Career Center :: Grad Student Home :: WRK4US :: Guest Speaker Discussions

CAREERS IN EDUCATIONAL CONSULTING

Hosted by Paula Foster
Edited by Sonya K. Smith
March 2002

The following Guest Speaker Discussion originally took place on WRK4US in March of the year 2002. Because WRK4US has a confidentiality policy, all names and email addresses have been altered or removed, except for the moderator's and the Guest Speakers'.

The discussion can be read in two ways- by simply scrolling down and reading the whole thing, or by clicking on the topical links below, which take you to specific places within the discussion. The discussion can also be printed out in its entirety for your reading convenience.

Special thanks to Sonya K. Smith who volunteered her time to edit this discussion and prepare it for posting on the web. If you are interested in editing a future discussion, your help will be much appreciated; email Paula Foster, WRK4US List Manager, at pfchambers@sbcglobal.net

As I prepared for and completed the oral exams for my Ph.D. in American studies, I had come to realize that I did not want an academic career. In short, I judged that I would probably develop into a competent but less than outstanding scholar and teacher, but sensed that I might excel in a field that called for both the capacity to analyze fairly complex matters and administrative, interpersonal, and business skills. A fairly wide-ranging job search (university administration, historic preservation, magazines, museums) led to a position as a writer for a university fund-raising campaign. When I applied for the job I knew absolutely nothing about fund-raising nor had I done any of the kinds of writing required: gift proposals, speeches, case statements, fund-raising brochures. In my application I admitted as much and was fortunate that the person doing the hiring was looking primarily for the broader analytical and writing skills I had learned in graduate school.

Over seven years there, while also writing my dissertation, I took on expanded responsibilities in fund-raising and administration. Seeing the limits in a university setting beyond which I could not expect to rise -- beyond a certain level in academic adminstration, one must either be a highly trained professional or someone who has worked her/his way through the faculty leadership -- and tiring of working in an inevitably political and bureaucratic environment, I was referred to and took a job with a consulting firm specializing in communications and market research for universities and other non-profits. As I had hoped, in this work I was asked to analyze interesting communication decisions and continued to write a great deal.

I work in the same field twelve years later, having since co-founded a consulting firm and witnessed considerable broadening and deepening of the work we are asked to do. Our work is fundamentally about differentiating universities and non-profits -- identifying their distinctive ethos and current strengths -- for the purpose of helping them strengthen their "market position" for student and faculty recruitment, fund-raising, legislative relations, and public relations. I'm one of three principals of the firm responsible for selling projects and overseeing work on anywhere from six to ten projects at a time.

The pleasures and frustrations are what one normally hears about consulting, both probably magnified when working primarily for universities: the stimulation of the intellectual challenge and of the people with whom you work, versus the fact that you have no control over what happens or does not happen to your recommendations. It seems that many people are clearly more fulfilled by working as part of a larger organization (say, in academic administration) and others by staying outside such organizations. Where one fits in this regard determines happiness as a consultant. I've never missed the academic life because, though I enjoyed graduate work, I think I never was truly predisposed to be an academic.

I look forward to receiving your questions and trying to answer.

Hello everyone!

My path into and out of academe were both accidental. When I finished my undergraduate degree (a BS in Business/Marketing) I looked for a job in Advertising and could find absolutely nothing so I hung around and considered law school. I even took the LSAT and did quite well before contracting a major case of mononucleosis that pretty much knocked me out of the application cycle for a year. A friend who was working on her Ph.D. in Social Psychology suggested I consider a Master's in Industrial/Organizational psychology. Since that idea beat the heck out of continuing at a minimum wage job for another year or two (or becoming a lawyer) I went to speak with the Chair of the Experimental Psychology department and he suggested that I take a couple of classes to see if this was really what I wanted to do. While I had done quite well in psychology electives I was still somewhat concerned about my ability to survive being at that time somewhat math-phobic and having heard Statistics horror stories. After doing well in both classes and on the GRE I was accepted into the program.

After being accepted into the Experimental Psychology program I rapidly decided that since I was enjoying the science part of the program I would prefer to get a Ph.D. in Social Psychology over the Master's. The school I was at did not provide assistanceships for the majority of Experimental Psychology graduate students though I was able to pick up both Research Assistanceships and Teaching Assistanceships after the first couple of years. As a TA I had full responsibility for several sections of classes in Group Dynamic and Social Psychology. When I was ABD a former faculty member who had hired me as a research assistant stunned me by offering me a job as an assistant professor at Georgia State University (I had colleagues who had finished up the year before and had been conducting a fruitless job search for almost a year while I had a well paying though not tenure track position drop directly into my lap). This fear of being unable to find a teaching position helped me put aside my concerns about taking an Assistant Professor position with little teaching responsibilities. The major part of the job was to start, manage and run a survey unit housed in the Public Administration and Urban Studies. The Applied Research Center was quite successful and grew from 5 people when I arrived to over 20 full-time staff plus a bunch of graduate students when I left about 5 years later. It was a fun interesting place to work though inherently stressful - we were mostly self funded. When a project finished if we didn't bring in more work we had to let people go. When I finally completed my dissertation I decided to see what the market was like by looking for jobs both in and out of academe.

One of the organizations I interviewed with was the company I currently work for. One university and this company both offered me positions which I ultimately decided to turn down. While at GSU I taught an course in data analysis and experimental method and a course in Organizational Management and Public Administration and finally finished my dissertation.

I applied for a job at the University of New Hampshire as Director of the UNH Survey Center, located in its Institute of Public Policy and Social Science Research for two reason - my boss at GSU was just two years older than I and the only promotion I could expect would be when he retired and because I was engaged to a woman whose family lived nearby. After a series of interviews I was offered the job and decided to accept it. Due to an illness in my family I decided that I had to find a job in the Mid-Atlantic region after only about a year there. Probably the high point of my year there was being called "a shill" for the governor in an editorial in the Manchester Union Leader (that state's largest newspaper). For some reason I was in the media a fair amount while in New Hampshire. Since the company I currently work for is located in Maryland - I decided to give them a call and see if they were still looking for help. It turned out they were and so I became the Senior Research Director at Art and Science Group, LLC, a consulting company that works almost exclusively with colleges and universities. I was nervous about moving out of the world of academia but it dawned on me that the part that I was in was not that different than the type of business I would be moving into - in both cases my work is project driven.

As a Research Director at A&S I am (not surprisingly) primarily involved in the research that we do for clients. We do a lot of survey research, sometimes of alumni, sometimes of prospective students and/or their parents and occasionally residents of a state or region. Typically my work starts with work on the budget for a project proposal usually in response to a RFP (a skill I first developed and honed at GSU), then when a number of us (usually 2 or 3) visits a client school and talks to faculty, staff and students in an effort to understand a school. After this the members on the team working on a given project meet to discuss what we think we learned and what kinds of things we should find out about. Based on this and input from the clients we develop a questionnaire to find out what we need to know for each specific project. After a final version of the survey instrument is developed we send it to a another company who actually fields the survey and collects the data. Once the data is collected I analyze it and write a research report which I present at the client university. After the research is completed (many projects have multiple stages of research) the team meets to develop recommendations for the client. Since most of the employees here have extensive backgrounds in higher education and since we work almost exclusively with colleges and universities the atmosphere is largely collegial.

The thing I remember least fondly about academe was some really bitter political infighting closely followed by the amount of time I spent in meetings that served little useful purpose. The thing I miss most about academe is teaching. I also miss easy access to the university library.

And now, since I see some of you in the back are looking like you are ready to nod off, I guess I'll take any questions from the floor.

I'm Risa Nystrom, and I'm a Managing Associate (essentially a project manager) with Art & Science Group, a higher education marketing firm. Paula has asked me to speak about what I do and how I ended up doing it.

How I got here:

My path to this career can only be described as circuitous. Certainly if you had asked me ten years ago what I thought I'd be doing now, I wouldn't have even realized that higher education consulting was an option.

I worked in human resources management for a few years before earning my PhD in English literature at Vanderbilt, and I think that experience led me to approach graduate school with an appreciation for the opportunity to immerse myself in a subject I loved, rather than worrying about what I would do with the degree when I was done. I assumed I would pursue an academic career, but I never felt that it was the automatic option, perhaps because I had already seen firsthand the ways in which liberal arts skills could translate into a business environment.

My decision to leave academia after defending my dissertation was the result of many factors, most too complex to get into here. However, suffice it to say that while I loved teaching and researching, I was frustrated with what I perceived to be bureaucratic constraints that seemed to dis-incent truly effective teaching or original research, and which punished rather than rewarded those academic professionals whom I considered to be role models. I never even went on the academic job market, deciding instead that I wanted to find a career in which I could address those constraints and work with higher education at a more systemic level. When a fellow graduate student asked what I wanted to do instead of an academic career, I told him "higher education policy" without having any real idea of what that meant. He told me he had temped for the director of the Education Policy Center at Vanderbilt one summer, and suggested that I ask his old boss for advice. An "informational interview" turned into a part time job providing staff support to a new task force appointed by Tennessee's governor to study the state's public higher education system (while I was teaching a full adjunct load in the English department). Two months later, the director of the Center fired the project's manager, and offered me the job in his place.

It was a finite appointment that lasted a year and a half, during which I conducted research and gathered data; wrote reports and analytical documents; scheduled meetings and public forums; conducted fact-finding trips with task force members to benchmark other states' systems; attended legislative sessions; and acted as the liaison between task force members, press, legislators, university and college officials, and the state's three higher education governing boards.

After a year and a half, the task force handed in its final report, and it was time for me to look for something more permanent. Once again, I found myself engaged in a job search without a well-defined idea of what my opportunities were. I figured I had a good combination of corporate, academic, and political experience, but I wasn't sure what they added up to: there were any number of directions I could have pursued, and all of them appealed to me. I didn't actively pursue a consulting career, consulting found me: I answered an ad posted by Art & Science Group in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

What I Do:

Our firm provides consulting services to colleges and universities on a wide variety of market-related issues, including student recruitment and enrollment management, institutional positioning, fundraising, alumni relations, tuition and financial aid policies, and communications. As a managing associate, I work on a project team with a company partner and a research associate. In a nutshell, my job is to coordinate all the various aspects of a given project and keep it on schedule; serve as the primary client contact; help identify the critical issues to be studied and provide the research associate with the information he needs to develop survey instruments; conduct in-depth interviews with client constituencies and sometimes with market segments that don't lend themselves to quantitative survey research; help analyze the data results and develop recommendations; and write reports and make presentations to the client. In addition to my project load, I also write proposals for new projects to prospective clients.

It would be impossible to describe a typical day precisely because there is no such thing as a typical day. One of the things I like best about the job is that I'm always doing something different. Some days I spend a lot of time on administrative work: scheduling team meetings in the office, scheduling visits to client campuses, writing memos, returning phone calls from clients, etc. On other days, I might spend a lot of time in meetings with my project team, discussing the various issues and questions that are unique to a given client, either at the beginning stages of a project, or once we have data to analyze. I also spend quite a bit of time on conference calls with clients, discussing various issues that affect how we design the research and the survey instruments. On still other days, I spend most of my time writing reports and presentations. I also travel quite a bit, spending time on a client's campus either to conduct campus-wide interviews at the beginning of a project, or presenting reports, recommendations, and findings.

Not everyone in our firm has a PhD, and we each bring our own set of skills to our work. But there are things that I think my academic experience and PhD add to my ability to be effective in this career. For example, the majority of the people we work with on campus are senior administrators who will make policy decisions based on our research and advice. Because I have spent time teaching at a university, I think I have a good understanding of how the things we propose at the senior administrative level might impact what goes on in the classroom, at least in a broad sense. I also think that having spent so many years working with faculty, department chairs, and deans gives me a useful perspective on how to negotiate the potential political sensitivities as we consider various issues and recommendations; and my several years in the classroom give me a good sense of student perspectives, which is particularly useful when we're conducting recruitment marketing research. Obviously, my academic training has honed my presentation, writing and analytical skills, though many non-PhDs have those skills too. Where the PhD really adds value to the way I approach my work, in my opinion, is in the ability to multi-task and to keep an eye on
the longer-term big picture of a project, while breaking that big picture down into a series of more immediate interim goals.

At the same time, my academic training has posed several challenges too. In many ways, academia does not prepare one to deal well with deadlines. Most of what we do in academia has a long lead time, leaving us with the ability to control how we approach our deadlines. In my work as a consultant, deadlines pop up out of nowhere, and longer term deadlines morph at the drop of a hat, creating conflicts with other deadlines that were originally planned around the deadline that just changed. Furthermore, as an academic, I was used to doing the bulk of my writing at night, when I could isolate myself and really concentrate. I still do that when I can, but I can't always get away with it, and even if I do, it's hard to pull an all-nighter and then be in the office by 9 am and work for eight hours. On a less tangible note, as academics, we're not used to being on a team that shares a common goal, but has different methods for achieving said goal, so interpersonal relationships take some getting used to, even for the most amiable PhDs.

The good, the bad, and the ugly:

Okay, there really isn't any ugly, unless you count the day I flew from Baltimore to San Antonio and back in one day, with a full schedule of meetings in between. I can state unequivocally that this has been the right career choice for me. That doesn't mean there haven't been compromises. I really miss being part of a community in which I can discuss Shakespeare, Renaissance drama and politics, and my latest writing project at the drop of a hat. And speaking of writing projects, mine have all stalled since beginning this job - when you spend as much of your time as I do writing on the job, writing is the last thing you want to do in your off-time. And one of the first things one learns as a consultant is that no matter how great your ideas are, you can't make your clients adopt those ideas. From a purely selfish standpoint, I could make more money working for a corporate consultant, because we can't charge our nonprofit clients the same fees that corporate consultants charge their business clients.

On the other hand, I don't feel that I have sold myself short for the sake of a paycheck; there is a real sense of satisfaction in being able to solve real problems for clients and knowing that it will help them improve their delivery of higher education. And while I may not be using my Shakespeare, I am using a lot of what I learned about how universities and colleges work. Overall there is a great deal of intellectual satisfaction to what I do.

As I mentioned earlier, I also love that I never have the same day twice in a row. In the same vein, as I also mentioned earlier, I love that we all bring a different set of credentials and perspectives to the firm, that we value a wide variety of skills that makes our own individual work stronger.

I also really like the variety of clients we have: from Ivy League to state flagship, to tiny little private college or regional comprehensive; from undergraduate liberal arts to research universities to religious institutions to graduate and professional schools, all over the country. I feel that as a result of this variety, I have gained a much more comprehensive picture of the many different missions that higher education serves.

That pretty much covers the nutshell; I look forward to answering questions about further specifics.

WINDING UP IN EDUCATIONAL CONSULTING: HOW THEY GOT INTO THE FIELD AND TIPS FOR YOU

Thanks for taking the time to participate and field our questions. Here are a few to start things off:

REPLY FROM RISA:
Z.M., you're right: serendipity is a common thread here. But I don't think serendipity can work if you haven't undergone some self-analysis to determine exactly what your skills are, and how they apply in a variety of settings -- that, and keeping an open mind and eye! I'm sure there are people who do get into the field directly -- but in our cases, we didn't know it was there to get into, or didn't know we wanted to get in. I will say this, though: I think it's probably easier to get into the field if you have some other work experience to complement your PhD -- it was my state task force job that gave me the project management experience I needed to get this job. That's not to say you couldn't get into consulting right out of school, but you might have to pay a bit more dues (and if academic experience is all you do have, then try to point out things like committee work, graduate student council, organizing formal study groups or guest speakers, etc. as evidence of your organizational/management/people skills).

As far as marketing oneself, a PhD in education isn't necessary -- nobody in our firm has an education degree. It's more about what you've taken out of your experiences and how you can apply them in a practical rather than a theoretical manner, and then showing how those applications add value to the consulting process. When I was interviewing, I made a point of emphasizing my "insider experience" on a college campus, and how working with exam/dissertation committees taught me to navigate a number of different agendas and personalities simultaneously (critical when dealing with a client committee). And my teaching experience certainly gave me a knowledge of broad curricular issues that affect administrative-level decision-making, as well as a sense of creativity in approaching programmatic content that has come in handy when working with schools to market their programmatic strengths. My advice would be to focus on what you have, rather on what you think they want that you don't have.

I don't think age needs to be an issue -- if anything, it can work in your favor. What did you do before getting your PhD? How can you take those experiences and combine them with your academic experiences? You can bet that when I struck out beyond the ivory tower, I was quick to find synergies between what my corporate experience had taught me and what my academic experience (and later, political experience) had taught me, so that I could differentiate myself both from other PhDs and from non-PhDs. Whether or not you got your degree later, or went to grad school straight out of college, once you're looking for a post-PhD job, you need to think of everything that's come before as a seamless series of experiences that build on each other, rather than thinking of BP and AP (Before PhD and After PhD) as two distinct and untouching eras.

As for sourcing opportunities, I relied on the Chronicle and the internet. Once I had answered the ad for this job, but before I heard any response, I remember thinking, "Hmm...education consulting..." and I plugged some key words into some search engines and got the names of other firms, whose websites I then perused. Sometimes they'd have openings listed, sometimes not, and I was planning to send out some blind resumes when I heard from Art & Science Group. Another good option might be to talk to your institution's admissions director or head of institutional advancement and ask if they have worked with any consultants, and if so, whom, then ask if it's okay to mention that the admissions person or advancement person suggested you contact them. One thing to bear in mind is that each higher ed consulting firm differs in the scope of services offered and approach to consulting methodologies. One of the things I like about our firm is that we offer the full gamut of consulting services, so I get to do a variety of work. On the other hand, someone who's more focused on creative work, for example, might do better with a firm that specializes more specifically in publications and communications design. And I'll offer one caveat: if you're considering working for a specific firm, try to see some of their product (ask questions about their research methodologies and the rationale behind those methodologies, and if you're in the interviewing stage, ask them to blind a few final reports for you to look at as sample). There is a wide discrepancy in the quality of research practices and final products out there, and you want to make sure you're comfortable with a given set of practices. There are some really good firms, and there are others where it would embarrass me to put my name on their product.

REPLY FROM LEO:

This is really just an additional note to what Risa said:

I had some experience doing educational evaluation research (though not on the college/university level) when I entered this field. I also had been involved in many aspects of college life as a undergraduate and a graduate student - I was a Resident Assistant, Head Resident, headed a volunteer student organization, played intramural and club sports, worked on search committees, was involved in student government, etc. etc. I would guess the later is about as useful to me in this job as is the former.

One of the things that proves unfailingly useful to me is the ability to stand in front of a group of often hostile people and tell them things they may not want to hear in such a way that most of them will at least listen --a skill I developed as a TA.

PAULA ADDS:
Z.M. asked: Does anyone ever get into the field directly w/o relying on the favorable disposition of the Fates?

Risa and Leo did a great job of answering this question, but I would like to add something from my own perspective. After two and a half years as list manager of WRK4US, having organized and moderated over a dozen of these discussions, I have come to see that very few careers have "direct" channels of entry that supposedly "most" people use to get in. Almost every single speaker, in all of the discussions, has come to his or her current position through a circuitous, off-beat route much like these speakers have. Their stories all have that certain random quality that Z.M. very correctly perceives: "I was doing this when I met that person, who later introduced me to this other person, who hired me to do yadda-yadda, and then because of doing yadda-yadda, so-and-so asked me to do this other thing, and that led to my current job."

According to previous guest speakers (I will speak for them en masse), ways to meet people and get that yadda-yadda chain-reaction going include working outside the classroom (even in a non-teaching appointment at your university), volunteering for an organization you care about, and social networking through sports, parties, hobby clubs, etc. Also essential, though more "direct," is looking for job postings and applying for positions.

The combination of these two basic endeavors--meeting people where you are, and probing into places where you are not (yet)--creates the right climate for the chain reaction to start.

That is what *I* see, anyway, in these narratives. Of course I am a social creature, so it makes sense that that's what I would see. Social connectivity makes a lot of sense to me as the perfectly rational driving force behind how things really work. Others may see other patterns in the narratives and are welcome to share their perceptions.

RISA ADDS:
Great point -- and, incidentally, the circuitous, "then I met" type of progression is not unique to PhDs looking to branch out...it's characteristic of job searches and career paths no matter what one's background is (it's certainly how my father went from being an insurance salesman to a commercial lending officer, and that was 35 years ago!).

S.T. IN RESPONSE TO PAULA'S COMMENTS:
I appreciate Paula's observations and the historical depth she brings to the discussion. Speaking, though, as a decidedly NOT "social creature" I find the message VERY DISCOURAGING. I suppose many of us who went into academic training did so in part because we weren't cheerleaders or frat boys, because rooms didn't light up when we entered, because we were always chosen tenth for P.E. class softball teams. It's sad to learn, especially in the face of ever-decreasing opportunities for finding a satisfactory life inside academe, that Janis Ian was right all along.

LEO'S RESPONSE TO S.T.:
As someone who was often last chosen for the sandlot football team . . . .

If you aren't a social creature, or a least able to fake it, then perhaps consulting is not an appropriate career orientation. The majority of what we do is predicated on forming a relationship with the client.

But it's not just schmoozing. That faculty member I worked for as a grad student who got me hired at GSU didn't do it just because he liked me. My first day at work for him (as a Research Assistant) he handed me a software manual for a statistics/graphing package I had never even heard of before and told me I had to develop a series of graphs using this software within a week for a paper he was presenting. I did and a year later when he needed someone to help start up the Center he called me.

PAULA ADDS:
I second Leo's observation -- networking or social contact alone won't do a thing for you if you don't have the goods to back it up. And one doesn't have to be a social butterfly to network effectively. Often, one simply has to keep one's eyes and ears open around people they already know, or think creatively about how the people you already know can help you. Who have been your primary mentors and academic peers, and what kind of affiliations do they have outside their schools? What kinds of boards do they serve on? Do they get invited to be guest speakers anywhere other than higher education institutions? If so, start doing some internet research on these affiliations and organizations, and if they seem like they might offer the kinds of career opportunities you seek, then speak to the relevant mentor or peer about effecting an introduction. Or, generate a list of the types of companies/agencies/foundations you think you'd like to work for and check out staff bios on the internet � any possible connections, either with you, or again with someone you know? You'd be surprised -- I know I've posted this anecdote before on the listserv, but my banker father turned out to have done some non-academic-related volunteer work with a gentleman who turned out to be on the board of a private regional higher ed think tank (and I discovered this only when my random internet research yielded the list of board members, and I handed it to my dad, asking, "We used to live in this region, you used to volunteer a lot, do you know any of these people?"). This gentleman had just answered my blind resume and cover letter with an offer to introduce me to the head of the organization when I got my job offer here; if I had proceeded, who knows what might have happened?

If one is creative and a good sleuth, one needn't be "a social creature" in order to dig up interesting leads.

W.G. NOTES:
I have to weigh in and say "I agree" with all of the comments about serendipity and unexpected pathways into new fields.

Four years ago, I was a Ph.D. student in English at Virginia, chafing at the thought of a life as a literary scholar (if I even landed a position). Today I am working on a book for ovarian cancer patients and their families. How
did this happen?

Well, when I decided to leave my program and seek other opportunities, I happened to have a friend from grad school who was working for an editorial consulting firm and looking for a freelance writer to create content for a new National Cancer Institute Web site on clinical trials. Just so happens that the person heading up the project for NCI had pursued doctoral-level study in the humanities at Yale before embarking on her new career path (which I assume made her amenable to an untested writer with my background).

And so--abracadabra--a freelance writer with a specialty in writing patient-focused (and some professional-focused) materials on oncology is born! That's not all I do, but science and medical writing makes up two-thirds of the writing that I do.

Yes, I've had to take assignments I don't always love, but I can honestly say this is a better fit for me than academia would be, mainly because I don't feel as if I am always toiling away in a state of isolation and perpetual self-doubt.

QUESTION FROM D.R..:

I'm reading this discussion in digest form, so forgive me if I've missed something in the mean time. As far as I can tell, most of the discussion has focused on alternative employment in education policy for recent Ph.D.s or ABDs. My situation is slightly different.

Since being turned down for tenure in an English department a couple of years ago, I have been looking for permanent employment outside of academia. Because I was fairly advanced in my career (two books published and many years in the field), I don't have much experience other than in academia. Recently, I did do a year stint as an education program officer for the Phi Beta Kappa Society. To make matters worse, I live in Washington DC -- a town not simply overrun with experts of every sort. Nonetheless, I continue to apply for positions at NEH, Dept. of Educ., education associations, etc. capitalizing on my short nonprofit experience, while emphasizing administrative, writing and other skills transferable from academia.

My question is whether there is anything else I can do to enhance my credentials as an education consultant.

LEO REPLYING TO D.R.:

At the risk of stating the obvious.

The first thing I would attempt to do in this situation is to look to see if there was a common denominator in the positions for which I was being turned down. If there is a difference in the skills I have and the skills they are looking for I would either set out to try and develop these skills or look for other jobs where my skill set matches the requirements.

If I am having troubles with the interview, or work samples, or references another course of action would be required.

If I wasn't even getting callbacks I'd have to sit down and think whether I was applying for the right kind of jobs.

RISA TO D.R.:

I would add one piece of advice: have you tried following up to find out why you didn't get these jobs? Sometimes a courteous and non-whiny phone call to a prospective employer, asking if they can give you any insight about why you weren't hired, can yield good information, especially if any patterns start to emerge. I also might demonstrate to them that you are a go-getter who's willing to find out what skills she needs and pursue them, which in turn might make you stick in their head the next time they have an opening.

QUESTIONS FROM B.N.:

Hello, everyone. I'm writing in response to Ben Edwards's introductory remarks as our guest speaker. I'm sure that I'm not the only one on this list who hears an echo of their own situation in his description of what led him to pursue a career outside the academy. Like Mr. Edwards, I had reservations about working as a professor, but I felt I needed to give it a try after all the time and effort I had put into my PhD. At this point I'm a visiting assistant professor of English at a small liberal arts college. (My second visiting position since receiving my degree in 2000.) Although
I enjoy teaching, I am less enthusiastic about producing the type or amount of scholarship that would lead to the kind of academic position that I would be satisfied with. So, rather than remaining dissatisfied, I've decided to look outside the academy. Honestly, however, I have found that the multiplicity of options (educational consulting, public relations, magazine work, foundation administration, arts administration, advertising) is precisely what makes this route both exciting and a bit daunting.

I have two questions for Mr. Edwards. First, how realistic is it to expect that someone with a PhD in the humanities and no business skills will be seriously considered for professional positions in other fields? I can write, I can research, I worked as a paralegal for several years while writing my dissertation, but I have very little sense of how business is done in these other fields. In some sense, what I'm asking is, what kind of "entry level" position should someone in my position expect?

I would also like to know what Mr. Edwards thinks is the most effective way to write about our academic experience in letters to potential employers.

Thank you, Mr. Edwards! And anyone else who cares to respond.

BEN TACKLES MANY TOPICS:

Hello all -- please pardon my absence from the conversation. If you're kind enough to suppose that sloth is not the reason you will imagine that you are witnessing instead a case in point of the sometimes unpredictable and fairly demanding consultant schedule. At the last minute I had a two-day assignment come up, and today has been nonstop recovery to attend to what had been planned for those days but had to be foregone. Like chatting with all of you.

So let me try to catch up in one fell swoop to a few parts of the conversation.

I'd say don't define what jobs you're exploring based solely on what you think to be the content of the field. To start with, I've never once thought in terms of a field called "educational consulting" and don't imagine many universities or organizations are looking for such a thing. As a firm we have to offer something more specific, something that fills a need defined in someone else's terms (we may think about educational institutions, but they want to attract more students or get some usable data or save money somewhere). And as a job-seeker you'll surely start in something more specific. Like patient-focused oncology writing. I mentioned that my first job involved writing in support of fundraising; previously the notion of "fundraising" had hardly pierced my consciousness and, insofar as it had, I'm sure I shared the common distaste the word evokes for someone taking out loans. But it's just like that Russian history course you took not for the content but for the professor and perhaps for what you anticipated s/he was going to bring out in you. Turns out, to raise funds an organization has to explain itself, which gets interesting fast.

And I have to say right at the top, it's all about that Russian history professor in the job world too: if you can, pick someone to work for, more than a job description to fit. When you've thought as long and broadly as you have to get a doctorate, you want to get near someone who thinks that way and applies it to running a magazine, consulting, dean-ing a professional school, raising money, or whatever.

How to market yourself? It's your skills, capacity, potential to solve problems -- ways you've never been led to think about yourself -- and it's certainly not the Ph.D. or the field of American studies. In my experience at least, graduate schools were all about the content -- you're defined as a historian and being groomed to be a history professor -- when the rest of the world is about abilities. You bring the content with you: what I really have to offer clients is understanding something about how universities work and what they're about. But I'm hired to analyze, to solve a problem.

So I'm very reluctant, unable really, to characterize the direction of the field of educational consulting. Other than to say that non-profit organizations, including universities, are -- happily for those of us who care about them but don't want to be a faculty member -- increasingly interwoven throughout the larger economy, and thus are spawning a wide variety of jobs. Our consulting is still very much a niche market: I could not give you a long list of our competitors. Some parts of what we've done over the years have become commodities, with lots of providers -- producing admissions brochures, for example -- and there are groups that dumb down any kind of work. But the work you might be interested in will be some creative corner of consulting -- or of an institution, say, continuing education or other programs that go beyond traditional departmental limits. If you find that place to be creative in consulting, yes, I think it can be a lifelong career.

Back to thinking of yourself in terms of abilities: yes to the earlier observation that it's necessary to be able to stand your ground, project confidence in what you know how to do. I repeat (something I know you've all heard): employers want people who can solve complex problems, including problems that don't require a great deal of technical knowledge to analyze. Just being able to write coherently: I couldn't emphasize enough how much demand there is for that skill.

If you can, I'd think seriously about getting away from DC (as one of you wrote about) or other places glutted with underemployed, highly skilled minds. Little colleges and out of the way non-profits are just the ones who are aware they need creative thinking and creative people to have a viable future, but those people aren't nearby.

Tell me which of your questions I haven't addressed, and I'll try to take them on individually instead of waiting three days then rambling.

Interesting discussion....I have a couple curiosity questions:

Is applying directly for a job with an educational consulting organization the only way to break into the field? What if no one is hiring in your area? Are there any other ways to get noticed, or any back doors ?

And, at the other end of the spectrum, I'd like to ask our guest speakers whether you see yourself working in this field for your entire career? Or do you see educational consulting as possibly preparing you for another type of work in 5 to 10 years?

If you think you may stay in the field, what types of directions could one go -- that is, thinking 10 years ahead, what types of positions and opportunities might be available for you?

RISA REPLIES TO H.P.:

I don't think applying directly is the only way. Much like any other field, scheduling "informational" or "networking" interviews are always a good idea because they let you discuss your specific skills and ambitions with someone who may not be actively looking, but who can either keep you in their head when they do have an opening, or they may know of someone else who is looking, or you may just dazzle them so much that they decide it's worth it to hire you anyway. Another option may be to try to engineer opportunities for informal networking -- check in with various education organizations' websites to see when and where they're holding conferences or panels, and check to see who their speakers will be. If there's something going on near you, or near somewhere you might have other reasons to visit (a trip to see Mom and Dad or an old college friend?), and you see consultants (or, for that matter, other professionals in fields that interest you), scheduled as a speaker, try to go to the conference and hear their talks; then you can approach them afterwards to comment on their talk, ask questions, and generally steer the discussion towards some informal networking for yourself -- "Gee, your talk about xyz was particularly fascinating to me because it confirms for me that this would be a good field to pursue even though my credentials aren't the standard ones..." (okay, maybe a bit more subtly than that, but you get the drift.)

As for longevity, I think that depends on what brought you to consulting, what kind of company you work for, and what other experiences you bring to it. The size and structure of a company may dictate whether there is any long-term growth potential for you, and Ben is probably in a better position to discuss the typical types of position tracks that might be out there. I know I'm in this for the long haul, but I also arrived here at an age and point in my career where I felt I had put in my time building my credentials and testing my options, and I was ready to settle into something long-term; others may enter the field at a point where they're still trying to build their credentials and explore their long-term options before moving on. I know from previous listserv discussions that many PhDs do a lot of freelance writing, including technical writing and communications; if you're tired of doing that, consulting could be a good place to settle. On the other hand, we work with a lot of technical writers when we're doing publications work, and I know of one consultant who would like to take her ten or so years of consulting experience and interaction with writers to strike out on her own as an independent writer/creative contractor herself. Depending on where you are on this spectrum, size and structure of a given company again may determine whether that particular firm is a good fit for you.

As far as where experience like this could lead, I'll risk sounding like a broken record. Just as all of our paths into consulting were varied and serendipitous, so too are the opportunities for those looking to move on. Off the top of my head, if I were looking to move on from here, I might try to get into a government agency at a higher level than I might otherwise have been able to do initially, or move into a corporate consulting function for a large firm, or maybe try to find an executive position with a nonprofit foundation, etc. But if I did, I'd still need to recognize that my experience might not be an obvious fit to a prospective employer, and find ways to sell why it would be a good fit.

QUESTION FROM H.P.:

I'd first like to thank our guest speakers for writing such great introductions!

For most of you, it seems that jumping into educational consulting was a significant turn from what you were doing before. In your first weeks and months in the new career, how did you go about learning the new job, and gaining the knowledge required to do it?

Also, did you take any particular strategy in terms of trying to be useful right away? Or in terms of avoiding making major mistakes? Or trying not to sound like an idiot to seasoned veterans of the field?

Educational consulting might inherently be more open to hiring people with Ph.D.s than other consulting/research fields (and feel free to comment on this), but I'm curious whether you had to convince someone that a Ph.D. in American studies or English or Psychology was a useful background for doing the work? if so, how?

LEO, REPLYING TO H.P.:

I learned my new job by asking lots of questions, sitting in on every meeting I could and reading old proposals, surveys and recommendations. And then I asked some more questions - at least in my personal experience it is better to ask a question when you are not sure than it is to wander off track. This was also the case when I went to start a survey unit - I had precisely 1 class in survey research as such - but I knew some people who did this (at least well enough to email) and bought some texts on the topic and joined a listserv on the topic.

When started I made sure that everyone knew that I would be happy to do the grunt work (see, its not that different from grad school). They might have to explain it to me in detail but I would march off merrily to do work and
learn the ropes.

As for the major mistakes and problems, it's sorta like writing your dissertation - you don't do all the work and then say "How is this?" You do a little work and then show it to someone saying "How far off is this?"

I think anyone who is smart enough and persistent enough to get a Ph.D. can learn how to do almost any kind of consulting.

It all depends on the field and your additional experiences in higher ed. I had a great deal of experience using surveys to collect data and using statistics to analyze data for evaluation research in addition to a degree in Social Psychology. Both my master's thesis and doctoral dissertation featured collecting quantitative data, analyzing it and writing conclusions based on these findings - pretty much central tasks for job today.

RISA ADDS:

I'll just chime in briefly on Leo's comments:

All the things he mentioned are dead on, no matter what job you're jumping into. The thing that struck me in this particular job is that the majority of our projects take anywhere from nine months to a year to complete...so it's a very long learning curve. I did not manage projects of my own right away, but I did get assigned to specific projects where I could simultaneously shadow the project manager, and over time take on discrete pieces of a given project. This gave me a chance to learn the ropes in manageable chunks. Incidentally, it didn't take a full year before I began managing projects of my own, because at any given time we have several projects in various phases, so I was able to learn each phase in a more condensed time frame.

The other big key is not being afraid to look stupid. Asking questions is part of that equation, but also feeling free to make comments or suggestions (though I prefaced mine with "I'm not sure how valid this is, but...") and then not being upset if your comments are dismissed (usually they're dismissed in a friendly manner). Remember: if they've hired you, they've made an investment in you, and they want you to succeed, so they should be helpful and tactful most of the time (though you might need to let them know what you need from them).

QUESTION FROM I.L:

Leo's experience is a good reminder of the role that learned skills play in getting and/or keeping a job of one's choice, especially in the private sector. In Leo's case, quickly learning the software package turned into a job opportunity later on; in my case, two years ago, my supervisor told me point blank that, to advance at Battelle, I'd have to polish up my people skills--promotion no longer depended just on my writing and editing (i.e., text-oriented) skills. (I'm not exactly an introvert, but certainly used to be picked last in gym class, and often preferred a book in my face over conversation.)

My question for the presenters is, are there skill sets that you have learned as educational consultants? And more specifically, are these skills you never thought you'd be asked to learn (like people skills for me) which now feel natural to you?

RISA RESPONDING TO I.L.:

GREAT question! I'd definitely have to say that computer skills rank up there for me...even though I don't do any number crunching myself, there are many instances in which I need to put together a spreadsheet, or format a chart/graph from a spreadsheet, so I had to learn Excel; I write a lot of my presentations in Power Point, and could probably also benefit from knowing some desktop publishing and HTML, etc., since some of our recommendations are geared towards communications strategies, and in some cases lead to putting together actual publications or websites or cd-roms (and if I worked for a firm more focused specifically on design and publications, I'd DEFINITELY need desktop publishing!). I had to learn these catch as catch can, and there are still times (usually when I'm crunching on a deadline!) that my boss will be looking over my shoulder and decide that I need some impromptu lessons. Even my proficiency in Word was a bit lacking when I started here (and probably still!) because there was seldom much need to do any fancy formatting or work with templates in my English academic incarnation. These skills are important not just because I need them to do my own work (and do it efficiently), but also because we're very collaborative here, and if I draft a document and email it to someone else to work on, they get VERY frustrated if my formatting is funky. I would highly recommend that any PhD looking to jump off the ivory tower do what it takes to develop a variety of computer skills. (Though I doubt they'll ever feel natural to me!!!)

Communication skills, believe it or not, were also something I needed to learn -- not how to write, orate, present, etc., but how to be effective logistically. Not only was I used to a lot of autonomy as an academic, but even in my job with the state task force, I spent the majority of my worktime alone. I was used to going off and doing what I needed to do, and not resurfacing until it was done. And I seldom needed to copy anyone in on any of my email correspondence prior to joining Art & Science Group. The need to keep others informed of my movements, progress, and communications, and to take other peoples' schedules into consideration when planning my own, were utterly alien to me, and took a long time to become second nature. On a related issue, I also had to learn CYA maneuvers that had been irrelevant to me as a student (though again, I think that's a necessity whatever you do in the non-academic world, and I actually learned those moves in my pre-grad-school days). These communication and CYA skills are less likely to factor into the getting-the-job part of the equation, but are key to the keeping-the-job part!

FOLLOW-UP QUESTION FROM V.B.:

To follow up the recent discussion on learned skills, I am wondering if it would be useful to take a course or two on educational foundations, educational inquiry, or at least be familiar with the literature and the language that is used in your fields. I am an ABD in History and my dissertation focuses on educational history, but I have never taken a course in educational methodology or even in the history of education. What I have learned I've picked up on my own. It sounds as if educational consulting, while it has many people who have doctorates in education, is a broad area open to many PhDs in other fields.

RISA'S REPLY TO V.B.:

You know, I asked this question when I was working for the state task force on higher education, and I asked it of a boss whose own background was in educational foundations and theory. He told me not to waste my time. In hindsight, I agree with him -- such courses will give you a lot of theory and very little that is useful in a practical sense. When I started on that task force, I knew nothing about public higher ed finance, governance structures, or programmatic policies, but I learned rather quickly as I went, and it was my general skill set that allowed me to do that. In my experience, employers are not impressed, and are even turned off, by someone who comes across as too theoretical in their approach -- they want action.

As for the kind of consulting we do, the sorts of classes you're talking about won't provide you with the "language" we use; again, I had to pick that up once I got here, and no one expected otherwise.

I've noticed, both in this panel and in previous listserv discussions, that we as academics tend to focus on what we don't have or don't bring to the table (I've certainly been guilty of this, and continue to do so when I look ahead). And to some extent that's good, as it shows a willingness to continue learning. But it's easy to lose sight of the fact that what you're bringing to the table that sets you apart from the faceless others vying for a job is your unique perspective; what you need to do is demonstrate how you're different, and how you can use it to add value, rather than focusing on your weaknesses or lacks. I have often played up my lack of education theory training by pointing out that I avoid relying on the jargon or on accepted wisdoms, and am therefore able to think more clearly and originally about the issues at hand, and by taking the offensive, have avoided looking defensive about my credentials.

I think the key is to embrace what you do have to offer, and lead with that, while being receptive to information from employers themselves about where you may lack a critical skill. Instead of trying to mold yourself to what you think they want, show them why they want what you are. Particularly in consulting, employers are looking to see that you're an independent thinker and someone who can stand their ground, who won't be too quick to say, "Oh well, that won't work." And don't be TOO constrained by a stated job description; I've started off many cover letters by saying, "I don't have the _________ your posting required, but here's why I still think I would be good for the job." Most job ads define an ideal that employers know they won't get, so show them why you're the next best thing.

QUESTION FROM J.K.:

The need to think of academic experience as skills has come up a few times, and I'm wondering how important it is to actively acquire skills that may not be emphasized on an academic C.V. More specifically, I am employed this year and next as an assistant visiting professor in a small liberal arts college, and I want to work on my academic credentials while also making it possible to market myself differently if necessary down the line. I'm wondering if trying to participate in governance or committees of some kind would give me more "real-life" kinds of experiences to bring to other employment. The academic mindset encourages us to focus so single-mindedly on publishing that I don't have any evidence of ability to work with others, get things done, etc. How important do you think this is? Plus, I have one other question for our guest speakers: more and more people are putting their resumes on-line by creating a home page. Do you think that this is becoming a necessity in the work world, or is it just something extra that employers are not that concerned about?

RISA REPLIES TO J.K.:

You're absolutely correct that participating in committees, governance, group projects, etc. is a good idea -- and when you try to leverage that participation, don't simply state that you did it -- state what you accomplished by doing it, and what skills you used in the process [e.g., if you helped organize an academic conference or lecture series on your campus, you might have had experience with communicating about and promoting the event, persuading guest speakers and lecturers to participate (people skills and initiative!), organization of all the various aspects, etc.]. Work on a committee might reflect the ability to handle multiple agendas and personalities, as well as other organizational skills. Be sure to emphasize results: got x number of people to attend the event, persuaded more prominent people than usual to participate, addressed a politically tricky issue in committee work and succeeded in solving the problem with a minimum of negative fallout, established a successful interdisciplinary effort in an environment that had been rigidly territorial, etc.

It would be hard for me to comment on the value of a personal homepage, since I'm something of a technophobe who loves the substance of ink and paper, and therefore wouldn't use a personal homepage myself. I know from my perspective, if I was hiring, I would want someone to hand me a paper resume for several reasons: it shows that you made an effort, instead of giving me a website and then putting the onus on me to look up your page/resume. I also like scribbling notes on a resume before talking to someone, and again, if I have to go to the trouble of printing yours and then going to the printer to collect it, I might not bother if I already have a stack of paper resumes in front of me (this may sound somewhat curmudgeonly and nitpicky, but when I used to work in human resources, I'd get tons of resumes, and it was hard enough reading through them all, without going out of my way to do so -- and nitpicks can add up quickly when you have to do them for all of the resumes you have. Plus, it's really a subliminal thing: the more effort you show, even on dumb little things like that, the more you look like a go-getter). And if I want to pass along your resume, I am personally more likely to hand off a piece of paper than I am to remember a web address or take the trouble to look up the web address.

That's not to say others wouldn't disagree with me, so perhaps it might be a good idea to have your resume online, but don't let it substitute for a paper copy -- simply put the web address on the paper copy, and then the prospective employer has a choice.

LEO REMARKS, IN RESPONSE TO J.K.:

I personally would think of the posting of a vita or a resume on the web as no more (and probably somewhat less) important than having a nicely laid out and printed hard copy.

One of the things that always impresses me is when people take time to research the organization that they are applying for a job in. When I was at Georgia State University one candidate had actually downloaded and read our entire website (literally hundreds of pages) and was able to ask reasonable questions about us and his job responsibilities. We were very impressed.

This may seem intuitive but you would be amazed how many people neglect this sort of thing.

R.E. ASKS:

I thank the participants for their interesting and useful comments. I'm curious about the prospects of educational consulting as a field, and also interested in learning more about the types of firms where one might engage in educational consulting. How much variety is there in the field? For example, are opportunities available in non profit organizations working on improving education in addition to more private firms geared more towards marketing? Where do you see the future of educational consulting heading?

LEO ANSWERS:

Sure we have a website, it's at www.artsci.com

It has a list of clients and some project examples.

Since I read some of the postings even though I wasn't connected yesterday I'd just like to point out that there are literally hundreds of companies that do educational consulting (ranging from the large Arthur Andersen Consulting or what ever they changed their name to down to single person firms).

There are also all kinds of educational consulting - some people do management assessments, some do print/web/communication development and design, some do data systems, some consultants work with fundraising and alumni development, some do financial aid programming and planning, some do training, etc. There are also so-called educational consultants who are essentially freelance high school guidance counselors.

I have sat in pre-RFP meetings with Advertising agencies, Public Relations companies, Non-profits, and others.

Someone asked yesterday if there were not-for-profits in this area. There are numerous not-for-profit, non-governmental agencies and governmental agencies that work with colleges, universities and other educational systems.

QUESTION FROM F.C.:

I don't normally participate in the list servers I'm a part of, but I'd like to start off first by saying "Thanks" for telling us of your experiences. I'm a Ph.D. candidate, but I'm already in Educational Consulting, from the perspective of being a TA Consultant. Our job has several directives, one of which is to run professional development seminars for graduate students in areas of professorship, others are various forms of discussing an individual instructor's teaching style, including videotaping classroom sessions, observing a class, and interviewing students at mid-semester, confidentially, and reporting general findings back to the instructor. None of this is quite the same thing as fund-raising and administration or strengthening the "market position" of a university for student-faculty recruitment, or legislative and public relations.

And yet clearly, many of the same skill sets and knowledge bases are necessary to both.

Just to get the ball rolling, I was wondering what you felt the difference might be between consulting to an individual instructor or a department, versus consulting to a university as a whole. What do you need to do to win the client's trust and what are the specific goals of a typical consulting job?

PAULA INQUIRES:

Ok, I have two questions for the speakers.

PAULA REITERATES HER QUESTION:

I would still be very interested to hear about specific types of projects you typically encounter, and the methods you use to carry out those projects. I want to get a sense of the 'content' of what you do.

Also, do you folks have a website?

Y.P. OFFERS A FEW WEBSITES:

Other websites for info:
Since I'm reading the discussion in digest mode, forgive me if I'm a little behind the thread of the conversation... But another source for finding out about many different types of companies that serve higher education would be CASE, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. I have become aware of many educational consulting-type firms by attending CASE's conferences. Examples include Stamats, and Brainstorm Design . Check out CASE conferences in your area or the CASE Currents magazine to find more.

LEO ALSO SUGGESTS A FEW:
Other places to get an idea about the huge range of types of university consultants, the type of work they do and precisely who they are include:

The Chronicle of Higher Education (everyone's favorite) requires subscription to access on the web
University Business (who does, ISTR, an annual issue or directory of consultants)
Education Week (though it is mostly K-12)

L.C.'s FOLLOW-UP QUESTION ON THE NATURE OF THE WORK:

Thanks again to the guest speakers for their responses -- I'd like to second Paula's question about specifics of educational consulting jobs (and I'm getting these in digest format, so I apologize if the question has already been answered). Leo, you mentioned several careers including "management assessments, some do print/web/communication development and design, some do data systems, some consultants work with fundraising and alumni development, some do financial aid programming and planning, some do training, etc." -- are there common activities, or common procedures, among these different jobs? Or is the common theme simply that all these diverse things are useful to a university or other educational institution? Also, it would be helpful to know whether there is a level at which consultants are expected to work -- are they called in in a management capacity, or a paper-shuffling capacity (or does this depend on the contract)? Specifics would be excellent.

RISA GIVES THE DETAILS:

In looking back over the week's discussion so far, it has dawned on me that perhaps we haven't been as specific about the details of what we do, and how we market ourselves, as everyone might like; if so, it's not out of any deliberate coyness. Rather, as I also reread this week's discussions on serendipity and attempts to define skill sets, requirements, and sources of job postings, it occurs to me that part of the problem is that what we do, in some ways, eludes a nice, neat, packaged definition. It's easy to think of, say, a lawyer, and have a general sense of what they do. At the same time, depending on their specialty and depending on whether they focus on litigation or not, it's harder to define what "a lawyer" does in the course of a given day -- there are probably as many different version of a lawyer's day and work tasks as there are lawyers. The problem for us as "education consultants" is that there are so few of us, and our audiences and clients represent such a specialized and small portion of the general population, that no one has that "general sense" of what we do that can stand as a proxy for the actual details. For you literary theorists out there, defining the job profile of an educational consultant is something like trying to identify and define the transcendental signifier. Just as there is no one perfect description of a successful job candidate, there is no one perfect description of education consulting.

That's not to say that we can't describe the actual tasks that we do, and I tried to give some sense of that in a general way in my intro. However, there are two issues that make it difficult (and this is a challenge we face when proposing new business to prospective clients as well):

So, that said, if you look on our website, www.artsci.com (I'd paste them in, but this email is already too long), we do list some project descriptions of previous clients, though they've been blinded, and so are still not as detailed as you might be hoping for.

I hope this helps!

LEO'S ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

My colleagues have answered parts of this so I thought I would try to get some of the other parts that they have not gotten to while I wait for a huge SPSS files to save.

Delineating common activities for the type of consulting that we do is somewhat difficult, much of what we do is based on the relationships we form with our clients many of whom do multiple projects with us over the years. One thing that we do that Risa and Ben both allude to is to get a feel for what the school is about through extensive interviews, campus visits, reviewing material provided by the school, etc. What happens after that is largely a function of what the client wants or needs, the relationship we have with the client, and how things go in the early part of the process. More often than not the nature of what we propose gets changed during the course of the project as we learn more about the client.

The type of consulting we typically do is at a relatively high level - provosts, vice-presidents and the such are our typical contacts and we run into a president or two while working.

IN RESPONSE, B.T. ASKS:

Maybe instead of describing a project, or betraying confidences, you could describe the most interesting (and/or most challenging) day you've had this past week. BRIEFLY!

LEO RESPONDS TO B.T.:

Hmmmm. I am not sure if this is what you want but here goes.

Rather than telling you about the most challenging day I'd like to talk to you about one of the important challenges we face dealing with our clients (without, of course naming names).

When what the client thinks they know is wrong; This has many forms -- I often think of it as a form of myopia. If we knew what was the problem then we wouldn't have to conduct research.

The client is sure that if it offered high quality Division I athletics an unending stream of high quality students would beat a path to their door.
or
If only we had better dorms . . .
or
Everyone knows we have the top ranked program in Ancient Etruscan.
or
It's where we are located that hurts us . . . .
or
Now that we have a new dynamic president everything will be better.
or
The faculty will fight us on this change all the way.

This is not to say the client is always wrong, they are usually correct in most areas but often for various reasons hold tightly to one or more false expectations. It may be a function of being inside looking out or the beliefs may be self-protective, but often times they stand in the way of improvement.

B.T. FOLLOWS WITH:

Thanks. How do you (generally) deal with this kind of situation??? Others? I'm wondering if your effectiveness as a consultant in this instance is related to your persuasiveness??? Or the trust/relationship you've established? Are folks willing to collect data to check these assumptions??? Or do YOU collect such data?

LEO ANSWERS:

What we do to deal with these things depends on a number of things including some you mentioned. Oftentimes we have research and past experience to back us up and we will tell the client about that. Obviously our persuasiveness comes into play (as does the client's receptivity and their trust of us). We tell clients about times where we (or other universities) have tested these assumptions and what we have found. For example, we do periodic national polling of prospective college freshmen and we know that Division I athletics are only important to a very small fraction of the pool. And our research experience also has shown that quality of faculty is seldom of great importance to incoming freshmen (horrors!).

If we can't convince them (or even if we do convince them and it serves a major political purpose), we will collect data on these types of beliefs. That is NOT to say that we will skew the data or the questions to find what the clients wants to find or, for that matter, what we want or expect to find.

E.Q. INQUIRES:

I would like to reiterate the thanks due to the presenters. It's refreshing to hear the "how I got here" stories; reminds me that there is no perfect blueprint for life, and that careers, maybe especially academic ones, are full of uncertainty and surprise.

First of all, I want to say that my initial reaction to the descriptions of this thing called "education consulting" was relief and, I don't know, that feeling you have when a vague idea or concern is specifically named by another person. Personally, I want very much to try out for traditional academic jobs; I love teaching and writing. But I know my chances are not great. Part of my desire to be a member of the professoriate is that I love the institution of the university; and I am worried about it. For this reason, I have also thought about how great it would be to have a job where my expertise as an in-the-trenches teacher and scholar could be put to broader use, to help determine to some degree the "fate" of the university as an institution. So my second reaction to the notion of doing education consulting is: how much is this field indebted to the idea of "corporatizing" the university? I know spreadsheets and market analyses are names for tools that can be put to any use, and I also don't feel that there is any reason to be suspicious of the need to make universities more "responsive" to their "constituents." (Although maybe a bit of suspiciousness is sneaking into those quotation marks.) Universities are supposed to serve communities, after all. But I'm wary of the ever more popular paradigm that positions students as customers, universities as "information providers," and tax-payers as stock-holders who deserve concrete returns on their investment. I don't believe that universities should act like businesses; effective teaching is, after all, incredibly inefficient, and an education is not a quantifiable asset.

So my question in a nutshell is, how much or how often do the presenters feel that they have to tango with the corporate university paradigm? And how do you deal with it?

BEN REPLIES:

What a pleasure it is to be part of such a conversation, and so many of you have been generous in expressing your appreciation.

A superb and crucial question about the relationship between consulting, especially "marketing consulting," and the corporatization of the university: My conviction is that you use the current market pressures on universities -- from legislators pursuing various agendas, from demand exceeding supply of high-ability students, from corporate funders looking after their own self-interest, from private philanthropists wanting to wield influence, from escalating price, etc. -- as a means to sharpen the focus on what higher learning, and an individual institution, is ultimately about, which isn't corporate. The pressures aren't going away. The question is, how effective will universities be in describing -- differentiating -- marketing the invaluable place they have in a single community, individual lives, the society as a whole. You're right: there are dangers and missteps everywhere. The most threatening, perhaps, are the ones that seem most benign, the ones that start from the premise that we're in a knowledge age so let's pigeonhole universities as the social unit devoted to cranking out knowledge units. That's fine as far as it goes -- and seems less "evil" than corporate funding dictating the work of some university lab -- but it's more insidious, not to mention wrong-headed: where but universities will people get the REST of what they're looking for, what we all need, from exploring, encountering a teacher, learning, and figuring out how to help make a community? So positioning a university in its markets is assertive as well as responsive, and even the responsive aspect of it can help the university sharpen its own focus on what it does uniquely well. Like anyone else, consultants can be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Several of you have asked about the specifics of our, or of all educational consultants', work -- ah, but I see that Risa has just addressed that.

RISA CHIMES IN:

I wanted to add to Ben's comments (and to agree that this was an excellent question!) --

Certainly, as someone who used to rail against my university's seeming attitude that the students were customers and the customers were always right (especially, say, when I or one of my peers would catch a student blatantly cheating and try to hold them accountable, only to have the administration undercut us when a disgruntled parent chose to threaten lawsuits rather than hold their own child responsible for his/her behavior...), I have often pondered this question. And, as Ben alluded to, issues of who or what control the flow of ideas and who or what determines what is or isn't "valuable" in the intellectual marketplace are not to be taken lightly (and as Ben also alluded, issues such as distance education and for-profit education, as well as "vocationalization" of undergraduate learning all play a role in this dialogue).

I think that in terms of what we do (and by we, I am including the larger consultant community, not just our firm), there is a potential danger of commercializing the intellectual enterprise that lies at the core of an educational institution, or of letting "commercial" interests dictate pedagogy and intellectual exchange -- but that danger exists only if one proceeds in an unscrupulous or ignorant manner when trying to consider how best to position an institution in the face of those pressures Ben mentioned, which aren't going away. These pressures also impact how academics achieve their pedagogy and intellectual pursuits; every time you hear faculty at a given school complaining about low salaries, lack of resources, heinous courseloads, etc., it points back to the fact that a given institution needs higher enrollment numbers to bring more tuition dollars in the door; or it needs to re-examine its tuition pricing and aid awarding policies in order to make sure they achieve an optimal net revenue; or it needs to find a way to get its alumni and its donors to cough up more dough, to put it inelegantly, and that leads us back to the issue of how an institution positions and communicates itself to its core constituencies.

So, back to the potential dangers. There are people out there (and I caveat this statement by stating that I have no specific culprits in mind) who, in helping an institution to "market" itself, pay attention only to what the market research tells them, and base their recommendations about institutional direction and identity solely on those forces, with the result that an institution following this advice might end up compromising its educational missions or ideals in the pursuit of the bottom line. Or that they will pursue strategies with one constituency without thinking about how those strategies might alienate other constituencies. One of the reasons I joined this company was because I like how we address these dangers. We operate under the assumption that successful market positioning is only one of a number of agendas that drive institutional planning, and that an educational institution may pursue various initiatives that don't necessarily make sense from a marketing perspective, but which make sense from a pedagogical perspective. We therefore make it very clear to our clients that our goal is not only to help them connect with their target markets effectively, but to do so in ways that will enhance, rather than compromise, a given institution's character, mission, and history. In a sense, we help institutions clarify what that character, mission and history are, and then how to use that to their best advantage.

Obviously, E.Q.'s question could serve as the topic for a separate week's worth of discussion, but hopefully this begins to address it in terms of where education consulting fits into the picture.

RISA: Well, folks, I'm signing off for the week. In the interests of different time zones and those who use digest form, I'll be happy to answer any last questions I find on Monday. Thanks for a lively discussion and great questions -- this has been a lot of fun.

LEO: Ditto!

PAULA: Well, the week is reaching an end, so it is time to say a heartfelt collective "THANK YOU" to our three Guest Speakers for giving of their time and energy to share their information and experiences with us. We have learned much from them this week and are very grateful.

Thanks as well to the subscribers who asked questions. The questions were especially good this time around and really contributed to the substance and value of the discussion.

The next discussion is currently being planned for sometime in April. I will let you know more when it solidifies.

Grateful again to our wonderful Guest Speakers, and best of luck to everyone in exploring nonacademic careers.