Last month I received an email from a potential student who would be taking my spring semester class in the Journalism School at the University of South Carolina. It went something like this, “Dear Professor Butt, I am blah, blah, blah and I will possibly be enrolling in your J545 Creative Advertising Strategy class. Since I couldn’t find you listed at RateMyProfessor.com I was wondering if you could answer a few questions for me.” He then went on to ask my thoughts (and enforcement) of class attendance, timeliness of turning in work and my ability to be flexible with his demanding work schedule.
Needless to say, I laughed and sent his email to the listserv at the school for all faculty and staff to enjoy. I then immediate went to ratemyprofessor.com and found myself, indeed absent. But I did discover something interesting (besides the ratings of some of my peers). I found a good many websites and information available that make the college experience a lot more transparent.
I generally don’t talk about transparency and the need for it unless I am counseling a client who sells or engages in what I term “high involvement” purchases and/or business practices. I was surprised to find the number of websites who make choosing a college or the collegiate experience transparent.
RateMyProfessors.com has already made faculty popularity public, and now a few new sites offer a way for students to share an insider’s perspective on campus life in general.
Unigo, which launched last month, is a site that offers tens of thousands of original reviews, videos, photos, documents and more about 225 of America’s top colleges. Representing the efforts of 18 full-time editors, 300 on-campus interns and more than 15,000 students, the results are all searchable within an interactive community built around student-generated content. Using the free site, high school students can communicate with one another and with current college students to find the college that’s right for them. An “intelligent calendar” guides them through the search/application process, while multidimensional filtering capabilities let them search through reviews by each reviewer’s gender, ethnicity, major, political leaning, hometown and more. The New York-based site plans to expand soon to cover nearly every college in America.
San Francisco-based Yollege, meanwhile, also aims to empower college students to share their thoughts and opinions on every aspect of campus life, from dorms to campus hotspots to local culture. High-school students can use the site for help in finding the right school for them, while college students can use it not only to share reviews about their school but also to meet fellow students. As of late September, there were more than 4,000 reviews on the site, Real Simple reported. Launched in April, ad-supported Yollege was recently named one of the top five Best of the Web 2008 newcomers by BusinessWeek.
How does transparency work in your business?
Tags: college life, college transparency, ratemyprofessor.com, Research Links, Springwise, student life, Trends, Trendwatching Links