Category: higher education

Friday Five: FYI edition

Stuff every higher ed marketer ought to know about:

fyi-sm

  1. The American Marketing Association has issued its call for papers for the 2010 Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. This year’s symposium will be held Nov. 7-10 in San Diego. The AMA is looking for “proposals/papers that report on new and innovative strategies and tactics in higher education marketing. Popular topics include including image and brand building, buzz/viral marketing, marketing research, internal marketing, electronic marketing, new marketing channels, social media, Web 2.0 tools, emerging markets and trends, marketing organizational structure, marketing budgeting, web metrics, and marketing ROI.” Submissions are due April 9, and this year the AMA is even welcoming video submissions. (Hear that, Todd Sanders?)
  2. What do social media users want? According to research from online ad network Chikita (and as reported by Mashable), “Twitterers mostly consume news, MySpace users want games and entertainment, Facebookers are into both news and community and Digg’s audience has a mixed bag of interests.” Also, MySpacers “have no interest in news whatsoever.” (Hear that, news mogul Rupert Murdoch?)
  3. Virtual graffiti. No, that isn’t the name of a Led Zeppelin remix. It’s what’s happening, right now, on college campuses everywhere, thanks to mobile mapping apps like Foursquare. “Since Foursquare’s debut last year,” writes the New York Times’ Marc Parry, “students have diligently labeled, praised, and, in some cases, profaned college campuses. Take this note, easily Googled, that somebody calling himself Mock Redneck Jr. left at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte: The library has Free Wi-Fi, Barely Legal girls and a warm place to drop a deuce.'” Drop a what? (Via Mark Greenfield’s Delicious links.)
  4. The state of campus CMS. Good research results from a survey of content management systems as compiled by .eduguru’s Michael Fienen. Lots of data to sift through here.
  5. From the it-had-to-happen-eventually department: RandomDorm: ChatRoulette for the College Set, via @davewiner.

Academic bracketology

March Madness is upon us, and college sports fans everywhere are busy filling out their brackets for the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, trying to predict which teams will make it to the Final Four. Serious bracketologists study each team’s overall win-loss record, strength of schedule, tournament match-up, the predictions of experts/media personalities like Dick Vitale and other data in an attempt to divine the ultimate winners.

If the teams in the Big Dance were judged solely on academic performance, it would be much easier to pick a Final Four. That’s what Ben Miller has done in a recent post over at The Quick and the Ed. Miller is a policy analyst for the think tank Education Sector and writes frequently for ES’s The Quick and the Ed blog.

According to Miller’s analysis, the academic Final Four, based on a rolling calculation of players’ graduation rates, would be Kansas, Butler, Villanova and Wofford. “The championship game would then feature Butler vs. Wofford, with the former prevailing thanks to a graduation rate of 89 percent vs. the latter’s 83 percent mark.”

With the assistance of Education Sector’s Abdul Kargbo, Miller filled out his bracket based on the federal graduation rates of each team.

Miller’s post has some other interesting insights into the state of college athletics in terms of graduation rates by race and overall. It is not a pretty picture. “Some schools are failing their athletes regardless of race. Maryland and Houston’s first round matchup has the distinction of being the worst academic pairing in the tournament, as the two have basketball graduation rates of 9 percent and 13 percent, respectively.”