alumni futures

The Risk in Measuring Alumni Engagement

Adapted from a talk I delivered to CASE District VII in San Francisco on March 1, 2013, titled
"What is Alumni Relations For?"

What are universities for?
I recently read a thoughtful (and at times, funny) book called What Are Universities For? by Stefan Collini. Collini, a professor of intellectual history at Cambridge University, describes how politicians and a "morose, prickly" mythical creature called "the taxpayer" are challenging universities to justify their existence in economic terms. And as we see in the media, critics are calling for more "accountability" by universities regarding the needs of the communities which they serve. They say we can assess this by tracking things such as

* jobs created
* graduates being hired
* companies founded by faculty members, and
* technologies commercialized by the institution. 

But as Collini points out, economic growth is not the sole (or even primary) way in which a community benefits from having such an institution in its midst. To measure education – and humanities in particular – in this way is to apply standards ill-suited to the task.

Collini's essay about what universities are for prompted me to wonder, "what is alumni relations for?" In a way, alumni relations is similar to the humanities. Like the humanities, alumni relations is under scrutiny. Every dollar invested, every staff hour worked, every event, is being assessed to see whether it is generating something called "engagement."

[Engagement is to alumni relations what
economic output is to the humanities]

Advancement VPs, budget managers, and development directors are wondering whether alumni relations is contributing directly to fundraising, and many of us are indexing "engagement outcomes" in search of an answer.

Just as economic measures are ill suited to assessing the "effectiveness" of the humanities, assessing alumni relations primarily according to fundraising outcomes is misplaced. And it ignores a fundamental aspect of alumni relations: the fact that it's largely about relationships.

How do we measure relationships?
We don't generally quantify how we feel about others or what we "get" from having a relationship with them. We don't assign a numerical outcome to interactions with a spouse, a close friend, or a family member. Nor do we keep a record of weighted "engagement opportunities" with family members and acquaintances. 

Why don't we quantify the relationships that matter to us? Because we measure their value based on how we feel, not on a scorecard created by a committee. And things that are based on feelings can't be measured. As Collini points out, they can only be judged.

The engagement craze
And yet, increasingly, we're trying to measure alumni relationships instead of judging them based on our goals and experiences. We have created engagement scoring schemes that quantify intangibles. How much time and effort are alumni relations professionals spending collecting, curating, and computerizing "engagement activities"? How much time should they be spending?

Critics will say, "But Andy, a relationship isn't a business. Universities are businesses. We have to apply business practices to manage them effectively and to maximize return on investment."

Schools, colleges, and universities exhibit business-like characteristics in some areas, and we can choose metrics to assess our progress toward some goals. But historically we've treated alumni relationships like a liberal art, not like a science. So if we assess alumni relations on a numerical scale, we have to change the way we design it and practice it. And we have to reassess its purposes.

Alumni relations needs a methodology
Regardless of its stated purpose in a given institution, alumni relations needs a methodology. We need tools that describe our profession, that help us assess our work, and allow us to talk about it with colleagues from other institutions. But what methodology should we choose? A subjective one based on judgment? Or a more numerical one, based on metrics?

Alumni relations operates today on a continuum, with no data at one end and nothing but data at the other end. 

 

"Friendraisers to the left, please. Robots to the right."

We could operate without data, judging our work by whether people "seemed happy" when they left an event, and by calling ourselves "friendraisers." I don't suggest we do that. 

At the other extreme, we could assign weighted values to things we define as engagement, put them into a database and try to prove exactly how engaged someone is. As you've guessed, I feel that this prevents us from exercising the judgment we need to wield.

A hybrid solution
Instead, we should combine these methods, as some already do. We can find a comfortable spot somewhere in the middle. We can use less measurement and more judgment. We can track data and correlate alumni relations to giving-related outcomes.

And we can find activities that support fundraising directly. A simple example: Work with development research staff to scan the LinkedIn profiles of alumni who join your official group. Flag likely candidates for research, based on job titles and keywords, and track how many become prospects and donors (hat tip to Cornell's Andrew Gossen). 

Alumni executives should regularly set aside the engagement scorecard long enough to get a feel for their alumni family. Because that's what people who are nurturing relationships do. They feel.

And based on how they feel, they decide what's important. To achieve what's important, they can check the numbers for guidance in taking the next step forward. And then see how that feels, and continue the process.

It's not a scientific method, but it can still reflect intellectual and professional rigor.

A simple equation to help us
In that vein, Collini suggests a simple way for scholars to assess each others' work in the humanities: 

Experience + Reflection = Understanding 

This is a proxy for metrics in a field - the humanities - where progress may be impossible to characterize with numbers. Wouldn't this be useful to alumni relations professionals too?

Experience the interactions students and alumni have with each other, and with the institution. 

Reflect on how these interactions matter, based on your goals. 

Understand what you see, what you hear, and what you feel, using your experience and reflection as the foundation.

[Collini: "Experience + Reflection = Understanding."
Is this a useful approach for alumni relations?]

A fork in the road
My views are somewhat of a backlash against the current hunger for engagement metrics. We're at a fork in the road: Do we need more measurement, or more trust in our professional judgment?

It's not an either/or choice. We should measure what we reasonably can, even when it's difficult. But we mustn't lose sight of the human aspect of what we do. 

§ § §

Agree or disagree with my viewpoint? Do we need more measurement? Or something else? Leave a comment.

Focusing on ROI is Selfish

Higher ed communications leader (and Alumni Futures advisory group member) Charlie Melichar periodically speaks about social media's place in advancement. At a conference in 2010, an audience member asked Charlie about "getting more alumni to spend time with our Facebook presence." 

Charlie replied:

Don't worry so much about whether a few more people spend two minutes a day with your Facebook content. Get the people who already spend two minutes to spend a few more minutes a day. Don't focus solely on ROI. Focus on ROA – Return on Attention.

Charlie urged us to make our existing supporters' experience more rewarding, instead of only trying to attract more fans and more followers. 

At the 2012 CASE Summit, I had a moment of clarity about why this made sense. Charlie was on stage again, this time discussing technology with MIT's Sherry Turkle. She had just described how technology can isolate us from one another, hindering genuine interaction. The discussion sparked my memory of Charlie's earlier remarks, and I suddenly realized why I found his advice appealing. In a nutshell:

Measuring ROI means assessing the value we get from our investment in online engagement.

Measuring ROA focuses on the engagement's value to our audience.

You should assess whether your organization is using its resources wisely, and ROI is one way to approach that.

However, "return on attention" puts the audience first. That's a worthwhile goal for those of us trying to connect with our audience in ways that matter to them.

 

Related Link:

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other
by Sherry Turkle

New Publication: Internationalisation of European Higher Education

I recently had the honor of contributing to a newly-published handbook, Internationalisation of European Higher Education.

My contribution is a section on Challenges in Global Alumni Relations.

The book consists of a hard copy (loose-leaf) physical edition, supplemented three times a year with digital updates that reflect new developments, best-practice examples from across Europe, and hands-on advice. The target audience is European education professionals navigating an increasingly international landscape.

Subscribers to the volume get online access to digital versions of all the Handbook's articles – useful for those who are constantly traveling because of the international role they play.

A description, full table of contents, and pricing information are available from the Handbook website:

Internationalisation of European Higher Education

The book is edited by the European Association for International Education.

I don't make any money from people purchasing the volume; but I'll gain great satisfaction if it helps a few Alumni Futures readers with their everyday professional challenges.

 

Do Events Have a Social Graph?

In a recent article titled The Next Big Thing, social network analyst Valdis Krebs pointed out that just as a person has a "social graph" that depicts how they connect and interact with others, a book can have a social graph too. His network map displays connections between the purchasing behaviors of individuals who bought a specific book on Amazon.com: 

Below is a network map of a very interesting new book – Too Big to Know [2B2K] by internet scholar David Weinberger. David's book is shown by the magenta node in the center of the network. Directly connected to his book are the books that Amazon mentions that customers also bought [green nodes], in addition to 2B2K. These books are probably more similar than different to 2B2K. The blue nodes are books that are 2 steps away from 2B2K, they are probably more different than 2B2K, but retain similarities also. The arrows show the direction of the majority of also-bought activity. 

His conclusion? Amazon is building an "Interests & Passions network...under the radar."

"Social Graph" of the book Too Big to Know on Amazon.com, via The Network Thinkers - Click to enlarge

It occurs to me that if a thing (like a book) can have a social graph, so can some of the "things" we use to engage alumni and donors. For example:

Events can have a social graph.

Is someone who attends a particular event more or less likely to attend certain other events? The answer could improve our target marketing for events.

Volunteerism can have a social graph.

Is someone who volunteers for a specific role more or less likely to fulfill another, specific role? The answer could improve volunteer recruitment.

[If a book can have a social graph, why can't an event?]

And directionality matters here too. For example, arrows would show which volunteer roles lead to future activities.

This is hardly a new idea. Overlay behavior onto a social graph and you're creating an interest graph. That's how several popular online services work, in a general way: Zappos, Netflix, and of course Amazon. But these sites mostly aggregate past users' behaviors to influence the next user's behavior, without those users being connected otherwise. A true "interest graph"–based system would interpret your behavior to help organizations understand why you attended that additional event, or how you felt about your volunteer experience.

Intrigued by this idea? Then see this article by Derrick Harris: The personalized web is just an interest graph away.

Do events, volunteer roles, and other engagement tools have social graphs?

If they do, should we be capturing and analyzing them?

Why – or why not? 

Related articles

• Amazon is building a social graph under the radar (thenetworkthinkers.com)
• [2b2k] Too Big to Know's network (hyperorg.com)
• Looking Beyond the Social Graph, Capsule Aims To Map the 'Experience Graph' (prweb.com)
• The personalized web is just an interest graph away (gigaom.com)

5 Long-Term "Ideas That Matter" for Education

A.C. Grayling with beverage,
by bowbrick via Flickr

[Updated 5 June 2011: A.C. Grayling involved in establishing new College of the Humanities in London.]

The English philosopher A.C. Grayling seems to produce a book or two every year, about things I can't comprehend. For example, is philosophical realism more epistemological than metaphysical, as a construct for understanding the relationship between one's mind and the world? Uh, let me get back to you on that, Dr. Grayling.

But every once in a while, Grayling produces something that many people can understand. In his 2010 book, Ideas That Matter: The Concepts That Shape the 21st Century, Grayling has compiled "a personal dictionary of ideas" that he finds worth examining, and suggests themes that will dominate political, economic and intellectual debate in the coming decades.

Last year, The American Scholar featured a dozen critical themes proposed by Grayling (not all of which are in his book), and among them I found five themes with direct, and potentially monumental, implications for higher education. Note: One of Grayling's constructs is education itself, which he covers in about nine pages, but it seemed a bit too meta to state here that education has long term implications for education.

I've listed the other five below with my own brief comment on their relevance. This is obviously a too-brief treatment of critical topics, but I'm curious how others see these topics in the context of higher education in the coming decades.

1. The Internet
Grayling calls the web "the largest graffiti-scrawled toilet wall in the universe," but its potential to transform education is vast. In fact, it has already done so. One remarkable thing about digital and electronic developments is that they are so new, in historical terms. We're at the absolute beginning of digital technology's influence over education (and everything else). Not all technical achievements are desirable, obviously, but they can open the door to more effective ways of doing things we've long tried to do (such as educating each other and ourselves).

2. China
Grayling's prescription for dealing with China's lack of democratic instruments and questionable human rights record is weak: "the rest of the world should continue encouraging it to practice good statehood." OK, sure. But consider China's economic and population growth, the public Westernization of certain aspects of its society, and its increasing (but so far, tenuous) links with Western institutions. These mean that many or most global education brands will try to place China securely in the forefront of their international strategy. 

[Many global education brands will try to place China in the forefront of their international strategy.]

3. Migration
Grayling focuses on the social outcomes of large-scale African and Middle Eastern migration to Europe. The international flow of students is recasting institutional definitions of what it means to be a "global" university. In fact, nobody yet knows what it means, and the moment that someone figures it out, the definition will change. Either way, increased international student mobility has implications for marketing and recruiting, fundraising and alumni relations, and competition across national borders and regions.

4. E-publishing
Grayling points out that print news media are "struggling to survive" as the written word shifts to digital form. He doesn't say why we need printed media – did people say that the horse-drawn wagon was "struggling to survive" 90 years ago? Or was it obviously obsolete?

[Did people say that the horse-drawn wagon was "struggling to survive" 90 years ago? Or was it obviously obsolete?]

Either way, digital storage and transmission of information (and its accessibility and portability) are wreaking havoc on traditional models of educational publishing and, yes, on retailing too. Campus bookstores house fewer and fewer printed books, and more and more gadgets for reading the books in their new incarnation: the digital volume. 

5. Retromania
On the heels of describing the downfall of printed news, Grayling points out that "the fashion for all things retro is already growing, and that is not a bad trend." Is "not bad" the same thing as "good"? Grayling doesn't say. But one thing seems likely: the past will be romanticized by anyone suffering from "retromania," just as people seem to think that "information overload" is a product of the digital age (it isn't). Who knows, maybe printed books will come back into style briefly, as an affectation of youth – like the cigar, the martini, the ironic fedora, and swing dancing. 

Are Grayling's trends important to education?

What aspects of their importance have I neglected?

Leave a comment.

(And for more of Grayling's opinions about education and how the Internet affects it, see his book Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life. See links below.)

Related articles

• Ideas That Matter by A.C. Grayling (books.google.com)
• English Universities After the "Browne Report" (alumnifutures.com)
• Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life (books.google.com)
• Educational Marketing, Authenticity, and Web 2.0 (alumnifutures.com) 

10 Challenges of Social Technology: Familiar Obstacles

Prolific web strategist and social tech blogger Jeremiah Owyang once again summarized the online community manager's world in a simple table (or "matrix," as he calls his ubiquitous charts). This one is called Challenges of the Social Technology Industry, July 2010 Edition. He calls the matrix an "opportunity list" for those of us using social technology to improve our business. 

Look at the full matrix and at least read through the challenges Jeremiah identifies. I've listed them below (with my own comments on how they might apply in educational advancement). 

Print out the chart, and highlight the challenges that you face. 

Then work with your organization's leadership, staff and volunteers, and draft a plan to address who in your organization will lead the effort of solving these challenges – assuming you don't already have a roadmap.
 
 

10 Challenges of the Social Technology Industry 
(via @jowyang); comments from @alumnifutures (Andy Shaindlin):

1. Noise overwhelms signal:
   Filter alums' tweets, blog posts and status updates so that quality and relevance prevail. Limit your organizations's output to conversational, relevant posts, with lots of question and a few fun polls.
   
   
2. Amateurism threatens expertise:
   Invest in training dedicated staff whose job description includes social media monitoring. Reach out to alumni, students or donors who have created their own social network groups in your institution's name, and partner with them to increase quality of group activity.
    
3. Power shift to participants:
   Don't talk all the time. Remember what a community manager looks like: small mouth, big eyes, big ears. Online communities are listening stations for organizations.
    
4. Fast moving industry creates confusion:
   Once you assign responsibility for social media management in your organization, schedule an update and reassess your progress within 60 days. The space is moving that fast.
    
5. Risk of overhype:
   Don't sign up for every site or service that gets "hot." Watch trends, and try to anticipate, but remember: deploy social media tools to help you achieve your organization's pre-existing business goals. Merely seeming "up to date" doesn't help you.
     
6. Lack of qualified talent:
   Don't have an expert in house? Create one. Invest in training and professional education so you can promote from within, or hire someone who understand how students and alumni are using social technology (see #2 above).
    
7. Measurement elusive:
   It's possible to measure return on investment, return on attention, and lots of other payoffs from attending to social channels. Start with this article from the Journal of Interactive Advertising or this post on Mashable about "measuring social media health."
    
8. Disparate data and irregular standards:
   Don't worry so much about benchmarking against other institutions. Start measuring outcomes and impact and track changes internally over time. Your data, benchmarks and standards will differ from your institutional competitors'.
    
9. Culture shift creates an internal rift inside institutions:
   Institutional leaders are concerned about being criticized by bloggers, tweeters and Facebookers. Social media-crazed staff members worry about falling behind the social media curve. Seek a compromise (and give your boss a copy of Open Leadership by Charlene Li).
    
10. Privacy woes scare companies and consumers:
    Advancement shops are pretty good at protecting the privacy of the donor database. This is no different. Learn what information is private and what is public in the platforms your organization uses, and respect absolutely the privacy and shared data of your stakeholders. Their loyalty will remain intact.

Related posts from Alumni Futures:

What Does a Community Manager Look Like?

The Alumni Organization Social Network Matrix: 18 Use Cases

Photo credit: Obstacle road sign via Creative Commons from Guillaume Lemoine

All The People You Know Who Know People

The mania over social networking is really a mania over the online component. Social networks have been in place for millennia. And reminders of this pop up in unexpected places all the time. Like in Truman Capote's classic novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

The earnest, plodding young narrator follows all the rules for getting his writing published. He mails each manuscript off and passively waits for rejection letters by return post. But he gets a casual dose of common sense networking from his neighbor, Holly Golightly, who says that she can help him land a Hollywood script deal:

"I'm going to help you," she said. "I can, too. Think of all the people I know who know people." 

There's the strength of weak ties, clearly articulated in a fictional conversation, 15 years before Granovetter published it as a scholarly finding.

And there's something else here. Holly and her author-neighbor are not connected by a common alma mater or some other granfalloon. They're connected by something that Holly herself determines is relevant:

"I'm going to help you, because you look like my brother Fred. Only smaller."

This can serve as a cautionary reminder about how little it often takes for groups to form, with or without your alma mater as a focal point. And now that forming groups is so easy, looking like brother Fred is sometimes much more important than sharing a school connection. 

That should be a wake-up call to alumni organizations, which no longer (necessarily) play a central role in connecting people to one another and helping them organize around their interests.

Separating Personal and Professional Networks Online

[Updated 27 February, 2011: A new service aims to help you "connect, integrate and manage your social identities": http://www.whoopaa.com]

[Updated 5 January, 2011: Multiple identities on the social web, from All Things Digital.]

[Updated 17 November, 2010: CASE Currents profile of how different alumni professionals treat the question of separate social network profiles. CASE member log in required.]

I recently read (and enjoyed) the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. For all his misfortune, Tolstoy's suffering magistrate had it better than we do in at least one respect. He could keep his "professional life discrete from his actual life" (and I like Tolstoy's dichotomy of "professional" and "actual" lives). For regular users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, separating personal and professional networks can be a desirable, but elusive goal. 

Here's how Tolstoy described it:

Ivan Ilych had practiced this skill for keeping his professional life discrete from his actual life for a long time, and had developed it to such a degree that he sometimes, like a virtuoso, would blend his personal and professional attitudes together, as though for fun. He allowed himself to do so because he felt sure he'd be able to disentangle them when he needed to...

There are some insightful higher education professionals whose regular tweets and blog posts inform and inspire me – but who often deliver scene-by-scene online critiques of their favorite television shows. Other colleagues have added me as a Facebook friend – although I am already connected to them on LinkedIn, and don't think of them as "friends" (even by Facebook standards). This isn't a big deal, but unlike Ivan Ilych, I don't feel like I can "disentangle" these connections as easily as I would like to. 

And so these interactions slip and slide among online communities, blurring the personal and the professional, the Friend and the Fan. Eventually – soon, maybe – tools will evolve to help me put the right information in the right place, easily accessible in the right way. Of course, with periodic pruning of our networks, we can make a little headway ourselves. 

How? 

• By deleting LinkedIn connections whose work we don't know first-hand, or can't otherwise vouch for;
• by unfriending (or hiding updates from) the over-zealous Facebooker who reached out to everyone from Mrs. Leonard's 4th grade homeroom class; and
• by unfollowing Twitter contacts who have mistaken your professional profile for a restaurant review repository.

Of course, many people prefer to mix professional and personal connections and content in online communities. I do link to Alumni Futures from my Facebook profile, and sometimes even tweet about a baseball game (but LinkedIn is for professional use only). Overall, though, I prefer my work and personal profiles online to be more separate than connected. 

Until I can easily assign my contacts to what I consider the "right" place in either network (or in both), I'll just have to live vicariously through the Ivan Ilyches of the Internet age, who can patiently and readily disentangle the two.

Related articles

• Manage your separate work and social network accounts with Whoopaa (thenextweb.com)

Final Thoughts from CASE Summit 2009

This week I joined in a planning discussion for the 2010 CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders. Our planning committee discussed a number of themes, issues and possible speakers to make the conference relevant and useful to our profession. Preparing for that discussion I reviewed my notes from last summer's conference, some of which I blogged previously. 

As I expected, there were a few more worthwhile ideas that I had jotted down last July, almost all of them comments from Tim O'Reilly. Here they are in bullet point form:

• Tim O'Reilly, in the discussion about what role institutions can play in their constituents' lives, said: "If the job is relevant [to students, alumni and donors], the institution will figure it out. It's not about 'how do we protect the old ways we used to do those jobs?'"  

Right on. This reminded me of Clay Shirky's comment in Here Comes Everybody, that professions must often redefine themselves. Most journalists, for example, didn't believe that user-generated content or Web 2.0 was a threat to their business model: "We're in the journalism business – bloggers aren't journalists!" Maybe, says Shirky, but the journalists defined their own profession inaccurately. They are in the communications business, and so are bloggers and anyone else "publishing" content online, no matter how informal or personal.

• O'Reilly again: Traditional higher education will suffer if it can't adapt to new attitudes toward learning, to new people doing things in new ways (his examples: the University of Phoenix and Canada's Athabasca University). "We may remember how things used to be and remember those who suffered. The parvenu companies that did something 'crazy' may end up as the leaders." 

• O'Reilly defined publishing as "spreading the ideas of innovators" (a not very subtle reference to the fact that he owns a publishing company). Universities should ask, "What do we really do? For whom do we do it? Can we do it better with the aid of new technology?" 

His point was that we should go back to first principles. Instead of automatically doing the same thing using new tools, we should first ask whether what we do should change, not just how we do it.

• Asked whether internet-based news was "dumbing us down," O'Reilly replied astutely that he's given 90-minute interviews to newspaper reporters who then quoted him in a single sentence that misrepresented his main point.   

• Finally, O'Reilly echoed something I mentioned here long ago: "The internet is just a user interface." I quoted Cem Sertoglu in January 2008 to the effect that the "internet is the dumbest network of all."

And in a typical instance of converging thought-patterns, Shirky again surfaces on this exact topic: 

...[T]he internet itself is just a vehicle for moving information back and forth – it's up to the computers sending and receiving information to make sense of it....The internet does not know what it is being used for.... [Here Comes Everybody, p. 157]

This provides us with the ability "to design and try new communications tools without having to ask anyone for permission." Like...the World Wide Web!

Final note: Despite a decidedly technical flavor to many of the sessions at 2009's Summit, there was no wireless access in any of the meeting rooms at the Hyatt hosting the conference in San Francisco. Not because CASE didn't request wifi for attendees; apparently Hyatt doesn't even have the ability to deliver internet access in its conference rooms. I find this mind-boggling. Last time I checked, the hotel's business offices had internet, as did the guest rooms. Let's hope the Marriott in New York gives us better online access next July.

HDR photo of Times Square from Nimo Photography via Creative Commons. That's the Hilton though – the CASE Summit will be at the Marriott.  

Your School: A Flatland for Students

You may be familiar with Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by 19th century author Edwin Abbott. Flatland is a two-dimensional land populated by polygons, and the story satirizes Victorian England's hierarchical social structure. Of equal interest to many readers is the book's clear articulation of the mathematical ideas behind different dimensions.

The narrator, named A Square, sees A Sphere (a visitor from a three-dimensional place called Spaceland) move through Flatland. But A Square doesn't recognize the visitor as a sphere, because he has no knowledge of the three-dimensional world the sphere inhabits. From A Square's vantage point as a flat observer, the sphere passing through the plane he inhabits looks like a single point that grows into a line. It then shrinks to a point again before disappearing magically (click the illustration from the book to view full size). A three-dimensional object is unrecognizable, and is beyond comprehension to a two-dimensional being. But if he could be lifted up above the plane he inhabits, A Square would see the relationship between the sphere and the plane. 

I think that A Square's plight is analogous to that of many current undergraduate students when they interact with alumni. The students' perceptions are limited in time and space by the very nature of their experience; when an older, experienced alumnus passes through the student's world, context limits their ability to recognize the graduate for what he or she really is: a rich resource, a person with experience and insight that the student could use, if only the student could rise above the Flatland of the insulated student environment and gaze upon it from Spaceland.

Students who thrive in "real world" situations are those who rise up and seek a three-dimensional look at the world outside their campus. This isn't a criticism of students, nor is it applicable to all undergraduates. But as I chatted about Flatland with a colleague recently, it occurred to me that Edwin Abbott's ordering of the various dimensions could be compared to the relative amount of time students and alumni have spent in the wider world. Experience away from campus and from traditional student life expands the viewer's awareness of the world and provides depth that allows him to recognize and understand unfamiliar people and things.

Is this too much of a stretch? Does the analogy make sense?

Related: In July 2008 I asked "do science students really learn science" - or something more?


Illustration from chapter 16 of Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. In the public domain. Find the book in a library near you using WorldCat.