffer's Soapbox

MIT Admissions Head Resigns

Of all people, you would not expect Marilee Jones, the MIT Admissions head, to resign due to falsifying academic credentials. At MIT, Jones created the most technologically savvy admissions website in the industry, making liberal use of blogs and web2.0 technology to give potential students ways to learn more about the school by interacting with current students, faculty and staff. Moreover, she was a leader in urging today's children to look beyond the rat race of the college admissions process. In doing so, "She rewrote MIT’s application, trying to get students to reveal more about their personalities and passions, and de-emphasizing lists of their accomplishments."

With Jones gone, we need more leaders to carry the mantle for what Jones stood for: developing well-rounded young adults and using technology to help potential students understand their school options

What is particularly sad here is the erosion of trust this propagates. It is an unfortunate statement on today's state of affairs that employers need to verify every degree and professional experience an applicant has had. I prefer to trust people at their word - but in today's world it seems this is a dangerous thing to continue to do.

Professional Services Opportunity?: Helping universities launch online programs

Do traditional schools have core competencies in building a lead buying plan, managing call centers, consultative sales in an outbound environment, processing financial aid in volume over the phone or developing multimedia courseware?

Of course not - but that is precisely what they need to do if they hope to achieve the same success as Umass, UMUC and South New Hampshire State University in bringing their programs online (see my post Traditional Schools Moving Online). Given the trends stated by Eduventures and others, students prefer to go to get even their online education from schools with ground campuses nearby. But there is not a single services firm out there that can provide the full range of services needed to assist these schools in launching an online education platform.

Right now, colleges would have to use a patchwork of services to get online delivery up and running -

• Buy leads from a vendor such as Quinstreet or use direct mail, email marketing to alums
• Funnel leads into some type of lead management system that tracks lead performance and allocated leads efficiently
• Structure call centers for admissions, FA, academic advising properly - making the right technology selection and process design decisions
• Get some type of Campus Portal, such as that offered by eCollege or Blackboard
• Convert courses into an online format
• Hire people with the right skill sets to get things done

What if there was a single one-stop shop a college could go to get these services done. This firm could even provide capital and take an equity stake in the online entity.

If anyone knows of a company offering all these services now, drop me a line!

Marketing 2.0: Education Providers Need to Get in the Game

This post from Andrew Chen, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow, explains what he calls "10 obvious strategies" to acquire users. These strategies are not so obvious to marketers outside Silicon Valley. To illustrate, I challenge you to go to a marketer at any post-secondary online education provider and ask them the top 10 ways they drive potential customers to their website. It would be buying from lead vendors, adwords buying, email recircs and - I'm drawing a blank. They don't even have 10 strategies. Any for-profit educator that formulates a strategy to successfully leverage social networking, blogs, and Internet viral marketing tools will zip away in a Ferrari, leaving their Model T driving competitors in the dust.

10 (obvious) strategies to acquire users

1. Email/IM features for invites and content
2. Blog/MySpace widgets
3. Auto-invite for email, social networks, etc
4. Auto-embed for blog widgets
5. A/B tested signup pages
6. Smart adwords buying
7. Viral referrals
8. SEO/landing page generation
9. Push through RSS/Email, etc.
10. Reduce user "drag" through the entire funnel

Rebirth of Banner Ads?

In light of Google's Doubleclick acquisition, there is an interesting post in David Churbuck's blog about the rebirth of banner ads. Churbuck, VP of Global Web Marketing at Lenovo, shares the common disdain for banners, but recently had a change of heart after his team found a "weird correlation that when we ran banner ads our search campaigns performed better and when we didn’t run banners our search yields declined."

Ad Age Digital Fact Pack

Ad Age published its annual Fact Pack - an encyclopedia of knowledge of online advertising that everyone who even remotely touches the industry would benefit from reading. Some highlights include:

• Internet ad spending for education is pegged at $274 million in U.S. revenue - a little back of envelope calculation on my part tags this number as too low - I'd say minimum of $400 million
• Reach of the top ad networks is immense - e.g. advertising.com reached 149 million unique visitors in Feb. (85% of total Internet population)
• Companies involved in consultative sales / lead gen. for consultative sales represent 9 of the top 25 Internet advertisers (Experian, Apollo Group, Ameritrade, IAC, ScottTrade, Nextag, Fidelity, e*Trade, Charles Schwab, Amex)
• Over 20 million US users browse news and info on a mobile device - education providers will need to find better ways to reach people via this channel
• The Top 10 internet ad companies reaped 99% of gross online advertising revenue
• 57 million US Internet users read blogs (out of 147 million total Internet users)
• 7.4% of Internet Users keep a blog

Targeting the Enthusiast: Educational Options Outside of the $20K+ Degree

Now, for-profit educators have a simple enough model. The model is profitable - high touch and high cost. Educators generate a lead from TV, radio, direct mail or the Internet. Then they call the lead or receive an inbound 800# call and try to get that student to enroll in school. Once the student enrolls, he/she works with a financial aid advisor and academic advisor to plan out a degree program. Once in class, for a culinary or design program, students use top of the line equipment with a huge capex.

So how about the enthusiast - the person who might want to be a great home cook but does not want a $20K culinary education, or the art enthusiast who wants to learn graphic design, but doesn't want or need a degree. As the baby boomers age and retire, there will be many of these enthusiasts who have disposable income, and may want to spend $3K or $4K to learn a new skill. Right now, there is no way a for-profit education company could be profitable serving this market.

There is a huge opportunity if someone can target these enthusiasts effectively - with a low touch, self-service sales process and no reliance on Title IV federal aid. For-profit educators buy millions of leads and may convert 1-5% of them - they have to be able to find a way to profitably target these enthusiasts and the 95-99% of leads that do not convert. They also have to find lower capex models that use less sophisticated, lower cost equipment (e.g. consumer rather than commercial kitchens) aimed at the enthusiast rather than future professionals.

I envy the person or company that figures out a model to profitably serve these enthusiasts - my gut tells me it is a multi-billion dollar opportunity.

Future of Online Education

I read a real visionary piece on the future of online education in a recent Education Signals newsletter. It is a summary of remarks at a recent education conference by Gary Keisling, chairman of Ashworth University, a for-profit backed Sterling Partners. Keisling has 20 years of for-profit education experience and gave a talk titled, "€œNew thinking in for-profit education models to advance cutting edge investment strategies."€ He described the career college of the future, the school he might build today if starting from scratch. Highlights include:

•  Delivery, outcomes and branding of education over the next 20 years will be much more than a simple reflection of old systems and more aggressively influenced by trends in technology and Internet socialization.
• Embracing Web 2.0 principles, including community, low cost, no censorship and individuality enable a new model for education.
•  Internet socialization will be facilitated and encouraged by the school and online and on-ground content will be completely equal and completely blended at the students’ discretion
•  The current system in which the cost of postsecondary education rises rapidly ahead of the pace of inflation, leaving new graduates tens of thousands of dollars in debt would finally collapse on itself and turn the current concept of brand embodied by a paper (?!) diploma, on its head.
•  The generation that grew up with Web 2.0 and MySpace as the norm, will reward models that focus on results-based learning and job attainment over a brand on a diploma.
• The new model will allow flexibility in curriculum design, and even a menu-based curriculum that will offer more choice in course selection.
•  Costs will be radically lower with revenue and profit generated far more through add-on services and third-party relationships (think of UTI’s company-sponsored graduate programs applied to other fields).
•  There are opportunities to focus on underserved niches: Hispanic market, retiring baby boomers and people seeking very strong career placement tools & capabilities
• The school would develop consortiums with other schools to share leads and gain leverage
•  One of the school’s major focuses would be negotiating articulation agreements and speaking out in every possible forum about credit transfer issues.
• Low cost programs will free schools from outmoded regulatory burdens and new arbiters of quality and value will emerge to replace the old systems.
•  One example could be instruction in multiple languages, multiple states, and even multiple countries all currently tightly controlled.

Washington Post: Where's the Story?

The Washington Post should be ashamed of itself. You would think that every major news outlet would enable their content to be available on mobile devices. This morning I tried to download a Post feature piece by Gene Weingarten, who writes about famous violinist Josh Bell and his attempts to perform as a street musician. Of course, the Blackberry gave me an error message - and the article went unread. Traditional newspapers are having a hard enough time keeping their readership - not making  content available to readers where they want and when they want will only serve to accelerate these newspapers' decline.

Fighting Temptation to Compromise

I am hiring for a number of sales positions right now and the big temptation is to compromise - you need X hires by Y date and it's tempting to chuck away all those visions of only accepting the best of the best and instead settle for "they could end up being good with an equal dose of training and prayer." It's great that I read Seth Godin's blog this afternoon as it gave me a well needed jolt of reality.

Seth urges marketers "to refuse to market mediocre stuff if that's the best the folks in R&D and production can bring you. The first time, they'll be shocked. Your job will be at risk. But then you'll notice something... the stuff gets better. Fast. In Japanese car factories, this is called kanban. You trade production efficiencies for quality. If a part isn't perfect, the worker refuses to install it. And the entire assembly line stops. Detroit was horrified by this idea. Keeping the assembly line going is the holy grail. Guess what? The line doesn't get stopped very often. Things get better, fast."

The same principles apply with HR - if the cadidates aren't good enough, I will press for more and more and more until I get the ones that meet my needs.

Colleges Must Embrace User-Generated Content

A lot of colleges (especially for-profits) are scared to leverage new media like YouTube, blogging and social networks, out of fear that they do lose some control of their marketing message. A typical administrator's comment is "What if someone writes a slanderous comment or what if a current student or faculty member bashes the school." What they fail to realize is that if their product is of high quality and they have an enthusisastic customer base, there is very little to fear. Check out this video on YouTube, it's a parody of UOPX and pokes fun at the school's marketing, accreditation and student body. What is most interesting to me is not the video but the comments to the video - some are ignorant, but UOPX's supporters present the other side well, giving viewers a very balanced view.  Two sample comments are "I don't believe Randy was referring to UoP's Business Program Accreditation. UOP is Regionally Accredited like most other legitimate schools." and "This is a waste of time, ill-informed, ad hominem attack with no basis in reality. Though I am not in any way affiliated with the organization slandered, it is clear that the makers of this clip lack the basic understanding and integrity necessary in assessing the value of well accredited distance learning programs." Instead of just responding to attacks, schools should start to use web2.0 to their advantage to create buzz, enhance brand value and generate leads organically.