Monetizing A College Education – Alma Mater Power Can Unlock Intrinsic Internet-Based Wealth

Monetizing A College Education – Alma Mater Power Can Unlock Intrinsic Internet-Based Wealth

Colleges and Universities “Hold The Keys” To The Biggest Stimulus Package For Students, Alumni, and Corporations!  The Government Can Help Too!

Why are college graduates (or soon to be grads) still looking for work?  Haven’t they been equipped to “land the dream job?”  Statistics prove that, during their lifetime, college graduates with a 4 year degree earn an average of $ 1 million more than non-degree carrying counterparts during their lifetime.  Monetizing this potential is something that may have just become easier.  Much easier!

Colleges and Universities “hold the keys” to the monetization of this huge potential earning power for their alumni.  Let me paint a picture!  Henry Ford had a crank installed on the front of the Model A to start it.  The post-war era brought us a key on a key chain.  The 1980s brought us the “clicker” on the key chain.  In this new century, many of us carry a USB Jump Drive as auxiliary equipment on our key chain, next to grocery store “ preferred shoppers cards” that entitle to mere discounts!  In this new millennium, accredited schools, whether community college or university,  potentially hold a similar web-based electronic key which may unlock  career-long success of their alumni, starting immediately!

Most colleges and universities offer alumni some kind of limited help securing jobs through campus based “Career Centers”  whether a new graduate, or a veteran of the workforce for 25 years,”.  These school based career centers are surely not the first place students and Alumni start looking for a job.  In these tough times, colleges and universities could make the current economic slump their alumni find themselves in virtually disappear.  But, are they willing?

This article addresses:

• The problem
• The intrinsic power of the Internet
• Potential benefits for students
• Potential benefits for employers
• Potential benefits for educators
• The Solution

There’s more that Colleges and Universities can offer their students, alumni and alumni employers.  Lots more!

The Problem

Visit the ASU Alumni website at this URL, http://www.asu.edu/alumni/career/advice.html, and you see this picture.  From the first blush, the ASU Alumni website indicates that it is interested in lots of real good things!  Networking, career programs, profiles, job search, resources & education, articles and advice, etc!  However a graphic does not a web site make…  A future link with “coming soon” and a broken link to “Visit the Voice of Experience” is a weak showing for a University that cares about the thousands of alumni that are currently jobless.

This lackluster showing of alumni support is surely not isolated to ASU.  Universities, Colleges, Business Schools and other accredited schools are just as guilty of not servicing the needs of their graduates and alumni over the course of their careers.  With a little bit of willingness on their part, educational institutions can now become a powerful driving force for the economic recovery with little to no investment, other than changes to their existing websites.

The Intrinsic Power Of The Internet

The Internet “as we know it” is little more than a decade old.  It was invented by a bunch of nuclear scientists that needed a medium with which to communicate with each other.  At this early stage, both government and universities already got involved!  The techno-geeks that have brought us the wonders of Internet-based  technologies back then had no idea what letting the genie out of the bottle would do in a decade or two.  Today, the “world of the Internet” has successfully been used for activities as complex as  streaming video content through websites like YouTube.com brimming with content like news, current events, talk shows, sports events and much more.  Then there are social media websites where participants share information both synchronously and asynchronously.  Some of the most popular website like this are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the like.  But this isn’t the entire story!

Mobile computing has become so “en vogue” that even the President of the United States now carries a mobile device.  The vast majority of today’s college educated business professionals have either desktop or mobile computing devices – maybe both – that allow them to be in touch.  Instant access to friends, family, business partners, acquaintances, customers, and more has become the norm.  Pokes, tweets, vibrating or buzzing ring tones of all types and more coming from these mobile devices are common.  Is there an enigma of sorts that that encapsulates the true essence of the power of the Internet?

Several Large companies like IBM and Intel are encouraging their employees to maintain a social media presence because they have realized that there is power behind the social media movement.  The reason?  Simple!  There’s potential behind it.  They just don’t understand yet, how to capitalize on it.  Even large corporations have not yet fully identified how to “harness this power” that is now no longer just perceived…it’s real. Yes, it moves communities!  It makes sales, and in our jargon, it makes “real conversions”… getting people to do things website owners want them to do, like fill out a survey, sign up for a newsletter, buy a product, and more.

Aside from all of the social media frenzy, search engines have also changed the way we seek and process information.  The search engine Google (currently serving about 71% of all Internet search) has become so popular that their name has become both a household name, and even a verb!  When someone says “I have to Google that”, we all know exactly what is meant!  Here’s the point – Google considers a .gov and .edu website more important than a .com, .net, or .info website.  Therefore, the following question begs to be asked:  if the search engines hierarchically favor the .gov and .edu websites over the .com and the rest, then can these preference hierarchies be leveraged to make a difference in these times of economic difficulties?  Yes!  Pointing a .gov or .edu or .gov website at a .com website for example, will significantly increase the visibility of the .com website in the search engines!  Thus, increasing competitiveness and competition.

This search engine phenomenon is really nothing new.  Yet accredited Colleges and Universities have not yet realized, or simply ignored the fact that they can offer their students a powerful, steady “wind in the sail” type energy as they progress through both their education, and their career, by associating their students with their alma mater’s .gov (for community colleges) or .edu website. Doing this is quite simple.  Allow the students to maintain a professional profile in an area of the alma mater website.  This professional profile would be designed to speak specifically about their current employer, and the specialties of the employer’s organization, linking to the employer website.  Links from this student profile would be pointed at the .com website of the corporation where the student currently works, thus endowing the employer’s website with more clout in the search engines because of employee / student’s choice of linking from the alma mater to their employer, in a natural, context appropriate way.

More often than not, when a website is trying to compete for position with a specific keyword phrase, it’s normal to see that 50 – 75% of the important parameters that search engines look at (and find important) are not “on-page factors”, but rather “off-page factors”!  Interpreted it means – “who  is talking about my website – and pointing at it”?

Diagram 1 shows several of the important factors for ranking in a search engine.  The bigger the piece of pie is, the more important the specific information or parameter.

What’s important in this conversation is that every piece of the pie that has a label starting with “IBL”  shows the importance of specific factors on the inbound page or “inbound back link” (IBL). These are other pages (mostly on other websites) that are pointing at the page in question.  No matter how well the page represented by Diagram 1 is built, without powerful “IBL Authority websites” pointing at this specific page, it will just become another statistic along with the 2,040,000 other pages competing for this keyword phrase “Real Estate Tucson Arizona” This 2 million number is not just random.  On the date this article was written, this is an actual Google estimate on the number of competing pages for this specific keyword phrase.

Note that the pieces of the pie in Diagram 1 are relative to the keyword phrase in question!  Sometimes the on-page factors carry more weight, yet, for short tail keyword phrases with only 2 or 3 words, IBL authority is still generally the most important factor, especially when the content on both pages is contextually similar.

When a company chooses to optimize the pages on their website so that they rank better in the search engine results, inbound linking from authority websites has become essential!  I propose that it doesn’t matter whether educational institution or corporation, leveraging this intrinsic power of the Internet will become vital, first, to get us out of the economic slump we are now in, and later, to make the success of the next upturn of the economy both more steady, and more sustained.  Seeing that .gov and .edu websites are most potent, colleges and universities should set the pace.  Today!

What’s In It For Students?

Most government agencies, institutions, and corporations have not yet woken up to the fact that there is this “intrinsic power” that can be tapped and passed on from one website to another for the good of the other website.  This “power” cannot be bought or sold.  Yet it CAN be controlled.  In other words, in this case, by associating themselves openly with their students – yes, offering students the opportunity to own and manage a LinkedIn or or FaceBook type account behind their .gov or .edu domain name similar to http://www.asu.edu/alumni/my-student-name.html (no this link won’t work, it’s just an example…) would have multiple positive effects.  Here are a couple:

1. It would be very simple for students to maintain their own information over several years
2. Students could stay connected with each other as a student body and alumni organization
3. Students could maintain multiple profiles and employer specific pages for different roles they play in organizations or businesses

4)Students would be able to move their alma mater’s allegiance to a new employer, always updating their current profile or pages into the direction that helps the student the most.

Giving students control of their “alma mater power” on an “electronic key chain” under control of the university would help students better identify with both their school and their employer.  Knowing that students and alumni can “shine success” on their current employer but also take it with them to their next position at a different company would likely make them “rabidly loyal” to the alma mater, thus benefiting the educational institution, the alumni, and employer organizations.

What’s In It For Employers?

The .gov or .edu based profile pages illustrated in the example above would belong to students and educational institutions.  This way, the graces of the educational institution would essentially benefit the corporation, small business, or other organization where the alumni are presently working.  If all else stays the same with search engines, college and university graduates would help the corporations they work for by pointing their own Inbound back link Authority from their alma mater at the company they work for.  Because of the inbound links from the pages on the alma mater website, the  company ranks better in the search engines, and therefore becomes more successful than others who don’t have the benefit of college graduates working for them.  Does this sound far fetched?  Not in today’s connected society!

Corporations would quickly learn that having their employees speaking on the alma mater websites about what they do for a living and with or for whom, will significantly affect their corporate earning when monetizing the online potential of the company.  Because of this, having employees with college degrees will become even more important, while raising demand for college graduates.

What’s In It For The University, College, or Business School?

If you’re a university marketing professional, by this time, you should be doing one of two things!

Either:

1. excitedly picking up the phone to make changes on your alumni website, or
2. stop reading, toss this article, and move on

No, wait!  There really is a lot in this for you too!  In these difficult times, the entire world is looking for ways to stimulate the economy while increasing enrollment in university.  What I am proposing is truly one way that this can be done, and like the Federal Government, with their stimulus package, all accredited post-secondary educational institutions should take a leading role in a way that stimulates both growth and competition.

Consider this:

1. A University’s clout on the street is more than just a name.  Take an example from Notre Dame’s alumni with their football team!  Notre Dame alumni have a rabid loyalty to their school and team!  Yet, it’s not about a pig skin being kicked or tossed up and down 100 some yards of a football field (including the end zones)!  It’s the name! It’s the experience! It’s what the school stands for!  There are similar reactions when mentioning names like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or Cambridge!  But there’s even more to it than this!
2. There’s clout and the quiet reverence and respect that goes far beyond the halls and hallways of academia!  Just walking into an office in corporate America with a diploma from an Ivy League School on the wall of a respected doctor, lawyer, engineer, or business owner wakens the same emotions. Reverence, Respect. Clout.
3. The reverence or respect is surely not for the piece of parchment or paper that the diploma is printed on or the ink that was used!  No!  It’s the name of the school, the seal, and the signatures that make it an authentic diploma!  It’s what the diploma stands for!  That clout cannot be transferred to the paper or the ink, nor can it be converted into bits and bytes!  Yet, it’s real!

Colleges and Universities can finally empower their alumni to carry the alma mater name, the reverence, the clout, and the respect of their school electronically on the web to freely benefit an organization of the students’ choice while in the employ of corporate America, in a partnership, or on a board of directors!

In reality, the careful grooming of students in the classrooms of academia was really just the beginning.  Now, it’s possible for colleges, universities, and schools across the globe to reward their alumni, by making the businesses that students and alumni work for more successful, by raising their corporate visibility in search engines – thereby creating more wealth for all stakeholders by moving success from brick-and-mortar to click-and-mortar.

The Solution

Getting practical, we have to go back to the URL mentioned above: http://www.asu.edu/alumni/.   Schools with .gov or .edu domains should offer their students a “Facebook” or “LinkedIn” type environment in the alma mater area of their school website where students can maintain their own “Profile Pages” and “Facebook Pages”. In these pages, students will then be able to showcase:

a) what they currently do, and

b) important public information (read content) about “key words” their employers care about because of the business they are in.

Thus, the alma mater would empower alumni to monetize their diploma because of their increased value to their employer or the firm they may own.  The increased “visibility” in search engines is surely not just a perceived benefit, it’s a huge boon, especially to small businesses.  This increased search engine visibility, caused by the good graces of the employee and the accredited school, in the end, will:

1. Underscore the importance of a college education
2. Help students and parents understand that the investment in an education is still a valid value proposition for the 21st century.
3. Help college graduates monetize their investment in a college degree

Marcus Laubli is the author of : “Competition In The Crosshairs – Web Intelligence Sniper Reveals Secrets Google Won’t Tell You!”
contact information: webmaster@WebIntelligenceSniper.com or +1 602-516-5513

Monetizing A College Education – Alma Mater Power Can Unlock Intrinsic Internet-Based Wealth by Marcus Laubli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.