[FR] [EN]Re: The End of Dreamcard?

[Dan Shafer]

Vis a vis the comments made by Judy Perry and others on this thread and
others on the board regarding the state of funding for education....

It is appalling to me that as a country, the United States (and apparently
this phenomenon is not a respecter of national borders) values education so
little. My business partner's daughter has a degree in social service and
education and wants to teach. Instead, she's a bartender because she can
make more in a good weekend of tending bar than she can in a week of
teaching. At lunch the other day, two of my other friends and colleagues
were sharing stories about *their* daughters, who are both full-time
teachers but who supplement their incomes with waitress jobs that end up
paying them more in a year than their teaching positions.

Funding for specific programs -- particularly those which, as Judy
describes, are showing declining enrollments but may nonetheless be
important to the overall value of education -- gets reduced while sports
programs, MBA programs and other efforts designed more to feather the
university's PR and endowment nest than to contribute to mankind, get
increased.

All that said, I don't believe this obligates any company to have a policy
that so favors the educational community that it affects that company's
ability to stay in business and serve its primary customer base well. And,
before anyone jumps all over me again, I am *not* saying or implying that
Judy or anyone else here suggests RunRev should do so. But even though Judy
said in one of her replies that when it comes to creating and distributing
Media "I think it costs the company nothing and has the potential to bring
in a certain class of users." I'm sure she didn't mean that Rev Media didn't
cost the company nothing, but only perhaps that having a strategy to sell
such a product doesn't cut into the sales of their primary product line and
in that sense isn't a revenue disruption.

I'd like to see the educational administrators get their priorities together
so that liberal arts programs aren't short-shrifted while business and
science/technology programs explode. But in a sense, I suppose, they, too,
are just responding to demand.
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
Get my book, "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
>From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html