Valued Customers

There is an article today at the Boston Globe web site about how colleges are using web tools to recruit students.  I linked to Colleges turn to Web tools in hunt for ’08 freshmen through eSchoolNews and found it interesting in light of conversations I have had at a number of colleges in the last couple of years about marketing themselves to the MySpace generation.

With the colleges we’ve encountered regarding our own children, we’ve noticed much more proactive marketing to prospective students, at least a lot more than we saw when we were in college.  And once in, their schools have treated them much more like customers than just students.  Yet their use of technology has been very utilitarian, mostly automating processes that use to require standing in long line — a huge part of my college experience in the early 1970s.

But this article indicates a more active and even urgent desire to connect with prospective students at their level, through their avenues.  I suspect that it is a struggle. 

“It’s not about staying ahead of the students, it’s about keeping up with them, but without seeming desperate to be hip,” said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

As I’ve written in the last couple of days, I find social networks difficult to comprehend, and it appears that I’m not alone.  Colby College has turned to their students for guidance, as it…

..scrapped its traditional admissions brochure in favor of a student-run magazine, (where) online visitors can view photo galleries and video podcasts with interviews with students and professors.

I’m curious as to how much instructors are using social media to capture the attention of students — and then to facilitate more participatory learning.  I suspect that the answer is, “Too little use!”  So how does admissions come to have more motivation to adapt to a new generation of learners than instruction?  How might we come to see students in our classrooms (K-HE) as customers and realize a need to start working through their information experiences, instead of just working from ours?

I think that classrooms could become, and in some place are becoming pretty exciting places, and through more transparent school walls, communities would enjoy seeing it, and might even come to expect it — and value it.

Schworm, Peter. “Colleges turn to Web tools in hunt for ’08 freshmen.” The Boston Globe. 7 Jan 2008. The Boston Globe. 7 Jan 2008 <http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/01/07/colleges_turn_to_web_tools_in_hunt_for_08_freshmen/>.