Thursday, June 2, 2016

And in other unsurprising news. . .

Following up on the post that is at the top of the page as I write, here's another shocker, courtesy of a "newsletter" that my university's LMS provider insists on sending me (yes, I need to adjust my spam settings, but I do glance at it now and then in a sort of "know the enemy" frame of mind):

Supply is up in online ed but demand is down — now what?

I'm especially fond of the conclusion:
As colleges and universities rethink their marketing strategies for a changing business model, Budd points to one critical need: executive-level attention.
"If you have marketing buried seven layers beneath your campus grounds, there's no way to move that conversation forward," Budd said. "It has to be at the top."

Because adding more administrators/outside contractors is always the answer, and marketing will solve the student-supply (and student-inability-to-pay-any-more) problem. 

My guess at the next breaking news: there isn't an inexhaustible supply of qualified (or even unqualified) international students hungering for a U.S. degree at an exorbitant price. 

--Cassandra

3 comments:

  1. Rosencrantz Andor GuildensternJune 2, 2016 at 11:13 AM

    "It has to be at the top."

    Because senior admin have all the answers
    /sarcasm

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJune 2, 2016 at 5:53 PM

    Supply is up and demand is down. Now what? How about stop trying to sell people a product they clearly don't want? That's what you'd do if you actually ran the university "like a business" (instead of like a Soviet-style administrative command economy).

    But then I am merely a simple business professor, with an apparently outdated and overly-literal view of things like "supply" and "demand."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fulton FredJune 2, 2016 at 7:13 PM

      Remember when MOOC's were all the rage? Maybe students realize that having an actual relationship with the professor instead of a virtual one is better. Measurement and controlling for cheating are difficult issues as well.

      And yes, adding more overhead is always the answer. To what question I'm not sure, but it's always the answer.

      Delete

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