How many solic­i­ta­tions have you received in the mail to apply for such-and-such uni­ver­sity or check out a sneak pre­view day at so-and-so col­lege? How many shiny, slick brochures with smil­ing faces and gleam­ing build­ings have grazed your front door stoop? How many catchy "get a degree now" sub­ject lines have popped up in your inbox?

If you're in the 18–24 age bracket and have sub­mit­ted your con­tact infor­ma­tion in any way shape or form to an edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion, your response to the above ques­tions is likely: "What solic­i­ta­tions? I lined the cat box with them."

I can vouch for this phe­nom­e­non. Not even a month after tak­ing a cer­tain col­lege admis­sions exam, I was bom­barded with spiffy uni­ver­sity "view­books," thick pack­ets detail­ing the ben­e­fits of voca­tional school, and e-mails explain­ing why I should pack up and move across the coun­try to major in some obscure field. It was over­whelm­ing. A bit flat­ter­ing for the first second-and-a-half, but def­i­nitely overwhelming.

Like coupons, credit card offers and sala­cious e-mails from V1agra, I brushed the phe­nom­e­non off as another mean­ing­less facet of modern-day marketing.

…but then I came across this opin­ion piece in the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion. The author, Seth Godin, sug­gests that per­haps col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties solicit so many appli­cants so they can reject more appli­cants, and thus, get ranked higher on such totem poles of truth as the U.S. News & World Report. Godin notes, "Why bother mak­ing your edu­ca­tion more use­ful if you can more eas­ily make it appear to be more useful?"

While this sounds like a low blow, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties have always been in com­pe­ti­tion to be revered as the most pres­ti­gious, most resource­ful, most successful-people-churner-outer. But does the explo­sion of e-marketing mate­ri­als and increas­ingly shinier pam­phlets dilute the qual­ity of the edu­ca­tion itself?

Some rad­i­cals would say yes, higher edu­ca­tion is turn­ing into a con­glom­er­a­tion of mass mar­ket­ing tar­geted at mass audi­ences with a goal of deliv­er­ing mass audience-ready infor­ma­tion to chew three times and spit out. Con­ser­v­a­tives on the issue would likely say no, higher edu­ca­tion would never do such a thing as com­pro­mise qual­ity for the recog­ni­tion that quan­tity brings.

I would say that per­haps it's not so much of a charged issue as it sim­ply is an issue of change. Everything's chang­ing in these post-2000 years. Print pub­li­ca­tions are los­ing rel­e­vancy, tod­dlers are tex­ting their moms when they're hun­gry, and no one even cares that Brit­ney is crazy any­more. The world is open­ing up, and so is the scope of education.

Godin also points out that things that used to mat­ter a lot for school pres­tige don't mat­ter as much any­more, such as the size of a school's library. With Inter­net data­bases hous­ing nearly every arti­cle you'd ever need for that senior the­sis paper, Dewey Dec­i­mal fanat­ics are los­ing club mem­bers fast.

"Back before the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion, access to infor­ma­tion was an issue," Godin's arti­cle notes. "One rea­son to go to col­lege was to get access. Today that access is worth a lot less. The valu­able things that stu­dents take away from col­lege are inter­ac­tions with great minds … and non-class activ­i­ties that shape them as people."

Well put, Godin. My speech & debate team days are much more valu­able to me than how my school's admis­sions stats ranked against other state schools across the same latitude.

Per­haps the age-old insti­tu­tions of lore still pro­vide the high­est qual­ity edu­ca­tion avail­able in this coun­try, but per­haps other means of access­ing infor­ma­tion and the way insti­tu­tions present them­selves needs to be reeval­u­ated. Because if we don't keep reeval­u­at­ing edu­ca­tion, it becomes history.

And you can already major in that.