Since I suggested that getting rid of grades might be the single easiest way to focus faculty attention on more meaningful assessment, I’ve been thinking about the alternatives.

One alternative is the Learning-Based Pricing proposed in Teaching Naked. No one needs a further incentive to get elective surgery: all you want is a result. If you are paying for this result, then you have an incentive to get that result as quickly and as painlessly as possible. The new outcomes-based health care models reward hospitals for the number of patients who don’t come back. As with school everyone SHOULD have an incentive to keep you from returning, but in both school and health care, the current financial model rewards the institution when the patient or student returns. (And schools that have improved advising or looked at schedules and funnels to get more students graduating sooner, have also had to deal with the loss of revenue.)

I still think the best alternative is meaningful assessment. What have students learned since they have been here? As part of the Bologna accords, degrees from most countries (where there are also no letter grades) now come with specific learning outcomes that are assessed before award of the degree.

I’ve also, however, been thinking about how gamification is being applied everywhere:  especially in business.

You can even gamify your life. Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell says that the combination of gamification and sensors will improve our life by giving us incentives to eat better and brush your teeth and maybe even ride the bus (because the government gives you points that can be used for tax credits if you ride the bus). Don’t think anyone will do things for points? Listen to his data about how much real money people spend to buy virtual money in Facebook games.

The idea is that people like points and they like winning. Gaining points becomes its own reward. They call them loyalty point or reward cards, but the rewards, are for you. You probably know some of those people who make a few airline extra trips in the fall, just to keep their travel perks. The Nissan Leaf comes with a video game CarWings  that puts drivers in competition with each other to see who can use the least amount of fuel when they drive. The Ford Focus designers teamed up with IDEO and Smart Design to create “EcoGuide,” on the dashboard: it is a game where you are rewarded for eco-friendly driving with a leaf and vine that grows. Hit the accelerator and it withers.  Gamificiation can change behaviors.

We are probably not ready for full gamification of higher education, but just for a minute, think of this alternative to grades: universities could separate learning points, from attendance points and civic points or social points. We know that being your fraternity president or doing volunteer work counts for something, but employers might quickly sort out how much. Grades currently include all sorts of things not related to learning: attendance, punctuality, participation, and the ability to follow directions, for example.

It is true that like grades, points would be an external incentive program, but historically, that is what has worked (and how we got here in the first place.) In 1909 Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell discovered that students were content with C grades and were hardly studying at all. He was also unhappy that the best and worst student ended up with the identical degree. Taking his cue from competitive athletics, he introduced both Latin honors and grading on a curve. While not a perfect solution, both had the desired effect, and student effort increased (See Christensen and Eyring, 2-12, p. 93)  It might work again.

I’d like to hear other alternatives!

Should universities be worrying about branding? Discuss.

It’s big news on college campuses that the CMO’s have arrived, but the outside world is wondering what took so long. The WSJ (“Marketing Pros: Big Brand on Campus,” Aug 15, 2012) is correct that budget cuts, rising tuition and more competition for students are leading to new branding efforts, but there is a much more fundamental problem.

The basic product is the same everywhere. Wherever you go it is the same 4-year 120-credit degrees with the same majors and the same brochures about personal growth, life-long memories and alumni connections. What’s to market? “We’re the same, only better!” This is an opportunity to start a new conversation about both value and distinctiveness. Maybe your dorms are better or your rock wall is higher, but which schools focus on job skills, or have a broader education? Maybe we offer a five year degree (with an entry year for high school dropouts) while you offer majors that no one else does. The marketing teams will have a hard time until we start to think more carefully about our individual missions and products.

Instead of all trying to be more like the residential leafy campuses with research programs (that trained most of our faculty) we might examine the needs of students in our local area. One of the main differentiators in higher education is location: even Ivy League schools have a higher local profile. State schools already have an in-state monopoly on tuition costs and we all tout our alumni networks, but for most of us, this is still mostly a regional benefit.

Such undifferentiated competition has not been good for students or universities. Just like any other organization, universities need a focused and unique mission. It is silly to all claim that we are more “excellent” than the next school and if we all continue to chase a ranking in the top 100 schools, we make the playing field very narrow. We don’t want all of our universities to be like Harvard.

Universities are already segmented by types of students and areas of content, especially in the arts and professional areas like nursing, or business. We have not seen as much segmentation for undergraduate science or pre-med, but we will. The new business model of the “long tail” suggests even more segmentation and more niche markets will emerge. In addition to specializing in content areas or even broad types of students (like commuter vs residential or part-time vs full-time), schools could focus on even smaller sub-categories.

One of the lessons of Borders is to leverage your assets. When Borders arrived, it had something the smaller independents did not have: inventory. As Amazon began to compete with Borders for inventory, Borders should have found some other way to stay vital that leveraged its other assets and market position. Borders had loyal customers who liked to visit. Instead of reducing staff and letting the stores get run-down, Borders should have done the opposite: give people more reasons to visit. Borders is gone, but many of the more idiosyncratic independent booksellers that once feared Borders survive. Universities will each need to find a niche.

There is a reason why there is only one Amazon: they are the best and cheapest at what they do. If you want to compete, you need to offer something better, unique or cheaper. Higher education has become too generic. With the same increasingly expensive products on every campus, we compete only through discounting. While online degrees won’t affect the best brands or appeal to the best students, they will carve into the market share in the middle. For those middle universities, a new culture of innovation and change will be required.

We’ve actually had plenty of marketing in higher education, but we call it athletics. When Georgetown won the NCAA Basketball tournament in 1984, it got a boost in applications, but so did George Washington University and George Mason University. Athletics budgets are large, but the marketing people will know that it would take even more money (or a bad news scandal) to buy the same media impact as a winning team.

Real marketing will be good for higher education. It is a chance to tell prospective students about what is different about your campus or your courses. It should stimulate a conversation on campuses about the unique mission of each institution.

This, however, is a pretty radical idea. As a faculty member, I recognize my own desire to be “left alone to teach what I want to teach and how I want to teach it–just bring me students.” To ask “what does the market need and what is unique about what we might provide?” is routine for other organizations. But it will be new for higher education.

Before we put a new label on our can, we had better stop and think about what we want in the can. This is an opportunity. Let’s think about what we do that is distinctive, but let’s also make sure we deliver as promised. What’s in your can?

This is a short blog version of my new article  “More Marketing, More Mission: How Technology is Driving the Branding of Higher Education—and Why that Might be Good For Us” that appears this month in Spectra, a Publication of the National Communications Association 49/1 (March, 2013) p. 11-13.

Almost everyone in higher education is now worried. There are new pressures for accountability, new online competition and now the sequester.  It also seems at last, as if the great tuition ramp is finally about to level off: we’ve brushed off concern from legislators for years, but with the economy still in neutral, parents are increasingly making college decisions based on net price. Look for smaller tuition increases and eventually even some tuition reductions. You might also recall that the baby boom is over and the number of high school applicants is declining in most states.

Still not worried? Republicans and Democrats can agree on almost nothing these days. Actually, they probably agree on absolutely nothing, except for one thing: higher education.

Yes, President Obama and Sen Mark Rubio agree on something: Washington gives out $175 billion a year on student grants, loans and tax breaks and both of them want to use that leverage to create more accountable and more affordable system. (WSJ Feb 20 Obama, Rubio Put Higher Education on Notice).

Many parents and students already use College Navigator, and now the White House has already introduced a new College Score Card.  It  has flaws, but external calls for accountability and transparency will only intensify.

Luckily for us, higher education legislation is not the most important issues in Washington right now.  At some point, however, perhaps before the midterm elections, both parties will want to find to find something they can get done and something that everyone in the country agrees upon. It is easy to assume that all of those ethical violations of for-profit schools did not tarnish the image of traditional not-for-profit colleges, but remember–all of thew were accredited. “Every bad thing you read about happened in an accredited institution,” says Kevin Carey, director of education policy at the nonpartisan New America Foundation.  Oh dear…

We will resist and it will not be futile. (No Jedi mind melds please.) We are a diverse and unwieldy system and we can still claim to be the best in the world. But in the end, there will be some new accreditation systems and new metrics for us to track. It would be very unlikely that higher education can really get out in front of this issue.  Radical innovation is in the DNA of most institutions, but with the coming disruption, it is the nimble who will mutate into something that can survive in the new climate.