With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the podium, House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled their plan to overhaul federal higher education policy. The bill, dubbed the College Affordability Act, H.R. 4674 (116), calls for expanding federal student aid programs and appropriating new federal funds to help states offer free community colleges. Some of the key provisions […]
Category: Blog
Five Key Factors in Placing an Op-Ed
“We like the piece. It will go up on our site tomorrow morning and I’ll send you a link.” For a PR person, there’s no better way to start the day than to receive that kind of short reply from someone whom you’ve pitched an op-ed piece on behalf of one of your clients. The […]
Improvement to Degree Attainment Rate Should Be a Key Component of Honoring MLK Legacy
While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is probably most remembered for his “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in Washington, DC in 1963, his stirring orations began much earlier in his life, going back to when he was an undergraduate student at Morehouse College in Atlanta in the late 1940s. It was at Morehouse in […]
A Memoriam to Doug Laughlin: Boss, Mentor and Friend
When I issued an RFP in 2001 to find a firm to handle trade and consumer advertising for Sallie Mae, the Fortune 500 company where I then worked, I didn’t expect it would lead to the finalists becoming two of my enduring friends in the 18 years since. The “winner” of the competition, Mark Russell […]
How Getting into Harvard is Like Getting VC Funding
For much of this fall, the college admissions world has been gripped by the “Harvard trial.” That phrase has become a shorthand way of describing how a lawsuit brought by Asian-American applicants who were denied admission into the world’s most prestigious institution has turned into something much more. In college admissions, that “much more” concerns […]
Upskilling is Key to Accelerating the Economic Recovery
Income mobility is on the rise according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After stagnating for nearly two decades, the incomes of ordinary American households are finally picking up. Of course, these numbers deserve context. Wages and incomes fell so far during the Great Recession that median household income, as measured by the Census Bureau, is […]
The Difference Between PR Inside and Outside the Beltway
My attending the public release of data last week comparing perceptions of today’s college students by the public and by Beltway insiders brought home to me a larger point – how different and challenging it is to execute on PR support for a client that is successful in meeting goals both inside and outside the […]
Higher Education for Adults Increasingly Means Enrolling in College Alternatives
For more than 50 years in this country, ever since baby boomers started graduating from high school in the mid-1960s, there has been an assumption that individuals with high school diplomas in hand would follow one of two tracks – college or no college. And even though the definition of “college” has changed dramatically over […]
How Erosion of Trust in Media May Affect PR Pros
Data from Gallup shows that confidence in newspapers and TV news are at an all-time low, and as PR professionals this should be concerning for a number of reasons. First, in the big picture, the erosion in trust in the media mimics the erosion of trust in most other American institutions — like the Catholic […]
All Trump All the Time: Why Pitching Clients to Cable News Outlets Has Become Nearly Impossible
There once was a time, before the summer of 2015 when a certain man came down an escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President of the United States, that PR firms such as ours could pitch cable TV news bookers with a reasonable chance at success. Yes, you had to have all […]