One of my favorite television programs is Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN Sunday Mornings.   One guest this week was Richard Florida, economist and author of the “Great Reset”.  Florida details how U.S. economy has crashed before, but historically reset itself and emerged into new eras of growth and prosperity.  While Florida believes the U.S. is in what will be a long and painful reset period, he feels the end result will be another era of innovation and prosperity, albeit no longer defined by consumption.

In my opinion, I feel the U.S. educational system is beginning a similar reset, arguably rooted with the fundamental change of the U.S. economy post World War II.

In the past 60 years, especially in the last decade, there has been increasing demand for education after high school.  Traditional four year colleges have seen growing enrollments, and specialty institutions such as for-profit online colleges have been filling an ever growing need.   This demand is clearly fueled by necessity.

We are in the last full week of August, and that means the freshman dorms are being loaded all over the world with your next load of candidate prospects. Another crop of students who are technologically superior to the graduates you will hire over the next few months.

As the candidate pool evolves, so do you! After many companies stayed on the sideline last year, they are back in the saddle this year and ready to recruit. The question we pose to you is what new(er) technology are you going to most utilize to connect with this year’s graduates and intern population?

Accept. You just spent close to $50,000 a year on a college education-how could and why would you turn down that job, or any job? You should be ecstatic to get an offer, any offer, in this our “Great Recession.”

CNN claims, it now takes an average of more than 30 weeks to find a job, the longest time span ever since the Department of Labor began tracking this data in 1948. Therefore, while it may be incredibly attractive to take that first job offer, there are legitimate reasons to turn that job, even in this pitiful job climate.

In a recent article written by Bobbi Dempsey, Investopedia.com, she highlights 5 (Good) Reasons to Decline a Job Offer:

Ad Agencies continue to pioneer the business-within-a-business internship model. It produces results. Students love it. Ad Agencies love it.

How does it work? An ad agency hires a team of interns, let’s say five. They have these five interns work as an independent business unit within the agency. The intern unit is confronted with a real communication problem. Real client. Real responsibility. Real expectations. Real money. Real freedom.

This internship program model caught national attention last summer when Crispin Porter + Bogusky auctioned their summer interns (38 students) on eBay. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly! The prominent ad agency received 44 bidders and the winner, Brammo (an electric motorcycle company), became the intern unit’s client for a mere $17,655.

Participating and interacting with students is complex, but giving students the content they crave isn’t.

Lately I’ve been doing some research on long-tail searches about specific company internships (I know, nerdy). The goal is to figure out what students type into search engines and thus how they search for internships. I’ve been amazed at the volume of searches that are company specific. For example, instead of typing in “internships” more and more students are typing in “JP Morgan Internship” (4,000+ searches/mo), “Google Internship” (16,000+ searches/month), or “IBM Internship” (8,000+ searches a month). Your can check your company’s search volume here. This presents an opportunity for companies that create content to harness these searches.

You should go google “Your Company Name Internship” and “Your Company Name Entry Level Job” because that’s exactly what students are doing. Web presence and content are becoming increasingly more important because they are a student’s first interaction with your employer brand. Companies need content that supports these searches and ranks highly.

Drinking alcohol at work or sleeping at your desk is not the best way to be promoted-shocking, right? But each day millions of people commit these workplace taboos. When workers fail to separate their social life from the work place, they run into major trouble. When new graduates begin their first job, they need to recognize that college life has ended and that the boss is not their friend. THIS IS A JOB, NOT A FRATERNITY PARTY.

“As companies continue to embrace more casual environments, employees may develop a false sense of informality when it comes to the office behavior,” says Rosemary Haefner, Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder.com. “Employees should make sure they are aware of company policies, so something that initially seems ‘harmless’ doesn’t end up negatively impacting a career.”

First of all, why is it so hard to spot good ones?

(A) It’s tough as academic achievement no longer differentiates:

- With the average A level grades for all students going to University being 280 points or BBC

I’m usually a few weeks (or months) late catching up on all the magazines that are delivered. So as I was catching up on a past issue of Time magazine the cover article (“Should Schools Bribe Kids?”) from the April 19, 2010 edition caught my attention. The article on page 40 titled “Is Cash the Answers?” is about a Harvard professor and scientist who conducted an experiment in four cities testing the validity of using financial incentives in the classroom to motivate children to do better.

Reading the article brought back the memory of being paid for good grades by my parents. Oh how we loved report card day! During my high school years (and my brother’s) my parents paid us $20 for an “A” and $10 for a “B”. No money was paid for a “C” or lower because a “C” was not acceptable in our house. As I read the article it hit me that I had never asked my parents why they paid us.

So I called my dad and asked him about the decision to pay for grades and he said, “Your mother and I paid you because we felt that getting good grades was your job and it was what you were supposed to be focused on. Remember, we discontinued the allowance with the grade payment.” (Side note – I never remember getting an allowance.) But my parents didn’t pay for grades in college so I asked why the payments stopped thinking his answer would be that because they were paying for college. But no, his answer was “we figured you were old enough to figure out how important grades are in college and if you couldn’t figure that out then you shouldn’t be going to college.” He added, “We actually felt this way your senior year in high school too but decided to pay anyway.” [For those wondering if grade payment worked my brother and I never made “C’s” and for me - I graduated high school with a small academic scholarship and graduated USC with honors. That would be the real USC – University of South Carolina.]

At this moment, many university recruiters are in the process of getting their fall recruiting dates for each of the campuses they plan to attend.

One of the emerging trends we saw last year was that several innovative university recruiters were using Twitter to tweet their events to students. I think this will become the standard this year, rather than the exception, but let’s see how you answer!

Social networking continues to be the big buzz word at all the national and regional conferences, but do you have a Facebook fan page setup for your university recruiting department or CSO?

They only take minutes to setup, but if the time is not placed to maintain them, they lose importance quickly.