I do not know Robert Hoekman Jr. I’ve read Designing The Obvious, and it’s a splendid book that has helped me hone my interaction design skills. I’ve never heard him speak, but it does seem the web has held his opinions and ideas in high esteeem.

I do not know Whitney Hess. I read her post on what a user experience designer is not, which I think is the worst blog post I’ve read this year not authored by Michael Arrington (though I would note that Arrington occupies my entire top five). I found the article to be overly prescriptive in a field that was birthed from web generalists trying to fold interaction design practice into a web that was still Web-with-a-capital-W. I’ve never heard her speak, though I’ve heard good things about her.

I do know Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast. And I do know Elaine Nelson. I’ve known them for years and know their web work well. They are damn good designers and developers the world should know about, people who were building websites before Hess could drink and back when we all thought XML would save the world. (It didn’t.)

So when Andrea says to me in response to Hoekman’s scathing criticism of Hess that “people like him that make me petrified of public speaking,” and when Elaine follows with “that sort of thing makes me want to never ever write abt web,” I know Hoekman missed his mark badly.

I find some of Hoekman’s criticisms to be valid. Hess has come off as naive in her writing at times, arguing for a level of specialization that only Fortune 250 companies and dedicated UX agencies have while ignoring smaller firms as well as the public sector and their small-to-nonexistent budgets. His description of her talk in Italy suggests she didn’t understand the audience. I myself have wondered what she’s offering to the broader web world right now. I see a 29 year old with a lot of talent still locked up in promise and not expressed in action.

(As an aside, have you noticed our so-called “web heroes” are all in their mid 30s to late 40s and professionally emerged in the late 90s and early 2000s? I can’t think of anyone who’s reached “hero” status, Hoekman included, who doesn’t fit those qualifications, save Kristina Halvorson, who emerged in the last two years but is roughly my age. Do we preternaturally choose to not grant authority to any web profesisonal under the age of 30?)

So Hoekman has a good argument. Why did he choose to wrap it in so much venom?

Hoekman’s post reminded me of two other people in the “web hero” category — Joe Clark and Mark Pilgrim — that have dished out unapologetic scorn to those they do not consider worthy to tie their sandal when it comes to accessibility. I have a lot of respect for Clark and Pilgrim, but there are times when I find their prickliness and bile obfuscates whatever message they’re trying to get out.

Is it sexism? I don’t see how it could be. Hoekman’s “sin” of sexism is that he’s jumping up and down in a known minefield. He should have known better, but it wasn’t on purpose.

But there is a chauvinism to his argument. Hoekman is framing himself as speaking truth to power in an industry that refuses to tell the truth. This belief truly becomes tortured when he starts dragging Zeldman and Happy Cog into it, as if they are Wearing No Clothes. The problem is that I’ve found people in the trenches of the web world have a very sober view of Zeldman and Happy Cog, even if they’re not always running around spewing 3000 word diatribes about them on the Internet.

I mean, seriously, we all worship the feet of a twice-divorced recovering alcoholic with a petulant streak and his design firm that spit out a re-do of WordPress which took multiple iterations to return to usability? THAT Zeldman? THAT Happy Cog?

Seriously. I respect Jeffrey Zeldman. I was lucky enough to have lunch with him last year at An Event Apart. He’s contributed to building web design from a bunch of people with text editors to an immense, diverse industry. Hell, I have one of his quotes hanging from the corkboard opposite my cube. But he’s no hero of mine. He’s just another imperfect guy with something to say.

Just like me.

But what can I say in a world where Hoekman is waiting to gun me down the moment I give a talk he doesn’t agree with, or suggest a different way in user experience from “what he built?” I’ve been a web professional now for a dozen years, though it’s only only been this year I’ve turned from web generalist to user experience designer when I left the higher education web world. Do I have enough experience that I’m not going to be slapped with a “dime-a-dozen designer” label by him? Is he going to say that because I’m speaking I’m not building anymore and thus am no longer valid, like some on Twitter insinuated?

And yet, I do speak. I speak because I enjoy it. I speak because it lets me teach and be taught. I’ve been given the opportunity to speak at an Ignite, a Refresh, and SXSW. I count myself incredibly lucky that the same conference attendees that vilified a keynote speaker handed me a Best Of Conference award the following year.

And yet, I worry that Hoekman — or someone like him — is waiting in the wings to fire at will and accuse me of not being good enough for his impossible standard.

And if I, someone who has no fear of an audience, feel that way, what of Andrea and Elaine, people with as much (if not more) experience than me (and better at this than me)? Why should they dare step up and speak? Why should they share, knowing the spectre of Hoekman looms somewhere out there?

Why should anyone timid or afraid they’ll be publicly humiliated as an impostor speak in a world where Hoekman lurks?

See, that’s what makes me sad. Hoekman attacks Hess, and he loses the argument because his bile is louder than his honest criticism. Hoekman attacks Zeldman and Happy Cog, an appeal to the ground level web person that falls flat because we’ve heard it all before and we don’t need Hoekman to defend us from them when we’re adults and can do it ourselves, thanks.

But Hoekman scares the crap out of the very people who should be speaking up — the ones “building cool things” who are afraid to share what they have. The young designer who found something interesting in a Camtasia recording that led them to build a better web form. The experienced developer with much to share but a deep-seated impostor syndrome. The user experience specialist who doesn’t think they have enough experience to open their mouths in public. In other words, the very people Hoekman says he’s saving from the infant terrible Hess are the very people he’s scaring off.

“Millions of designers do and say the same things every single day, and the web is better because of it” comes across not as a statement of affinity with those of us who fight in the trenches every day but as a backhanded slap to those who stay in line and don’t stray from the path.

Because I think that’s what Hoekman is arguing for — do things his way and no one gets hurt.

He would argue differently. He would lean on the idea, I think, that those who do good work should be and will be rewarded for it. But I’m reminded of a saying of my father’s that I used over the weekend at Barcamp Seattle — “The cream rises to the top, but s–t floats too.” Trying to get signal through the noise is already difficult. We need to amplify the best so we can turn down the douchebags. How does a vicious teardown of a younger speaker help when some of us are just trying to be heard — and are trying to coax out some outstanding people out of their shells?

I don’t know Robert Hoekman Jr. But I know his vitriol, and it’s hard to separate his good ideas from his bad behavior. And while I respect his ideas about user experience, he is not my hero, for sharp criticism must come with honesty and respect, not with venom and dismissiveness.

I don’t know Whitney Hess. I know some of her writings, and I believe she lacks an understanding of how flexible the idea of user experience must be. She is not my hero, though I respect her ideas, and I believe that she is an decent person who knows she is learning, just like all of us. And I would rather live in her UX reality, flawed as I may see it, than in Hoekman’s, because hardened ideas are easier to deal with than hardened hearts.

I know Andrea Schwandt-Arbogast and Elaine Nelson. I know their writings. I know their work. I know them personally. They do great work. They are fallible. And they are my heroes, because every day, despite small budgets, great stress, and looming personal burnout, they do great things. And should they ever stand and speak, I will listen. And should I disagree, I will tell them in private long before I criticize them in public. And if I were to criticize, I would hope I’d choose to be clear and concise and dispassionate.

And should Robert Hoekman Jr choose to suggest they’re “dime-a-dozen designers” who are “hurting” an industry, I do not think I could be clear and concise and dispassionate.

The future of usability lies in the hands of a thousand professionals taking Hoekman and Hess’ ideas and making something new. I hope some of them will share their ideas — and their work — with the class. And I hope they can share without fear of Robert Hoekman Jr suggesting they are a dime a dozen, or Chris Fahey having so little respect for the industry that he’d suggest the work that’s come before has been poor. I just hope they can share.

And I hope one day I might be lucky enough to grace the stage of a conference like An Event Apart, though I think my comment about Jeffrey Zeldman has me blackballed for life.

(And one last aside to Mr. Hoekman: Leaning on “the lurkers support me in email?” Seriously?)

As I’m leaving this job, I’m cleaning out my file cabinet page by page, file by file. Along the way, I stumbled on a letter Janette Eby, our student services coordinator at the time, wrote me in 2001. It was mostly about how terrible the Prospective Students section of the site was at the time (and it was terrible… oh God, the site was terrible from top to bottom in 2001).

What’s remarkable about it is how she closed the letter:

…we live in a computer-centric world, and for those people looking for information about our school on the Internet, we must provide a website that easily and clearly directs prospective students or visitors to information they are looking for…. Good recruitment practices, which include good customer service, attract more students…. To put it bluntly, if we don’t have students, we don’t have anything. If we want to attract intelligent, qualified students it is our responsibility to practice good customer service by presenting what our school has to offer in a clear, easily accessible and user-friendly way.

Ten years ago Janette understood the mission of the higher ed web. My last ten years have been about convincing everyone else of this.

Universities exist because of those they provide service to — teaching, research, practice. They must never, ever forget that relationship.

In the waning hours of HighEdWeb 2010, I slumped into a seat in the hotel bar, trying to remember the license plate of the freight truck of adoration that had hit me. Here I was with the top prize for a talk that just 72 hours seemed heading for disaster. I was just numb. I was just biding my time until it was time to fly home.

At some point Lori Packer* wandered by. Lori was the track chair and had selected my proposal which had become this talk which had become a red stapler and a Best Of Conference trophy. We got to talking about what it all meant. Somewhere in there, I said that I’d been unhappy at work for quite a while, that I was starting to ask whether I should stay in higher ed. Lori retorted that there were many good things about being in higher ed.

I responded, “I love higher ed. And I love the web. But I don’t like my job.”

And, at that moment, I realized what I’d just said was Truth. Not “true,” because it was, but Truth, as in a revelation of honesty.

The University of Washington has been good to me the last 9 1/2 years. And yet, I’ve been unhappy. I couldn’t move up. I was top of the food chain in my unit, and because my unit valued the web, I was paid well compared to other web people on campus. And yet, I’m top of the food chain. There’s no rung on the ladder above the one I’m on.

When I did interview for other web positions on campus, I was either passed over for cheaper alternatives, or I was given offers at a massive pay cut (and still a full-time job). And all these moves would have been lateral. We have an excellent person running the web for the university right now, but she’s probably going to die in the saddle, so moving into that role is out of the question.

As well, I have a problem with political capital. I have a lot of it. Heaps of it. But it’s like the sickles and galleons of Harry Potter — meaningful in the wizarding world but utterly worthless in this world. I can’t spend the capital; I lack the power to transform it into the changes I’ve desired.

At one point last year I told my boss that for all the good things everyone thinks I’ve done, I feel like I’ve dragged the school 50 feet in 9 years, and everyone else is 500 or 5000 feet further along. I’ve been long promised that change would come, this will be the year that Everything Will Change, but the change never comes, thanks to the resistance to change that is endemic to this entire university.

It is time to go. I’m leaving higher ed.

Starting January 31, I will be moving to a technology business management startup called Apptio. They need someone who can help their brilliant Java programmers make their web applications look and feel brilliant. And I will get my first raise of any sort in 5 years.

I would love to stay in higher ed, but I’m doubly a victim of geography — I love Seattle, and Seattle is very, very lacking in institutions of higher education. If I were in the Northeast, I could just latch on to another college down the street, but in Seattle you don’t have a lot of choices. As for uprooting and going somewhere else, I just bought a house in 2010, and I’ve got a daughter in school she loves and a wife who finally has a job she doesn’t hate. On the other side, the metro Seattle high tech community right now is stronger than it’s ever been. Between this and the draconian cuts coming to UW, this is a great time to leave.

But I won’t be completely free of the higher ed community and UW just yet. I’m still teaching web development in the spring, and I’m still planning on defending my Best Of Conference title at HighEdWeb 2011. I’m not going to be scarce with the higher ed web community; I’m in a new role, but I’ll always be a fellow traveler.

I stood on stage in October talking about why why higher ed is the best gig in the Web. And I still believe that it’s true, and I’m sorry I can’t continue in higher ed. There are some great people doing incredible work at schools and colleges all over the country. And they’re doing it despite many things — money, time, an organization that values them at the level they should. Higher ed web people achieve more with duct tape and bailing wire than for-profit web people achieve with actual funding.

But in that litany of mine that’s been echoed around the web since I said it that Tuesday morning in Cincinnati, I left out one thing. Love higher ed. Love the web. Love people. And love yourself, too. Do work that makes you happy and pays you what you’re worth (not necessarily with money). If you feel that way in a higher ed job, then you’re awesome, and I really hope you’re making the world a better place every day. But if you’re miserable in your job right now, then find something else. You deserve better than long hours, low pay, and zero respect. If they don’t love you, find someone who will.

I realized that in a small way my job was like an abusive relationship — I should get out, but this life was all I’ve known. The Truth was that I did deserve better, and my loyalties should lie with my God, my family, and myself, not with a job.

And given I spent a quarter of my life at UW and a third of my life in higher ed when you count my years at Colorado, I doubt I’ll ever be free of it. No one ever really leaves the University of Washington; they just take sabbaticals at for-profit companies.

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Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook.

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* – Do not hold Lori responsible for any of this. She just happened to be there at the right time. If she comes out for the M’s-Phils series this summer, I’ll buy the game tickets.

Late last night someone sent me a link to today’s XKCD cartoon, saying “This reminds me of you…”:

XKCD #773: University Website

By this morning, it was all over Twitter and spawning all sorts of it’s-true-no-it’s-not commentary from the higher ed world. Most of the negative commentary seems to be around the importance of the university website as promotional piece. Meanwhile, the user-centered design folks are mostly pointing and screaming “THIS.”

As for me, I agree with both sentiments — the home page is about promotion, but it’s also about focusing on your users and their needs. But, in addition, I am reminded of something I’ve been saying around here for years:

The web is a tool, not a toy.

One of the sentiments I hear from higher-ups on university campuses is that they see the web as this “thing” they must “have” like the latest electronic gizmo. It’s a sentiment I heard in the late 1990s quite a bit from people — that having a website made you Cooler Than Everyone Else.

The frightening thing, of course, is that people are still saying that in 2010. It doesn’t make you cooler than anyone else to have one; it’s de rigueur now, so NOT having one makes you LESS Cooler Than Everyone Else.

Around 2002 or so, I noticed a change in what they were saying. They talked now about putting information on the web, filling their sites with a mishmash of information. I dubbed this the “web as bulletin board” approach. This was an improvement over the “web as toy” attitude, but there was no strategy involved, and often you ended up with university home pages that were slumgullions of random chunks of information that had no purpose other than to, well, make you look Cooler Than Everyone Else. Here’s a big box about a research grant we got! Here’s a huge thing on some random academic center whose professor demanded we put it on the front page. Oh, you want to find out about our academic programs? Click on this itty-bitty link down in the bottom right.

University websites, for the most part, have been a combination of these two things ever since then. Take the now-famous Brown University website, filled with its sliding boxes. Perhaps, from an information architecture standpoint, it’s pretty good (and I think it probably is), but what did everyone talk about? The sliding boxes. This is the Web As Toy, and I personally think it distracts more than enlightens.

Then there’s the new University of Washington home page. If you head for the bottom of the page, you run into what’s been dubbed the “Obama footer,” so called because it was the same link-heavy footer style used on the Obama campaign site. The problem, of course, is that you have a lot of useful links all clustered in these long lists that make them hard to read and unusable. (Scott Thomas, the Obama ’08 design director, explained at An Event Apart 2009 why they had the link-heavy footer — everyone wanted their stuff on the home page, so they just stuffed them all in the footer out of the way of the news and marketing messages so they wouldn’t interfere. Win-win, yes, but it doesn’t seem like a viable long term strategy, and in fact the big footer was not a design element of any Obama-derived website that followed.)

I don’t think the web is a Toy, and I don’t think it’s a Bulletin Board. I think it’s a tool. It’s a device for getting needed information to the users looking for it.

An example: Someone at our undergraduate advising office told me a story a couple of years ago. For a long time, the advisers were constantly going through burnout due to the endless crush of students begging them for help. They decided to do something radical: They rounded up all the frequently asked questions of students — everything from what classes to take to how to declare a major — and put a list of answers on their website. Students were then advised to check the website first to see if the information they needed was already there.

Something strange happened in the Advising Center. The students kept coming, but the questions were now harder, things that required time and effort to solve. The advisers, though, found they now had time to do the legwork to solve the hard questions and take the time to help walk students through crises, because they weren’t spending the day on the phone answering the questions the website answered. Students were happier, and the burnout started to fade as the advisers saw what their work meant to these crisis students.

To me, that’s using the web as a tool — they identified their audience, identified their questions, answered them, then made themselves more available to deal with the stuff the web didn’t or couldn’t answer. It’s not just the “user-centered design” we wave around like the new banner we must rally around, but it’s also a user-centered organization that uses the web to help make their users’ lives easier.

Now, there is one issue with this — what information needs to be in front of the audience. Audiences want to find faculty phone numbers. Audiences also want to find out about your school. Both pieces of information need to be available to them. I am not opposed to the home page as marketing tool. Used correctly, it can be a great device for promoting the institution.

But it must come with findability. The information the people are there to look for needs to be obvious. It needs to be findable.

Think of it this way — retail stores fill the fronts of stores with aspirational products as well as cheap, high margin tchotchkes. My local Target is loaded with items they’re promoting that I’m not looking for, all with the idea that perhaps I’ll think hey, this is only $1, or hey, I really do need a 5 burner gas grill with sear burner and at a low price to go with the socks and underwear I actually was here to buy.

But imagine if Target was only about all this stuff they were trying to promote. Imagine if it was such that you couldn’t actually find the socks and underwear for all the big displays of grills and the videos of people using electric toothbrushes and the aisles and aisles of cheap junk. What would happen? They’d stop selling socks and underwear and everything else people came to find because people would go to Fred Meyer or Wal-Mart where the socks and underwear were findable.

And that, to me, is the truth of the XKCD cartoon. A university website is a tool for finding answers. If along the way you find out something new about the institution you didn’t know before, that’s gravy. But if your audience is prospective students, and they just want to know if you offer their degree and how to apply, and you’re shoving videos and mission statements in their face rather than giving them a route to the application form they want to fill out, you will lose.

Noel-Levitz’ recently released E-Expectations survey found 1 in 4 prospective undergraduates took a school off their potential applicant list because of a poor experience with that school’s website. We can say all we want about how nice multimedia presentations and marketing materials help draw students in, but if you don’t give the students what they want, they will leave.

The web is a tool. It is not a toy. Content may be king, but the user is God. And they demand — and deserve — usability and findability. Let content strategy and user-centered design lead the way, not the hither and thither of provosts and presidents and professors and their pontifications.

I have a lot of respect for Seth Godin. In the marketing world, he’s been the best advocate for authenticity in marketing in a time of massive media upheaval. His books sell a hell of a lot of copies because he’s smart, funny, and a great communicator about the marketing world.

He knows marketing. He breathes marketing. He is marketing.

And I think that’s why his post this morning about higher education is so detached from the reality of higher ed.

Mind you, I agree with his basic premise (and have said so in the past) — that higher ed in this country is on the precipice of collapse. Nine years building and running websites for my large research university employer has given me a view into the dark present and darker future of our institutions of higher learning.  Some have overemphasized research at the cost of providing solid undergraduate instruction. Others have solid teaching, but the diminishing returns of massive tuition increases means they are vulnerable to the coming revolution in online learning, which will bring the same Internet-driven changes to colleges that have come already to the music and news industries. Budget cuts in public institutions are obliterating any chance for schools to do anything but hunker down and survive. Meanwhile, private schools like Stanford (Godin’s alma mater) now charge more than $50K a year just for tuition.

The business model of higher education is completely unsustainable. I think Godin and I agree on that. And it pains me to defend higher ed, because I know where the problems are and who the problems are and that why universities are in trouble now and in the years to come.

But his case is so vapid and superficial it’s as if he’s seen the postcard and that’s all the data you ever need to judge a place. And sadly, that’s his case, in a nutshell.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is?

No, you can’t. But first off, you’re not buying a car. You’re buying an education. An experience. And every school has their flipbooks of ivy walls and brick buildings and oversaturated blue skies because that is exactly what we expect.

Not students, mind you. Parents. Students don’t read the flipbooks. They read the websites. And the websites of higher education are a vibrant, diverse cohort. And that’s where the real competition is, if you call it that. The schools that have chosen to dive into social media and have sought to interact with potential students that way have been rewarded. Those that haven’t, well, they have flipbooks.

Flipbooks and catalogs and brochures go to two kinds of people: Parents and prospective students who need to have something “tangible” to show them that yes, they are really going to apply for that grad program. Everyone else uses the web. And as public colleges have more and more of their funding cannibalized for, I don’t know, paying for lawsuits over pointless immigration and abortion laws (I’m looking at you, Arizona and Oklahoma), there’s less and less money for print. Most of the schools within my employer have ceased printing catalogs, telling people to go online instead.

College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay….

Well, yes. DUH. College costs have outstripped inflation for something like 25 years straight. But there are a lot of reasons why they’re going up. State support has collapsed. Health insurance costs have risen. Students are demanding more and more services — nicer dorm rooms, wi-fi, cable, writing centers, etc. — that cost money. The one thing I can say isn’t the problem, honestly, is tenure. Tenure protects the bad eggs and gives those who “can’t do” a teaching job, that’s certain, but a vast majority of faculty work their rears off writing papers, winning grants, and teaching students just to get tenure.

But the problem here isn’t that colleges are tone-deaf to the rising costs. It’s that as a society we think it’s perfectly acceptable to pass the full cost of a four year degree off onto students. If they’re unable to afford it, tough. This despite the desperate needs we have in this country for well-trained scientists, nurses, accountants, technicians, programmers, and thinkers. This is a post-manufacturing America we’re living in, after all; if our children stand a chance in a world where a Chinese peasant can build toys for $1/hour and an Indian college graduate will code for 1/5 what an American developer makes, we have to give them the best shot we can at winning the global economic game.

And that’s the weird conundrum we’re in. We throw the kids in the pool saying “Learning to swim is what we all must do!” then yelling “You can figure out how to swim on your own!” from our deck chair. We can’t have it both ways. Godin, I think, wants to have it both ways.

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 the schools can reject more applicants.

Here Godin looks at a pig, walks around the pig, pets the pig, stares at the pig’s snout, and announces it’s an ostrich.

Why is university direct mail so bland? Three reasons, I think. One, it’s been done this way for a generation, and it’s hard to break out of that rut. Two, in order to break out of such a rut, you need creative, dynamic people — the sort of people who won’t work for universities because they can’t be paid enough. Three, universities are so tight on cash they can’t drop $100,000 on hiring a marketing firm filled with young Seth Godins to spruce up their images.

The best universities can do is pick up what they can during a downturn knowing they’ll be gone the moment the green shoots of an economic recovery appear. And during that collapse they’ll have no money to effectively execute such a plan. Or, they lean on young, green BS/MS marketing students who are just learning the ropes and don’t understand the university’s issues from a business perspective.

So 90% of college marketing is barebones, repeatable, and filled with tropes (such as Jared Spool’s Girls Under Trees) because that’s the best most schools can do. And if you’re a unit within a university, you have even less to rely on.

(This is not to knock the 10% of people in higher ed marketing that are doing innovative and remarkable stuff. I flip through the CASE awards every year and think how people are managing to do some spectacular pieces despite the lack of resources at hand.)

So the question to Godin is whether a university should be dropping $100,000 on hiring him to fix the “undifferentiated pieces of junk mail” problem, or whether they should be spending that $100,000 on scholarships. Or on maintaining a wireless network. Or, heaven forbid, cutting tuition.

As for the “increasing rejections” issue, it’s far from the truth. Maybe all that advertising draws more students and ups the rejection rate, but it’s just one factor in the mysterious US News formula. You could do as Clemson did — cut class size — and get a better ROI out of the rankings than you would with blasting eleventy-billion flyers out there. And remember, if it’s all less than compelling, why would you apply in the first place?

[Added 4/30/2010: Let me reiterate that last point, because I think it needs to be. Godin is saying these publications are less-than-compelling marketing pieces, and they're using them to bolster their reject rate. If schools are really trying to bolster their reject rate, why wouldn't they use COMPELLING media pieces? Wouldn't they have a far, far higher ROI? Wouldn't they be hiring marketing gurus? Godin, again, can't have it both ways. Either these marketing materials are useless, or they're compelling enough to skew reject rates. Which is it, Seth?]

College wasn’t originally designed to merely be 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 shows 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 a degree from a cheaper institution.

What data, Seth? Where? Because studies have shown that people with bachelor’s degrees earn substantially more than those with only a high school diploma. Yes, the ROI gap is closing due to the massive tuition increases, but it hasn’t closed yet. And consider the medical field, where 10 years of education will leave the average doctor with well over $150,000 in debt — schools are still churning out doctors every year.

And honestly, I think the primary issue here is that if you go into college without a plan, you’ll spend a decade wandering around making minimum wage waiting for your life to start. For the people who come to college for “binge drinking” this is the life they’ll end up with. But I’ve been teaching college students this quarter, and I work with college students, and I’m friends with college students, and I can tell you that almost all of them are driven to get an ROI out of college. They’re not in school to binge drink. They’re in school to learn and gain opportunities their parents never had. And binge drink. But only after binge studying.

The college that Seth (and I) went to, the place of Animal House and weed parties, is vanishing. What’s replacing it is an environment where kids work and study and push themselves. In other words, the institution Seth wants already exists right now. Yeah, still drinking, still drugs, still sex, but it’s all part of college and growing up, anyway.

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-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

As someone who’s had to go through the horrors of the re-accreditation process… bulls**t, Seth. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Outcomes are what drive accreditation. Measures. Goals. They’re not about high cost, high risk, low reward. It’s the opposite. It’s about getting schools to offer the low risk, high reward stuff that’s essential to an education. It’s also about making sure that a public health graduate will be what the public health organizations need, or a computer science graduate will be what software companies need.

And that means in some majors requiring practical aspects of the field be baked into the program. Internships. Practicums. And it also means taking a careful look at each class and each syllabus and asking whether the program is building future leaders.

Sure, in the sciences you’re churning out professors. But no business school would last if it were churning out professors. Ditto public health, nursing, forestry, veterinary science… hell, marketing!

Yes, online programs are struggling to get recognized by accreditors. But we know that will be solved soon enough, just as when blogs weren’t considered worthy of producing news, or when online-only musicians weren’t “real” musicians.

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 premium services a university provides are ones that can’t easily be replicated by online learning, like one-on-one teacher interaction, or working in a research lab, or learning group dynamics. Whether those premiums are worth paying for will be the question students and colleges will have to answer over this next decade, but there are definitely benefits to such an experience. Yeah, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Costco destroyed the five-and-dimes and department stores, but Nordstrom is still around, because people are willing to pay for a great customer experience. And when the Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Costco of higher education finally arrive on the scene, they will leave a trail of destruction in their wake, but most colleges will survive, for the same reasons Nordstrom survives (and thrives).

I think we all know that some schools — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Penn — glide by because they have a great reputation that feeds back on itself. We also know that other schools are trading on a good name but are shadows of what their reputation suggests they are. And there are schools out there that are offering a superior education but don’t have the name brand that Harvard/Yale/Stanford/Penn do. But such it is in any industry.

Yeah, my college degree is nowhere close to my chosen field (which, mind you, didn’t exist until about my junior year of high school). So you could argue my education was meaningless. But college also taught me how to think critically, read widely, and write clearly. It exposed me to the full spectrum of the liberal arts, giving me ideas and thoughts that I’ve been able to port into my chosen field. I don’t think I’d be the success I am if it weren’t for my college education.

Could I have received that education outside of the ivory tower for a fraction of the cost? Perhaps. Perhaps if there were an internship in web development I could have taken right out of high school… oh, wait, I graduated in 1990, a year after Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web and three years before Mosaic, the first viable web browser, became available. So I guess that’s not an option.

Could I have done anything else? Sure. Worked a job. Taken a gap year. And eventually I would have probably made my way to college. But maybe not. I think I made the right decision to go to college, even if at times it feels like I’ve lost a few years to indecision and feeling myself out.

But my big problem with Seth’s line of thinking is he’s throwing rocks at the ivory tower without understanding what’s inside that tower. It’s different over here, Seth. Maybe you should climb down from your marketing tower and come see what the modern university is like. You’d be surprised, I think, to see what it’s really like — that students are getting a quality education with a solid ROI despite everything going against higher ed right now. Maybe it’s time you taught a class, or just spent a few days helping people like me figure out how to market their university school with no budget whatsoever. You’re certainly welcome to show up at my office and offer to pitch in.

Climb down, Seth. Come find the truth over here where we dream of just having a marketing budget that matches your honorarium.

There’s no question I don’t blog much anymore, and it’s because Twitter has been a better megaphone for my thoughts than blogging is. Every once in a while I’ll think “I need more than 140 characters to convey this thought effectively,” but then I just end up not tweeting it rather than blogging it.

About two years ago I first conveyed this shift in direction in a comment on Zeldman’s post on the vanishing personal site. Last month a journalist for the Christian Science Monitor found that quote and my dying blogs and e-mailed me asking if I could elaborate further on my comment. The result of that e-mail conversation became about 1/3 of his article on whether blogging has peaked.

Since a few people have been asking me to elaborate on my comments (and more than a few have been asking me when I’m going to blog about the article) I thought I’d post my full response to his questions. (The nice thing about Mr. Shaer is he did a great job distilling my long rambles without losing the meaning of what I was trying to say. Seriously, you young ink-stained wretches, take a lesson from him.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently, tech conferences are all I can blog about anymore.

I spent my own money this year on An Event Apart Seattle, which won out over Webvisions on the “can I sleep in my own bed?” tiebreaker.

If you’re reading this because you got my Moo card at AEA, howdy.

This trip to SXSW was much different from my first trip in 2007. For one, I knew people there this time, not only from the last trip and from Seattle but from my Twitter followers. For another, I was a panelist for the first time.

The core conversation I hosted ended up being very polarizing for attendees. Some were very happy about the experience. Some left some quite brutal assessments on Twitter. I learned that if you’re going to talk about faculty struggles with the web to ask if there are faculty in the room first.

I was generally happy with the experience, and happy to have one of the best higher ed social media experts in Brad Ward to help me through it. But the room was dimly lit, the lack of amplification and dearth of chairs made the experience dissatisfying for many attendees, and the fact I had such a generalist topic meant we were trying to whip through multiple concepts — social media, politics, accessibility — in 60 minutes. Any of the topics we discussed could have taken up an hour unto themselves.

And doing the talk threw me for a bit of a loop. I didn’t hit a lot of other sessions while I was there, and hit even fewer after the talk.

I think, unless a project I’m working on earns a return speaking engagement, I’m not going to propose anything for SXSW 2010. Don’t get me wrong — I loved hosting the core conversation and thoroughly enjoyed it, even with the bumps and mistakes. But I think what I missed this time around was the serendipity of meeting people and hearing great ideas. I did do that, but I felt bound up by the demands of my talk. I think I also want to feel more secure about being up in front of the crowd. I really felt my self-esteem issues the whole week, but the immediate aftermath of the talk was very bad.

And I did meet a lot of great people this time around. Too many to list, in fact. But it was good to hang with Elaine and Andrea and Ralph again, and being able to catch up with Vijay (through pure serendipity) was great as well.

I’m planning on being back in 2010. I really hope I can be.

Oh, SXSW, I wish I could quit you. Despite your massive crowds, drunk geeks, and 2.75 million “social media experts” around every corner, I still love the conversations on the margins, the introverts trying to break out of their shells, and the BBQ and Tex-Mex.

Tomorrow my core conversation on higher ed and the web rolls — 3:30 in Room 19B. Let’s all be there.

Also, we’re having a higher ed meetup at Buffalo Billiards tomorrow night from 6-10pm. Come on down and drink  your higher ed budget woes away.