Are Millennials good for business schools and programs?

Former Harvard faculty member Steven Berglass recently lamented the lack of an entrepreneurial spirit among Millennials in a Forbes blog post. Interestingly, the way he describes this shortcoming suggests a radical shift instead of an overall decline.

Regardless, the change could be good news for business programs. Many entrepreneurs have a tendency to scorn higher education, but the spirit of collaboration that characterizes Millennials is also prevalent on many campuses.

It’s worth emphasizing this in your recruiting.

Throughout his post, Berglass takes potshots at over-attentive parents, but he really gets to the crux of the matter when he says, “Rather than seeking to come out on top in zero-sum games, Millennials strive for consensus.”

In the context of the post, this is apparently supposed to be a bad thing, although I’m not convinced that Steven Berglass completely thinks so.

Many academic programs include a strong element of collaboration, and if this is true for your business department you’ll recruit a lot of ambitious Millennials who are eager to learn and share. There will always be a few lone wolves who seek their fortune without an education, but you can take heart knowing that this generation’s overall attitude should be good for business.

New Harris Interactive Millennial presentation

Steve Mellor and Cathy O’Donnell of Harris Interactive recently released a great set of slides that covers the entire Millennial generation from a cultural perspective.

Complete with slides on Millennial cultural influences, crime and drug statistics and the state of the mobile Millennial, it’s worth a view. Enjoy!

As if recruiting Millennials wasn’t tough enough already…

All the challenges of recruiting the right students for your institution are only a part of what campuses are now facing. A  post on Millennial Marketing yesterday suggests that many students are experiencing a sort of buyer’s remorse.

The post cites a recent study by collegeclicktv.com in which more than half of the students surveyed indicated they were not happy with their college or university choice.

The good news is that you have a hidden opportunity in this challenge. Whatever measures your institution takes to retain current students can also become an effective part of your marketing and recruiting efforts.

If nothing else, the survey reinforces the need for college applicants to do their due diligence.  And with Millennials, that’s bound to mean an increased demand for blogs, videos, chat rooms and other technologies, such as we discuss in our white paper.

Not all scary: Millennial blogger highlights the positive

Millennials often get a bad press, describing this generation as being lazy and entitled. So it’s nice to remember this generation — like all others — has it’s good and less good points.

A recent blog post by a Millennial, blogger and marketing student caught my eye. In his post “Marketing to the Big Scary Monster”, he explains that as a marketing student is often bombarded with loads of disparaging statistics, comments and ideas about Millennials. In his post he does a nice job of highlighting several positive traits:

1. Compared to 1995, teens today are more likely to embrace their parent’s
   values.
2. The average combined SAT score has risen nearly 15 points since 1996.
3. Read the rest.

His blog is well written and insightful. This Millennial is clearly communicating well in the medium that he is comfortable with and grew up with: the Internet. It looks like he uses blogs, Twitter (micro-blogging) and Facebook (a social network).

It looks like he is already in school, but what about his cohorts who aren’t yet in graduate school? Is your marketing plan engaging with these prospects on the Internet? If it isn’t, does this worry you?

Top Technology Trends in Higher Education

Educause and the New Medium Consortium have teamed up to present The Horizon Report, 2009 Edition, which identifies technologies and trends that are entering mainstream use  for teaching, learning, research, and creative applications.

The Horizon Report (cover), 2009 Edition

The trends are fascinating, and can be readily applied to millennial recruiting:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

One trend that immediately resonates with me is the use of “smart mobile phones”, that have web access. I see many students increasingly using these devices for short Internet transactions, like looking up a fact, phrase or location, or updating their Facebook status or posting on Twitter.

A second trend that resonates with me is the increasingly global nature of students, particularly at the graduate level. We must all keep in mind that the work day does not start and end for the other two-thirds of the world at 8am and 6pm, and so using technologies to reach potential students in other countries using technologies like WebChat, Email, IM, and skype becomes increasingly important.

(The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 300 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.)