Great post up by Seth Godin about higher education.
The problem with much of higher education is that it is mass marketed — and so has to be average and bland, without being too challenging or too different. Being that ISDSI programs are pretty challenging and very different from a “traditional” college semester, this really resonates with us.
Here are some things Seth says:
Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is?… This works great in an industrial economy where we can’t churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But…
The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people. The question I’d ask: is the money that mass-marketing colleges are spending on marketing themselves and scaling themselves well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high?…
Things like gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.
The only people who haven’t gotten the memo are anxious helicopter parents, mass marketing colleges and traditional employers. And all three are waking up and facing new circumstances.
This great. Seth is (once again) on to something important.
Two things come to mind. First, “marketing” per se at ISDSI doesn’t exist. We work to build relationships to students and faculty, so that the right students find our study abroad program. We send out announcements, and go to an occasional conference, but don’t “market” the program. Second (linked to the first), this study abroad program isn’t for everyone. Mass marketing wouldn’t work. We tried an advertisement once in a “study abroad” magazine. Total waste of money.
What we do instead is to strive to be the best possible study abroad program we can be. Our focus is narrow (leadership/ecology/sustainability) and our approach isn’t easy — experiential learning in a new culture and country can be really difficult (ask any of our alumni!). We often joke that if we do our job right, we’ll ruin a student for returning back to “normal” college or university. From the emails we get from students who’ve done the program, we are successful! Once you’ve directly engaged the subject, sat with village elders talking about land rights, stood in a forest during a monsoon rain trying to figure out the different tree species, the PowerPoint presentation in a classroom aren’t going to be as engaging.
That’s not a bad thing.
Seth writes:
The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people.
ISDSI builds its ENTIRE study abroad program around interactions with great minds (villagers, activists and others) and non-class(room) activities (sea kayaking, ecology studies, working in the fields with your host family). And we’ve seen, year after year, how life changing that can be!
Jump over to read Seth’s full ‘s post. You might not agree with all of it, but it is thought provoking — like the best education should be!
