At the risk of seriously undermining the incentive for potential participants in the design-the-logo contest for Social Media University, Global (which offered at 50 percent tuition discount to the winner), I want to clarify two important points:
- SMUG students are not eligible for any state or federal financial aid programs to assist with their tuition payments, because
- Tuition and fees for SMUG are $34,998 less than those for Harvard.
In other words, SMUG tuition is Free. You are responsible for your own room & board, though.
Still, even though we receive no federal funds, SMUG does not discriminate based on race, gender, socioeconomic status, religion or any other factor. We are fully Title IX compliant, with opportunities to play open to both women and men.
Many prominent organizations advocate Universal Basic and Secondary Education, and other programs like One Laptop Per Child are aimed at giving youngsters in developing countries access to technology. SMUG’s focus is different: we offer free, universal post-secondary education in social media not primarily to kids, but to the non-traditional student; the lifetime learner.
Yet hopefully the curriculum will be valuable even to the digital natives who’ve grown up with this stuff, because it offers a more structured framework for understanding. They may even find out that what they’ve learned about social media will be valuable to potential employers who are looking for more effective ways to engage key stakeholders, because they will see practical examples of social media being used to meet real business goals.
SMUG is no “Ivory Tower” institution for pointy-headed intellectuals. You’ll get hands-on, real-world experience in social media…with no student loans to repay.
I’m looking for stories of people who’ve used blogging or other social media to generate bottom-line business results. I’d like to profile you in a future post, or even have you be an adjunct faculty member. Leave a comment below, or send me an email in Gmail (see address in the upper right) or a message in Facebook.
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[...] though we don’t have our own sports teams (which helps us keep tuition down!), Social Media University Global still needs a nickname for our student body. Referring to the [...]