The elephant in the room

I was a prospective student twice – undergrad and grad school. I was a student-by-osmosis for the last three years (thanks to the hubs). I have a very real understanding of both tuition bills and passing classes in addition to experiencing the joys – and stresses – of paying a mortgage and trying to save for retirement.

There’s been a lot of news in the world of higher ed about the stresses and poor emotional health among college freshmen. They worry about paying for school, holding down a job. Meanwhile, their parents are living “lives of constant economic struggle and worry“.  The kicker: among all the things we worry about – mortgages, retirement, taxes – the one top thing folks in that survey said would help alleviate their stress is making higher education more affordable.

This is a huge issue for students, their parents and influencers. But as the marketing department, we can’t control at what price the university has to set tuition. We can’t control who gets scholarships or grants. We can’t promise any amount of aid. We can say that we do our best to help students and families find solutions, but sometimes that’s a bitter pill. I can say that – I’m looking at repayment of law school loans at this moment.

I think these reassurances or support and small fixes work in impersonal pieces like direct mail. But what about social media? What about one-on-one? We have to recognize that funding an education is difficult. There are many times I come across interesting articles about the cost of an education or ways to fund your education, but I hesitate to throw those into the social media arena, being hesitant about getting negative feedback. I feel like I need a more proactive, armed approach when it comes to discussing the dollars and cents.

What would that include? Maybe:

1. A transparent breakdown of what tuition pays for. We have a lot of Ph.Ds who teach and very few graduate assistants. That’s a lot more expensive, but if it’s a benefit you value, then it’s worth the extra bucks. I seem to remember Zach Briton from George Washington University explaining a similar breakdown that school has done, but I can’t find it.

2. Some really good financial literacy offerings on campus that could counsel students about loan consolidation, interest rates, alternative sources of funding, etc. I went to “loan counseling” at my institution and there was no counseling, just a lot of paper signing.

3. Great outcomes to back up the value of the degree. I think most people have this. My only issue is that the cost of the degree in 1980 and the great outcomes today aren’t necessarily parallel to what “kids” today are experiencing. So making these outcomes more relevant and real is important.

Other ideas? I feel like this is such a sticky area. One that most institutions gloss over (“don’t think about that right now, you have 4 years before worrying about it!”). But could it be a differentiator? Not “we’ll give you a bargain-basement education so you can afford it” but “we’ll give you the tools to make a high-quality education as affordable as possible and prepare you for the consequences.” It’s providing an extra service, one that people might not realize they need right this minute, but one that they will appreciate several years down the line.

Is it ironic?

Media Life has this article on the successes network evening news programs are having by covering the economic crisis.  My question: will they be able to capitalize on those ratings with advertisers? The irony is that TV’s biggest buyers (retailers and automakers, largely) have been some of the hardest hit by the very crisis giving the networks a bump. Unfortunate, yes. Maybe even ironic.

I wonder how the Web operations are going. They’re being dominated by the same type of coverage. Have pageviews/uniques jumped? How are the efforts to monetize that space going?

Experimenting with paid content: a semantics problem

Al Tompkins ran part of an interview with Belo VP James Moroney III and highlighted one section in particular where the exec said:

Two years ago, I would have told you that asking people to pay for content on the Web is a ridiculous notion. Today, I will tell you it’s almost imperative we experiment with it to see what the consumer will respond to.

Aren’t we past the stage of experimenting? Didn’t almost every newspaper try paid content at some point? Aside from my beliefs about the possibilities of paying for articles, archives and what-not, this makes it sound like the idea is brand new. Oh gosh, why didn’t we think of that before?

And I truly wish the reporter would’ve pressed the issue a bit more. Do lawsuits like the one GateHouse recently settled become legitimate? If any content from behind a pay wall is quoted in a free space, that would seem to me that monetary damages and a legal cause would follow. What would that do to information on the internet? How would the link economy be affected if users followed links only to be told they had to register and pay?

Don’t get me wrong, my passion for journalism will mean NOTHING if it can’t be monetarily supported. I don’t want to work for peanuts (or free) either.  But this seems to be an old-school idea to me. Maybe Kindle is working because it’s a significantly different format. Maybe we should try to think outside the scope of current operations to find a sustainable solution.