So far I'm not persuaded that College Tonight can provide a robust enough set of mobile features to drive college students away from Facebook, but I hope to be proven wrong, if only because I'd love to see social networking via mobile really take off.
But the idea of a new member-driven College of Teaching does.
When I started Teach For America as a college senior, I sensed that there were thousands of talented, driven college students and recent grads who were searching for a way to make a real difference in the world.
Tranghese argued at the time that football was the engine that drove college sports and that the Big East had better get into the big-time football business or be left behind.
As status anxiety has helped to drive college applications to record levels, the college-guidebook industry has expanded along with it, stoking those anxieties in order to sell you a way to assuage them, most conspicuously through their merciless numerical ranking of the colleges by every metric they can plausibly invent ("Most Millionaire Graduates," "Top 10 Schools You've Never Heard Of").
While workforce needs should not drive college preparation, we can at a minimum be more intentional about what we know and what is likely to happen over the longer-term.
The U.S. News rankings began in 1983, and they drive colleges nuts, because they are based on notoriously unstable and sometimes incomparable categories, but they have a demonstrated effect on both applications and donations.
The myth that federal student aid drives up college tuition has been refuted by empirical evidence and by the real-world actions of colleges and universities.
"Football is what drives the college sports train," said Tim DeSchriver, assistant professor of sports marketing at the University of Massachusetts.
His monthly phone bills are usually $300, but can be as high as $600 in the months he drives to college at the University of Miami.
