So much has changed in the past two decades thanks to the rapid developments in the world of technology. Few places is this more apparent than in the world of education, where the availability of the internet and digital publishing puts much of traditional teaching and learning techniques into question.

With all this change, it’s no wonder that some forward-thinking educational institutions are looking into new solutions to embrace an ever-changing culture of information intake and dissemination. Here we’ll take a look at a couple institutions that are capitalizing on current cultural trends in order to help restructure the way that we apply to schools now and in the future.

Coupons for College

National Louis University, a private institution based in Chicago, took advantage of the deep-discount service Groupon to offer reduced tuition to applicants to the school. Nearly a 60% reduction in tuition was offered to 25 applicants to an entry-level graduate teaching program.

The deal went live last week and sold 18 of the 25 slots. The tuition was dropped for those applicants from $2,232 to $950. Applicants had to already have an undergraduate degree and must complete an additional 33 credit hours at full price to earn the graduate degree. And according to the 18 Groupon deals sold, it seems that National Louis may be onto something.

The 200-Character Application Essay

Another experimental approach that has gotten media attention lately comes from the vaunted Ivy League. Columbia University feels that it can capitalize on the trend of forced brevity as in the 140-character limit imposed by the service Twitter.

Columbia isn’t the first school to try this– the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management let applicants use Twitter for their application essays earlier this year. But Columbia stretches the max limit to 200 characters. While this cuts down on a ton of reading and writing on both side of the application process, one must wonder if it’s an effective method of parsing the field of applicants, especially for a competitive institution such as Columbia.

What else?

Have you heard of any other schools that are experimenting with new ways to engage their incoming students? How effective do you think that the ones that we discussed today are? Leave your answers in the comments.

Advertisement