The Plight of the Millennials: Pedagogy as Marketing, Marketing as Pedagogy

Anyone who already regards college education as a business should have no trouble with corollary notion that marketing is essential to success. In the information and service industries including education, marketing depends more upon image than it does in resource extraction, refining and manufacturing. In this article, the authors focus on Diana Oblinger, Executive Director of Higher Education for Microsoft Corporation, as merely one of the more prominent market analysts who has sought to single out a new cohort of educational consumers and describe what makes them unique. Acceding to the alleged needs and only dimly articulated preferences of contemporary college students, one finds a bizarre pedagogy emerging. This is most easily witnessed in the study of history, although ample examples could be drawn from areas as diverse as anthropology and zoology. Rather than "telling students about the conclusions of history," Oblinger touts games allow that "students to explore authentic information via multiple paths." The authors argue that Oblinger displays neither academic nor scholarly pretensions.