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February 06, 2005

Brand U

Sometimes, the timing is just too good.

I was leaving the Job Fair on Friday, looking for companies interested in hiring a soon-to-be-minted MBA/MS Finance degree-holder, interested in investment analysis (buy-side), able to do his own applications programming and with a background in math and physics (ahem). I ran into a classmate of mine who asked me to fill out a survey relating to DU's new branding initiative.'

So it goes.

The more I think about it, the more Twitchell's article makes sense. So what does it mean?

To summarize, Twitchell is claiming that colleges and universities simply aren't in the business that we assume they're in. We assume that they are in the education business. They assume they're in the alumni-producing business. We would like to see the outputs. They would like us to see the inputs.

Well, there are some things we can do, even with the inputs. If you use a brand-name analysis, it's clear that CU's brand name has been so thoroughly tarnished by serial football-related, financial-related, and now idicocy-related scandals, that it feels it has to do something to redeem itself. That something may very well be to throw Ward Churchill under the bus, and I can't say I object.

As an aside, to those who wish to preserve the tenure system as-is, on the grounds that conservatives would fare worse under a system that punished unpopular speech, I can only reply that the current situation of 95% Democratic affiliation in the social sciences and liberal arts occurred entirely under the current tenure system. The tolerance of speech codes, newspaper-stealings and -burnings, ripping down of Republican or conservative group flyers, leftist anti-semitism, and outright violence against pro-Israel, millitary recruiters, and conservative speakers, has all happened under a rubric of preserving students' rights. Perhaps there are still enough administrators and faculty committed to process over ideology that conservatives have time to organize and use those rules to restore a semblance of balance, but that would have to be proven.

In any event, the university's willingness to consider dealing with Churchill suggests that sustained, combined pressure by alumni, parents, and parents of in-state high school seniors could, over time, have an effect. The information about a school's speech codes and campus atmosphere is out there now for a certain amount of comparison-shopping. That I want my child exposed to liberal politics doesn't mean that I want them bombarded and surrounded by them.

What isn't available, unfortunately, are the outputs. GMAT, LSAT, GRE, and MCAT scores. Admissions to grad schools, where the outputs are measured and reported. Starting salaries. And so on.

Here again, I think there's room for innovation. When Bill James got frustrated with the Elias Sports Bureau's disdain for releasing simple statistics, he started a fan-based project to collect and report pitch-by-pitch statistics on every major-league game in the country. It was so successful that Elias eventually had to relent, and begin publishing the stats that the seamheads wanted for their analyses.

Something similar could happen here. Alumni, who have access to the alumni lists, will want to know how much those degrees really are worth. Eventually, someone will put together some comprehensive surveys of the test scores and starting salaries of the alumni from a few hundred universities, and begin publishing annual lists. Schools will complain they're not accurate, at which point they'll be challenged to produce their own statistics. Given the current climate of distrust of anyone who has information but won't release it, it won't take long for a few school, aware that they're being under-rated by this report, to start putting out and trading on their own data. At that point, the wall crumbles for all but a few schools.

I'm sure that even now, someone is setting up a survey...

Posted by joshuasharf at February 6, 2005 02:32 PM | TrackBack
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