Adaptation, Penn State, and the state of Northeast football

Earlier this week, Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications made waves for offering a “podcasting” degree. With the total cost of tuition just south of 100K/year, this drew a lot of attention.

However, Matt Brown, one of the best and original converts to newsletter journalism, had a far more nuanced reaction that is far more relevant to be considering.

When I was a student at Syracuse, Newhouse would prop itself up and justify Syracuse’s price tag by trotting in ESPN play by play analysts, NBC anchors, and other highly successful local reporters directly into classrooms week after week. The story: these professionals did the same thing you did and look how they turned out with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work.

However, over the last decade, that narrative has fundamentally changed. The most successful people in the creator economy did not slave away in lower markets, working their way up the corporate ladder based on merit. They snagged high profile jobs out of school based on name recognition in order to help networks look younger, or in most cases, carved out an independent self created form of storytelling leveraging social media.

The reactions to the Syracuse Podcasting Degree(tm) have been mostly negative from a lot of millennials and older bemoaning the change that’s happening and the “value” that this kind of degree actually gives someone trying to figure out what to do in life. But the reality is that after years of successful Syracuse alumni coming back to Newhouse and essentially saying “I’m successful because of what I did outside of the classroom,” the University pulled the trigger on a decision that was never going to popular, but at lest repositions them better for how the world actually works.

If Syracuse wants to stay a premier communications school, this kind of move was needed, and they needed to be one of the first ones to move. The challenge they face is that you have to convince alumni, parents, and students that this kind of bold somewhat silly sounding face value idea is actually worth 100K/year.

This brings me to Penn State, who over the weekend lost to UCLA and are completely unranked. The preseason number two team in the country is unranked after just two conference games and is almost assuredly going to miss the postseason in a year when many, myself included, asked if James Franklins’ viability hung on his ability to actually do something this year.

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