Copyright © 2010, The Hartford Courant

Because states, unlike the federal government, are required to balance their budgets, state funding for higher education is heavily influenced by the states’ fiscal situation, reflecting a cycle unique to higher education, the report said.  Funding typically takes a disproportionate hit when state fiscal conditions are weak, but experiences more robust increases when state budgets recover.

“The rationale is simple: Colleges and universities can find other sources of income, such as tuition, to compensate for reduced state support. This is not an option available to other state services. As a result, fluctuations in state fiscal conditions often have a greater impact on higher education,” the report said.

According to the report, financial woes brought on by global economic weakness have been especially hard on higher education institutions, which typically rely on three major funding streams: state appropriations, school endowments and tuition. In addition to declining appropriations, university endowments have received fewer gifts and experienced massive investment losses. With two of the three major funding sources down, many state policymakers turned to the only remaining source and raised tuition, thereby increasing the proportion that students and families pay for higher education.

According to research conducted by the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO), tuition increased 2 percent between FY 2008 and FY 2009 and is now more than 37 percent of total education revenue. In FY 1984, it was less than 25 percent.

Click here to view the full report.

Passion Rules!

The great economic upheaval of the past few years has spawned many new, provocative public policy discussions in which long-held assumptions are being challenged. That’s a good thing. Perhaps if some of the Wall Street “assumptions” had been challenged sooner, we’d have all been better off.

Recently, articles in Time, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Wall Street Journal, and discussions by policy leaders in Washington, raise questions regarding the cost, associated value and affordability – the utility, really – of a degree.

Simply put, is a college degree really still worth the cost given a job market that seems less able to provide jobs today?

Put in perspective, the answer is an unequivocal “yes.”

Colleges provide a fair amount of grant-based aid to offset students’ costs, so let’s talk about debt incurred to attend college.

The median debt owed by a Bachelor’s degree graduate is about $20,000, according to a College Board study. Less for a public university. More for private schools.

Compare that to the average debt level people assume when they buy a new car: $25,396, according to Experian Automotive.

Even given the challenges of today’s job market, doesn’t it seem intuitive that a degree – with its lasting economic, social, and personal value – is worth far more indebtedness than a car, which begins to depreciate the day you drive it off the lot? It does. Comparatively, the debt seems reasonable. And once you consider the societal value of a better-educated populace, and the socialization skills that students develop within the college experience, then it definitely is.

Perhaps the most important reason a college education remains a smart investment becomes clear once you examine the economics associated with a degree. Post-secondary education adds significantly to lifetime earnings. A Bachelors Degree? About $450,000 present value, according to the College Board. Even if that amount was cut in half, in general a degree would still seem worth the investment.

In fact, a report just released by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce concludes that jobs requiring an advanced level of education will far outpace workers qualified for those positions through 2018. And, the trend actually shows an increasing percentage of jobs will need some higher education – 63% in 2018 versus about 60% in 2007.

And, it concludes that there will be a shortage of degreed workers by ” at least 3 million post¬secondary degrees, Associate’s or better. In addition, we will need at least 4.7 million new workers with post-secondary certificates.”

The economic argument makes even more sense once you examine who’s been losing their jobs in the current downturn. According to data produced by Economic Modeling Specialists, eight out the top 10 occupations that lost the most jobs from 2007 to 2009 were ones that didn’t require a degree.

So those lifelong earnings improvements? They will remain.

And let’s not ignore another fact. Other nations are focused intently on advancing the education of their populace. UNESCO reports that post-secondary enrollment worldwide increased from 2000 to 2007 by 53 million people. That increase alone is nearly twice the United States total college enrollment. That’s a lot of available competition for our jobs.

Economic times are hard, and changing. The old assumption – of highly valuing a college education – is being questioned, as are many old assumptions. And questioning long-held assumptions is a smart thing to do, given what’s happened to the economy. There will be, and should be, refinements to educational delivery approaches which increase access and efficacy.

But while some assumptions deserve to be scrapped, this one does not. Because it still works.

When it comes to education – less is not more.

Randy Proto is the President and CEO of the American Institutes school group, which specializes in health care career education and serves over 2,000 students annually. It includes the American Institute College of Health Professions, American Institute and American Institute School of Health Careers located in Florida, and the Fox Institute schools in Connecticut and New Jersey.Is college still worth the investment?

Passion Rules!

Dog lovers know the feeling. Their pets seem human. The way they lick a tear-stained face or gaze adoringly, sometimes even more so than friends or, um, spouses.

But that’s a misperception, says animal behaviorist, author and contrarian Clive Wynne. People may behave like animals, but dogs, he says, are just good at being dogs.

With new discoveries about animal intelligence announced practically every day, there is growing sentiment that dogs, parrots and ark-loads of other creatures share the essential qualities of Homo sapiens. This yanks Wynne’s chain. A professor of psychology and author of “Do Animals Think?” he contends that while animals may appear uncannily human, it is strictly an appearance. Their perceptions and cognitive abilities are radically different from ours.  http://www.cvm.ncsu.edu/six_pro/ca.html

Wynne, who earned degrees from University College London and the University of Edinburgh, researches pet dogs at his Canine Cognition Laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville and captive wolves at Wolf Park, a research park in Indiana. There, he explores what might be termed the meaning of ‘dogness,’ delving into such questions as whether dogs have become genetically programmed to respond to human cues. The answer seems to be no. The wolves in Wynne’s experiments follow human points and other doggy directions.

But, says Wynne, over their at-least 10,000 years of domestication, dogs have lost the ability to hunt prey effectively. As a result, they are utterly dependent on people—and so become experts at figuring out what their masters want.

“You are your dog’s project,” Wynne says. “He really has nothing to do all day but watch your every move and try to detect even the smallest difference in your activities that could predict that something is about to happen to his benefit.”

Your dog jumps up for his walk before you’ve grabbed the leash? A response to a subtle change in how you stood up. Specially trained dogs’ sensitivity to oncoming seizures in owners? Proof of their ability to smell small changes in human body chemistry. The love you share with your dog? For Wynne, that’s a happy convergence of dogs’ yearning for a pack leader and people’s yearning to nurture children.

Wynne’s ideas can raise the hackles of some pet owners. When he told Cat Fancy magazine that cats jump into their owners’ laps because they want to get warm, a woman wrote him a letter asserting of a deceased feline, “HE WAS HUMAN.”

But, for Wynne, dogs and other animals shouldn’t have to be human-like to qualify for our respect and admiration. The fact that dogs can sniff out bombs in baggage or emotional upheavals in their owners speaks not only to their otherness, he says, but also to the remarkable intimacy of the bond between human and dog.

As for spouses, well, that’s for other researchers to study.

Today’s home page feature at NCSU.EDU is an interview with student body president Kelly Hook, who will be blogging for us during the term of her presidency. In this era of social-media supremacy, we were looking to find a way to help connect Student Government leaders with not only their fellow students, but future students as well. In Kelly’s column, “Off the Hook,” she’ll keep everyone aware of what she and Student Government are up to, all while serving as a sounding board for readers. (Feel free to ask her questions here – some of the questions & answers will be featured in future posts.)

On a related note, we’ve added a couple of student writers – Amaris Hames and Candace Jones – to our Web editorial team, which we hope will add an air of authenticity to our student-focused stories like our recent feature on Mr. Wuf tryouts or the iPad Test Drive. Our full-time writers are great at what they do, but students have a way of capturing the passion of student-centered topics, events and news like we older folks can’t. Not that I’m saying we’re older, but you know what I mean.

Passion Rules!

As our communicators know, the calendar is a dominant feature of our home page, and we want our visitors, both online and offline, to know there’s more to do here this summer than attend departmental budget meetings, or see The Crazies  and The Princess and the Frog. (although they’re probably great movies)

So, now’s the time to re-stock the University Calendar with your summer events, exhibitions, camps, classes and, well, anything else that’s going on!

We’ve got a one-page submission form online, ready to be filled out.  The more info the better – so don’t be stingy!

http://calendar.activedatax.com/ncstate/oePublicForm.aspx

If you have any questions, feel free to email Dave Pond in University Communications.

Additionally, if you have ideas for homepage stories – either those that are upcoming to those you’ve already featured in your respective magazines, Web sites or newsletters that would interest a general audience – he’s the guy to talk to as well.

Passion Rules!

By Michael Armini

Inside Higher Education

In 1981, Grey Poupon took the nation by storm. Although the little-known Dijon mustard had been manufactured for more than a century, in the early ’80s it went from a minor six-figure business to a retail powerhouse.

Most people remember the famous TV ad in which one Rolls-Royce pulls up next to another. An aristocratic-looking passenger rolls down the back window to ask, “Pardon me. Would you have any Grey Poupon?”

In the cities where the ad ran, sales of Grey Poupon shot up 40 to 50 percent — a remarkable leap in the largely static condiment sector. Today, the Grey Poupon success story is frequently invoked as a highly successful “rebranding,” and an example of a singular advertising triumph.

Within the retail world, plenty of products have had their sales driven up, and their images buffed, through focused ad campaigns and catchy slogans: Don’t Leave Home Without It (American Express), Just Do It (Nike), and Got Milk? (California Milk Processor Board).

These successes — reinforced today by the hit cable TV show “Mad Men” – have led to an onslaught of branding consultants currently setting their sights on American universities. Many of these firms, battered by the recession and seeing higher education as a wealthy untapped sector, are coming to a campus near you.

The primary problem with their pitch is that it undervalues the very essence of a large educational institution. Universities are, by definition, complex, decentralized, multidimensional places with many disparate audiences. To attempt to rebrand these institutions as if they are one-dimensional retail products is to misunderstand what makes them exceptional.

Some university leaders are eager to buy the promise of a quick fix. The branding consultants tap into a low-level frustration on nearly every campus — “No one knows how great we are” — and make flashy presentations that promise fast results.

These campaigns provide all of the trappings of success: highly varnished collateral materials and new websites, all stamped with a focus-group-tested tagline. Internal constituencies are put through a time-consuming discovery process, which helps achieve a sense of internal buy-in, even if the effectiveness of the “deliverables” is suspect. In the end, most of these efforts are like Chinese takeout: initially satisfying, but with no long-term nutritional value.

So, if empty branding campaigns aren’t the answer, what is? For most institutions, a sustained and thematic flow of credible messages to your key constituencies will produce real results. Three principles should drive this approach:

Build on strong facts: Bob Dylan said, “All I got is a red guitar, three chords and the truth.” Without denigrating Dylan’s guitar chops, it’s fair to say that he relied primarily on the truth. University marketing and communications programs should do the same.

Effective marketing (or public relations — the terms mean different things to different practitioners) should be thought of as an accelerant. It’s the lighter fluid we pour on a fledgling fire to create a full-blown blaze. As a result, even the strongest communications program will fail if it is not built on strong facts — on the truth.

Within your institution, find three to five strong institutional assets — the ideas, initiatives, and people that differentiate you from the rest. These could be research programs, student successes, or an innovative approach to admissions. The point is, you should fan the flames where you have the potential to outshine others.

In the late 1990s, I was appointed director of communications at Harvard Law School. At the time, Harvard Law was viewed by many as an elite institution coasting on its laurels. There were those who believed that Harvard Law, arguably the largest law school in the country, was too big and impersonal. The faculty considered shrinking the size of the student body; ultimately that proposal failed, and we decided that the school should embrace its bigness. A “legal metropolis” and “the New York City of law schools” were messages we began promoting. These efforts, combined with a public-service renaissance and tremendous fund raising success, helped Harvard Law reassert its preeminence. (Some might argue that a trained chimpanzee could enhance Harvard’s reputation. The truth is that it can be even more difficult to shift and update the image of an institution that is so deeply marbled in the public’s consciousness.)

Don’t give up on the press: A popular joke in media circles today is: “What do pimps and the newspaper industry have in common? Both are being put out of business by Craigslist.”

While it’s true that the financial model of the commercial media is being severely tested, many traditional news organizations still maintain significant readership. (The problem is that online readers don’t translate into the same kind of revenue that print readers do.)

For example, The New York Times actually has more readers today than it did a decade ago, if you consider print and online readers together. In 1998, the Times had 1.06 million readers of its print edition. Today, in part due to a top-notch web presence, the Times has more than 1.5 million print and online readers.

Even The Boston Globe, viewed in recent years as a news organization in serious trouble, has maintained approximately 460,000 daily readers when combining print and online.

Most important is that these and other news organizations remain credible sources of information. New research by the Nielsen Company shows that people have become increasingly savvy consumers of information. In a recent credibility-of-sources survey, Americans placed many forms of direct communication — advertising, printed materials, mailings — well below media coverage in terms of what they believe. The concept of “third-party validation” is still compelling.

Put in simple terms, a good article about your university in a national newspaper is worth more than a dozen paid display ads in the same paper.

Persistence pays off: When it comes to reputation-building, patience is indeed a virtue. So is persistence. An old rule in political campaigns is that voters should see or hear something about a candidate at least seven times between Labor Day and Election Day — the homestretch of any election. The truth, for better or worse, is that most audiences require a steady drumbeat of consistent information to shape their perceptions.

In addition to sustaining the flow of information, use the “show, don’t tell” rule. Instead of producing print materials and web pages that tell the world how strong your programs are, show why this is true.

At Northeastern University, where I currently oversee marketing and communications, we are a leader in experiential learning, anchored by our renowned co-op program. Showcasing real students in experiential learning programs around the world will move the needle far more than dispensing platitudes about our leadership position. We have used this principle in recent newspaper ads designed to build awareness about our expanding research enterprise.

This steady, brick-by-brick approach has been used by a broad range of American universities (Duke, Emory, and Washington University in St. Louis, to name just a few) that have moved dramatically up the academic food chain. These institutions and their leaders made many tangible, undisputed good moves. But they are also each known for complementing these good moves with strong, sustained communications efforts.

***

To be fair, there are plenty of thoughtful, idea-based communications firms out there doing good work across different sectors. I differentiate these firms from the bumper-sticker branding agencies that focus solely on the sizzle, not the steak.

Whether or not your institution relies on outside counsel to promote itself, remember that you’re not selling mustard, Big Macs or running shoes. Your university is a churning, diverse and complicated place. Tell this story in a smart and truthful way — with unrelenting persistence — and you will succeed.

Michael Armini is senior vice president for external affairs at Northeastern University.

Passion Rules!

When Michigan State Spartans confirmed that they were moving forward with a re-branding effort which included a new logo (featured on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site) the outcry from students, alumni, and fans was deafening.

Before long, online message boards began filling with negative opinions on the new design. In fact, by the time of writing this post, more than 18,100 fans had joined a Facebook page entitled: “JUST DON’T — No new Nike-influenced Spartan helmet.” One alum even admitted he’s part of a grassroots Web effort to flood the e-mail inboxes of MSU officials and coaches to stop the logo change.

Tom Izzo, the Spartans men’s basketball coach, supported the new logo stating:

“For all of you out there that are complaining, shame on you, because … we are trying to do what’s best for Michigan State University, our athletic department and the great people that we associate with and Nike’s done a heck of a job …We are going to be moving into that new century here in the proper way and I’m excited about it.”

New logo is on Right

As a fan of many teams (none of which are the Spartans) I’d have to agree with Tom. Shame on students, alumni, and fans that would turn their backs on the organization they support so easily. Just take another glance at the two logos and see if these minor changes are worth so much fuss. It’s just a logo after all.

Is the new logo really that bad?

Before you call the new logo ugly, take a long look at the side-by-side again. They’re so close in shape and styles, that if one is ugly; the other one can’t be that attractive (by simple association) can it? Let’s break down the changes, shall we?

• The connectors to the feathers (on top) are now solid (the most noticeable change)
• The face mask has harder, more dramatic edges
• The eyes are sharper and angled
• The jaw plate is larger and more dramatic
• The back of the helmet is beveled
• The tail of the feathers no longer comes to a point

The overall look isn’t too dramatically different, but it is more modern. The final effect results in a fiercer “expression” (if you will) and a helmet that more accurately represents the shape of a traditional Spartan helmet. The largest difference, and point of contention for most, is the (now) solid connector to the “feathers” on the helmet. While this change completes the more modern look, the old logo did present the feathers in a more visually articulated way.

Why the redesign is a smart move (regardless of what you think)

People can argue about whether or not they like the new logo or whether it needed to be changed until the cows come home (and they will); but they’re completely missing the point. It’s not that the new logo is any better than the old one; that’s simply a matter of opinion. It’s not that the Spartans needed a new logo; they didn’t, the old one worked just fine. People need to remember that college sports is big business. The point of a re-brand like this is plain and simple: profit.

Merchandising
Things like the merchandising of t-shirts, jerseys, hats, jackets, and the hundreds of other products that are being sold will almost certainly increase. Despite the large dissent, there is likely a larger percentage of people who are indifferent or perhaps prefer the new logo and will be first in line to sport the new look of their favorite college team.

Even those who hate the logo now will eventually get over it; but (ironically) not before they go out and pick up as much of the “old” gear that they can get their hands on. If you really like the old logo that much, you might want to do the same because it’ll be tough to find soon.

Sponsorship
Nike is a powerful name to be associated with your team. I know nothing about a deal (if any) Michigan State has with Nike, but I’d be surprised to find out the school didn’t make out (big time) already just so Nike could be a part of the rebrand. Just one more reason this is a win-win situation for the school.

The Bigger Picture of (Re-) Branding

With all the new merchandise, sponsorships, and attention, the ultimate goal of a re-branding campaign like this is to jump start an established identity and splash a little (proverbial) water in the face of their fan base and of the general public with a new fresh look; just like Pepsi did last year. They’ve done enough with the logo that it’s noticeably different, but not so much that it can’t be recognized. But even then, modernizing a logo is only one small part of the branding pie. As the MSU Athletics Director Mark Hollis recently said in a statement:

“The Spartan logo, posted on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site, is a single element of a comprehensive brand and identity project that will be unveiled in April by Michigan State athletics…As in all branding, the power of a single symbol cannot be appreciated or measured outside the context of the total presentation.”

http://www.qualitylogoproducts.com/blog/msu-spartan-logo-controversy/

Passion Rules the Spartans!