Good afternoon and I hope you are staying cool.
Here is another great video from Joe Fathom on email marketing tips, enjoy, marketmpb
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Epilogue
4 years ago
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Is college worth the debt?
A great article today, courtesy of the NY Times, I personally feel higher education is one of last great institutions we have left in this country! enjoy, matt(marketmpb)
(source nytimes.com)
The most subversive question about higher education has always been whether the college makes the student or the student makes the college. Sure, Harvard graduates make more money than graduates of just about any other college. And most community-college students will end up making far less than graduates of flagship state universities. But of course these students didn’t enter college with the same preparation and skills. Colleges don’t help to clear up the situation either, because they do so little to measure what students learn between freshman and senior years. So doubt lurks: how much does a college education — the actual teaching and learning that happens on campus — really matter?
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2007 American Community Survey
Marcus Walters
A recession makes such doubt all the more salient. Last month, National Public Radio ran a segment called “Is a College Education Worth the Debt?” in which an economist noted that 12 percent of mail carriers have college degrees — the point being that they could have gotten the same jobs without the degrees. In January, “20/20” ran a similar segment, in which somebody identified as an education consultant and a career counselor summed up the case against college. “You could take the pool of collegebound students and you could lock them in a closet for four years,” he said, and thanks to their smarts and work ethic, they would still outearn people who never went to college. I heard a more measured version of these concerns when I recently sat down with a group of college students. They were paying tuition and studying hard, and yet they weren’t sure what they would find on the other side of graduation.
Along with all this skepticism, though, economic downturns also create one big countervailing force that pushes people toward college: many of them have nothing better to do. They have lost their jobs, or they find no jobs waiting for them after high school. In economic terms, the opportunity cost of going to school has been reduced. Over the course of the 1930s, the percentage of 17-year-olds who graduated from high school jumped to 50 percent, from less than 30 percent. Boys — many of whom would have been working in better times — made up the bulk of the influx. In our Great Recession, students have surged into community colleges.
So who is right — these students or the skeptics? It isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that the field of labor economics has spent the past 30 years trying to come up with an answer. In one paper after another, economists have tried to identify the portion of a person’s success for which schooling can fairly claim credit. One well-known study, co-written by Alan Krueger, a Princeton professor now serving as the Treasury Department’s chief economist, offered some support for the skeptics. It tracked top high-school students through their 30s and found that their alma maters had little impact on their earnings. Students who got into both, say, the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State made roughly the same amount of money, regardless of which they chose. Just as you might hope, the fine-grain status distinctions that preoccupy elite high-school seniors (and more to the point, their parents) seem to be overrated.
The rest of the evidence, however, has tended to point strongly in the other direction. Several studies have found a large earnings gap between more- and less-educated identical twins. Another study compared young men who happened to live close to a college with young men who did not. The two groups were similar except for how easy it was for them to get to school, and the upshot was that the additional education attained by the first group lifted their earnings. “College can’t guarantee anybody a good life,” says Michael McPherson, an economist who runs the Spencer Foundation in Chicago, which finances education research. “But it sure ups the odds substantially.”
Earnings may be a flawed measure of an education’s value, but they’re about the only tangible measure we have. And the work that labor economists have done suggests that colleges do indeed deserve credit for much of the earnings gaps between their graduates and everyone else. The median earnings of full-time workers with bachelor’s degrees was nearly $47,000 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau. The median for someone who had attended college but failed to get a four-year degree was nearly $33,000, and the median for a high-school graduate was nearly $27,000. Compare these numbers with the typical education debt that a college student has on graduation day — $20,000 — and it’s clear that a college education is worth the debt. McPherson slyly points out that even the pundits and professors who suggest otherwise seem to understand this; they tend to send their children to college, often to quite expensive ones.
Yet the skeptics do make one crucial point. Nationwide, half of all students who start college don’t end up with a four-year degree. Not only do these dropouts spend less time in class, but they also miss out on the signalling benefit of the degree — a mark of those who, among other things, have the discipline to finish what they start.
Some would-be dropouts may stay in school if Congress approves a pending proposal to increase Pell Grants to needy students. Still, college tuitions are rising and resources are being cut — two factors that affect graduation rates. Federal spending cushions the blow but isn’t large enough to make up for state cutbacks. At Dyersburg State Community College, in northwest Tennessee, enrollment rose a staggering 28 percent this fall compared with last fall, but the state cut the college’s budget by 16 percent, thanks to the recession, Karen Bowyer, the college’s president, told me. For similar reasons, the University of California system plans to enroll fewer freshmen this year than last. Given the current debate in Washington, it’s worth noting that the rising cost of health care puts more pressure on state budgets than perhaps anything else.
When you look at what’s happening at Dyersburg State and dozens of similar places across the country, you’re left thinking that students understand that they don’t make the college. They need the college. The rest of us would probably say that they do, too. The clichés are familiar enough: the children are our future, I’ll be the education president, etc.
Yet when you look at our actual policies, you have to wonder. Many colleges and high schools still fail to do a good job, year after year, with little consequence. And in the deepest recession in a generation, at the very moment when education would be of most value, money for it is disappearing. It’s almost as if we’ve been convinced that college isn’t, after all, all that different from locking somebody in a closet for four years
Location Based Text Marketing
This is a great article about some trends in mobile marketing
(source: e-marketer.com)
enjoy
marketmpb
Mobile Users Ready for Location-Based Text Marketing
JULY 6, 2010Mobile marketing is not just for smart phones
Though Smartphone shipments are rising and expected to surpass shipments of feature phones in 2011, according to Morgan Stanley, feature phones are still the devices in the hands of most mobile users. An April 2010 Exact Target study found 58% of all US internet users ages 15 and older had one, compared with 31% who had a Smartphone.
That means a large swathe of mobile users cannot be reached by more sophisticated mobile marketing efforts like sponsored apps, in-app ads or campaigns on the mobile web. According to location-based advertising network 1020 Place cast, opt-in text alerts are the smart way to target a fuller mobile audience.
A May 2010 survey conducted for Place cast by Harris Interactive found that while most mobile users still have not signed up for any text alerts, there was a small rise in interest since a similar poll in 2009: 28% were at least somewhat interested in the alerts, up 2 percentage points, and 8% were extremely or very interested, up 3 percentage points. For under-35s, interest was significantly higher.
Those who wanted the alerts were most interested in coupons and promotions from grocery stores and restaurants. Respondents who had signed up for text alerts said it made them more likely to visit the company’s website (34%), visit the store (33%) and purchase the product being promoted, either in online (28%) or in the store (27%).
Many agreed that making those text alerts location-based, so that recipients would get the right offer at the right time, could make the channel more useful or interesting.
While awareness of location-based text alerts is still building, there is the potential to reach a broader audience than with check-in apps such as foursquare or Gowalla, which are designed with smartphone owners in mind. And despite negative attitudes of many mobile users toward SMS marketing, Placecast reports low opt-out rates among recipients.
“The brand faithful view these kinds of alerts as a service, not just marketing or an intrusion,” Placecast CEO Alistair Goodman told eMarketer.
50 Ways To Use Twitter in The Classroom
Good morning!
One of my readers sent me a link to this great article from her blog and I would like to share some of it with you and encourage you to check out her great site.
If you have a blog that you would like to email me about, please do, I want to share the best with my readers! (marketmpb@rocketmail.com)
source: universityreviewsonline.com
Many critics of Twitter believe that the 140-character microblog offered by the ubiquitous social network can do little for the education industry. They are, of course, wrong. K-12 teachers have taken advantage of Twitter’s format to keep their classes engaged and up-to-date on the latest technologies. The following projects provide them with a few ways to incorporate the site’s features into important and lasting lessons.
One of the simplest ways that teachers can use Twitter in their classroom involves setting up a feed dedicated exclusively to due dates, tests or quizzes.
2. Provide the class with a running news feed.
Subscribe to different mainstream and independent news feeds with different biases as a way to compare and contrast how different perspectives interpret current events and issues.
3. Create a career list.
Set up an interesting assignment requesting that students set up Twitter lists following feeds relevant to their career goals and keep a daily journal on any trends that crop up along the way.
4. Track memes.
As inane as Justin Bieber’s popularity is, at least an educational opportunity lurks around the corner. Instructors concerned with communication and sociology issues can easily find a number of different lessons on how ideas and fads spread throughout different media sources.
5. Coordinate assignments.
Rather than keeping up with an e-mail train, students can use Twitter to collaborate on different projects and keep a quick reference on any changes.
6. Track a hash tag.
More ambitious educators may want to incorporate Twitter in lessons that track hash tags for another interesting lesson in how trends spread and the various ways in which people use social media to communicate ideas.
7. Connect with the community.
Partner up with local government or charitable organizations and use Twitter to reach a broad audience discussing the latest cultural or educational events in the area and encourage others in the community to attend.
8. Follow the issues.
Bring a little technology into debates by asking the class which issues they would like to follow. Subscribe to relevant hash tags and accounts from all perspectives and compile an updated resource cobbling together as much research as possible.
(for the rest of the post, please see http://www.universityreviewsonline.com/2005/10/50-ways-to-use-twitter-in-the-classroom.html)
thank you for emailing me Samantha and great tips!
matt (marketmpb)
Some Marketing Humor this morning…
Good morning, and I hope it started better than these folks!
Some humor for you….
enjoy
marketmpb
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Marquette Withdrawals Employment Offer to Lesbian
Good evening, and I hope it has been a great day!
In my blog, I will never be afraid to attack a controversial education or business issue, so lets take a look at the Marquette one tonight.
I read with very much interest the controversial case regarding Jodi O’Brien, the lesbian professor who was offered a job by Marquette University and then it was withdrawn by the university president, due to a conflict in Church teachings.
There is a lot of confusion out there regarding Catholic Church teachings regarding gays and lesbians. Let me let you into my personal life here a little bit. I am a practicing Roman Catholic who attends Church regularly, lectors, and volunteers in different aspects of the Church. The teaching of my Church is that gays and lesbians should be loved and respected, just like everyone else. However, the sexual act is the sinful act, not the person.
First, I have always thought a school or business has the right to hire anyone they want, who best fit’s the position’s needs. Apparently, Ms. Brien was the best fit for the position, but again her publishing and books were directly against Catholic Church teachings. I certainly feel that Marquette had the right to do what they did. However, they probably should not have done it.
The university extended her the employment offer and I assume they knew about her lifestyle and teachings. When the offer was extended, it should have stuck and they should have hired her. A person still has a right to an opinion just because they have a different lifestyle.
Marquette should however continue to market and brand itself as a Catholic University first.
enjoy the rest of your evening!
matt (marketmpb)
Students studying less, but not due to social media!
A very interesting article, courtesy of the Huffington Post…..enjoy, marketmpb
Glenn Beck might have thought twice about opening a new university had he known that students aren't studying as much as they used to.
Two economists have discovered just that. The Boston Globe reports:
According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today's average student hits the books for just 14 hours.
Babcock and Marks found that this decrease in study might be attributed not to social networking, the internet and other technologies but a desire -- both on the part of students and professors -- to do the least amount of work possible. Universities attempt to combat this tendency by relying less on course evaluations when making decisions about tenure and requiring professors to administer explicit directions to students. That universities are often unaware of the scope of this particular problem, however, undermines their efforts. Many still hold that for every hour a student is in class, he or she should be studying for two.
Critics of the survey believe that regardless of university and SAT scores, it is impossible to compare 21st century students to their predecessors. After all, students today are not only more active on campus but also have more effective tools, like laptops, at their disposal.
