Making the most of Obama’s retraining push

A few months back, we had a post about the dismal job market, and made the case that this should be a part of the dialogue you have with applicants, incoming freshmen, and graduate and transfer students.

It’s time to revisit the issue. University Business just ran a story about the American Recovery and Reinvestment act. The gist of the article is ways you can increase a student’s eligibility for financial aid when students and/or their parents are collecting unemployment benefits.

But there’s a broader trend that may help you get better numbers. University Business notes that the Obama administration has taken several steps to help displaced workers retrain for new careers. There are a number of initiatives that will encourage people to enroll in higher education, and this is timely as it coincides with the Post 9/11 GI Bill, which went into effect on August 1st.

The biggest question these new prospective students will have is, “How can this help me in the job market?” Your institution’s way of answering this question should be a central part of your marketing efforts.

And what does this have to do with Millennials?

Much of the literature on this generation has focused on the ways employers should go about recruiting and retaining Millennials in the work force. But an unstable economy may have changed the conversation. A large number of young entrepreneurs will skip higher education and seek their fortune on their own. But for those who take the more traditional path, it’s only a matter of time before they ask, “How can this help me in the job market?”

I suspect a lot of them are asking this already.

A sucker’s guide to talking to Gen Y

In the article “Speaking to Generation Nexus”, the Washington Post recently reported on business coach Anne Loehr, who teaches a class called “Get Wise With Gen Ys: How to Effectively Sell to Each Generation in Today’s Workplace.”

From the article (quoting Loehr) :

“[Millenials] really value making a difference. If you can say you are ‘green,’ or politically correct or socially correct, whatever, that goes a long way with them. Nike, no way. Gen Y will not buy Nike — that big, ugly globalized company. This generation is very well-educated — both parents probably have MBAs…Y’s may be working in the local schools, teaching French to the poor elementary school kids. Okay? That kind of thing.”

In case you wanted some crib notes on how to lump generations made up of the entire spectrum of ethinicities, classes, educational levels, etc., you can download “Anne Loehr’s Generational Cheat Sheet” from the Washington Post’s website.

This is, to say the very least, an incredible oversimplification. Loehr mistakes an entire generation’s proclivity towards optimism and “other-orientation” and reduces it to a fashion statement. Not only is this dangerously cynical and stereotypical, but overreaches into the political/personal and socio-economic realities that this generation grew up with.

By making this kind of generalization about a group born over the course of a decade is exactly counter to the multi-faceted nature of the generation. There is a shared consciousness of global events that did shape the American Millennial generation’s experience. Rapid advances in technology sectors during the ‘90s — with cell phones, the Internet and personal computers, satellite and cable television — did exponentially increase entertainment and information outlets for *everyone*; Millennials are just more adjusted and comfortable in that environment.

CBS News Report “Gen Y Social Misfits?”

Report suggests Millennials “lose the headphones” so they can “lose the stereotypes”.

Millennials have “Grown Up Digital”

“Technology is a part of their life, it’s like air,” says Bill Tapscott, author of “Grown Up Digital.”

I wanted to share this great podcast from December from net@nite with Amber and Leo.  Author Tapscott discusses how the net generation is a force for change and how the cynical views of this generation don’t hold up.

You can download the first chapter of “Grown Up Digital” here.

Make an appearance at NAGAP through Web Chat!

National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals 2009 Conference, New York

Kathy Hua-Di, Recruitment Coordinator for the University of Southern California School of Social Work, and I will be presenting on Thursday (4/23) at the National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals (NAGAP) annual conference in New York. If you won’t be there in person, read on to find out how you can make an appearance also, via web chat!

At our session, Technology 101: Recruiting Millennials Using Web Chat, we’ll be discussing how and why to use Web Chat to recruit millennials.

The generation of students entering college this year have never known a world without the Internet. Graduate schools that don’t communicate using newer technologies run the risk of missing out on some of today’s top students.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be tech-savvy to reach Millennials, or Generation Y. Web-based chat is an example of how new Internet technologies can be adopted at a low cost and with little training. Kathy Hua-Di will provide an overview of the electronic communication tools that are natural for this year’s incoming freshman and suggests ways that these tools can become an integral part of the admissions process based on her experience using Web Chat at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work.

I’ll be providing a demo, and discussing some research findings about how recruitment professionals are using webchat, who they are inviting to chats, and who is participating in web chats.

If you won’t be able to attend, but would like to make an appearance at the conference, join the following web chat room at the specified time and date, and you’ll be able to participate in a live web chat during our conference session! If you plan to participate, please send me an email, so I can acknowledge you in the Web Chat during the session.

Join the NAGAP Web Chat Conference Session Live
Thursday, April 23, 2009
8am PDT / 9am MDT / 10am CDT / 11am EDT
http://nagap.universitywebchat.com/chat6843/

I hope to see you there!

YouTube’s new site for higher education–a new way to waste time?

On April 1st, YouTube launched YouTubeEDU, an aggregate of videos around higher education.

If you’re hungry for constant learning, this is a great resource for watching lectures and interviews. But I’m not sure exactly how useful it will be for recruiting Millennials for your institution.

YouTube EDU has its share of recruitment videos, of course.  But a quick sampling of these didn’t show me anything I hadn’t already expected.

There are a number of slick, corporate-like productions that most prospects will ignore, and some gritty recruitment efforts, such as a job fair which would probably be good except that the background noise drowns out the voices of that narrator and the students being interviewed. One video offers 45 seconds of a giggling sophomore who gushes about how much she loves her college mascot, without explaining why she or anyone else would want to attend that particular school.

If any Millennials are really going to rely on YouTube to select their campus, they can find relevant videos more quickly by doing a normal search. I don’t see how YouTube EDU offers anything special, aside from maybe weeding out the junk videos like “Drunken CSU student vomits in pool.”

But don’t write it off just yet.

This is the classic Web 2.0 style, where you “just build it and see what the masses do.” And we don’t really know what they’ll do.

Getting your institution’s videos onto YouTube EDU needn’t be a top priority just now, but it may be worth keeping an eye on the site.

Put Millennials on a mission

Ford has come up with a creative marketing plan to sell the new Fiesta to Millennials.  A mere 100 Millennials were chosen to borrow and drive the sleek, tiny vehicle. And there’s a catch. They have to go on a number of “Missions” in their fiesta, and post their experiences on social networking sites such as YouTube and FaceBook.

Basically, Ford has recruited Millennials to do something interesting and fun. Is there a way to apply this to your institution? Maybe.

Create a “mission” for potential applicants, ideally something that they can do in their own home town. Give them a forum to report the results online, such as a blog or a FaceBook group. Make sure the event is somehow tied in with your institution.

It’s your job to get creative with this, but here are a few mission ideas off the top of my head:

• Build a team of people with similar academic goals and challenge another team to paintball, ultimate frisbee, or some other competition (English majors vs. Business School, and so on).
• “Find the Alumni.”  Post clues on your website to help Millennials locate someone who recently graduate from your institution. Once you have people involved, your graduate could post online videos that taunt the seekers until they succeed
• Chat room record breaking.  Set a regular time for highly-publicized live chat sessions, and try to set a record for the number of attendees. You could compete with other schools for the highest number of attendees each week, and come up with creative and unusual topics.

All of these are unusual tactics, to be sure. This is thinking outside the box, and it could flop. But Ford has turned this new way of thinking into something really cool (over 3,000 applicants competed to drive the 100 Fiestas, and there were over 580,000 YouTube views of their video submissions).

If you’re willing to stretch the envelope, you may be the founder of a new tradition that will win you a lot of “cool” points.

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.

Millennials’ mass media of choice makes them more accessable

I don’t think any school has ever used TV ads to recruit students.  Even though past generations of teens through twenty-somethings have spent hours every day in front of the tube, television offers limited ability to target the ideal recruits, and the costs are prohibitive.

That’s why Deloitte’s State of the Media Democracy report is such good news for admissions counselors.

The gist of their findings shouldn’t surprise you–computers and all their mobile cousins are taking over TV as the top source of entertainment. This is true for roughly three fourths of Millennials, and seems to hold true internationally.

What this means, effectively, is that if you use digital recruiting tactics such as we’ve surveyed in our white paper, you’re going to effectively get TV power on an internet budget–and with easily measurable results, to boot.

Bea Fields posted a clever and moving video about students on the Millennial Leaders blog. Just above the video she poses three questions:

1) Are you redesigning your education process to make it relevant and interactive for students of today?

2) Why are teachers still broadcasting information (one way lecturing) as opposed to collaborating and interacting with their students?

3) What is stopping us from using the vast technological resources we have at our fingertips to make learning exciting and a true experience for our youth?

It’s probably reasonable to address the second question by pointing out that faculty have knowledge and experience which the students do not.  But the third question deserves some thought, and it’s especially relevant for admissions.

At least at the level of higher education, many institutions are, in fact, making good use of technology in the classroom. But this short video, in addition to dramatically pointing out some important statistics, reveals the frustration that a lot of Millennials are feeling.

Chances are your institution is doing something to address this issue. There are a lot of classes and projects that involve collaboration using text and other modern media. Your tip for today is this: When marketing your institution, be sure to emphasize these instances of instruction that will impress Millennials.

Admissions officers should be familiar enough with this to answer a prospective student’s questions or offer examples of the ways your faculty are using technology to offer students an exciting and “real” educational experience.