The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education (as Seen by a Marketer)

For 400 years, higher education in the United States has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amounts of time and money and prestige in the college world have been climbing.

I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.

Most undergraduate college and university programs 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 college it is? While there are outliers (like St. John's College, in Maryland, Deep Springs College, and Full Sail University), most colleges aren't really outliers. They are mass marketers.

Stop for a second and consider the impact of that choice. By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their missions.

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 graduate dwarfs the cost. But ...

College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, millions of people are in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won't get fooled again.

This leads to a crop of potential college students who can (and will) no longer just blindly go to the "best" school they get into.

The definition of "best" is under siege.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high-school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one-page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So colleges can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in U.S. News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?

The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

College wasn't originally designed to be merely a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that's what it has become. The data I'm seeing show that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn't translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job, or more happiness than does a degree from a cheaper institution.

Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-return policies on institutions and rewarded colleges that churn out young wannabe professors instead of creating experiences that turn out leaders and problem solvers.

Just as we're watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass-market products, I think we're about to see significant cracks in old-school colleges with mass-market degrees.

Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things that students 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 spend on marketing themselves and making themselves bigger well spent? Are they organizing for changing lives or for ranking high? Does NYU have to get so much bigger? Why?

The solutions are obvious. There are tons of ways to get a cheap liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter, and teaches you to make a difference (see DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, by Anya Kamenetz). Most of these ways, though, aren't heavily marketed, nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped 200-year-old institution with a wrestling team. 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.

Seth Godin is the author of 12 books, including Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, published this year by Portfolio. He is founder and CEO of Squidoo.com, a publishing platform that allows users to generate Web pages on any subject of their choosing. This article is reprinted from his blog.