Rep. Lynne DiSanto is one of least useful legislators in Pierre. However, even she can occasionally make some sense:
I’m grumpy, too, Lynne. At their August meeting last week, the Board of Regents heard a pitch from Sioux Falls marketers Epicosity to spend $260,650 advertising during the 2019 Legislative Session.
According to Bob Mercer, the Regents are already a frequent Epicosity customer, spending enough on their services to send a couple-three dozen students to university:
Staff members from the Epicosity firm presented a $260,650 plan to the state Board of Regents.
It included $118,000 for production, including $40,000 to build a website, and $142,650 to buy advertising from January through March during the 2019 legislative session.
The current contract with the regents through Dec. 31 is for a maximum of $16,000 to develop a plan.
Public records show state government meanwhile has paid the Sioux Falls company $83,813.44 for various other services since the current fiscal year started July 1.
Epicosity received $559,670.79 from state government last fiscal year and $656,152.81 for fiscal 2017, according to records [Bob Mercer, “Regents Consider Hiring Marketing Firm to Pursue Money from Legislature,” Rapid City Journal, 2018.08.09].
The Regents made no decision on Epicosity’s pitch; the idea of advertising to voters and legislators during Session remains in the thinking-about-it stage. But I would hope for the Regents’ sake they say, no thank you. Our public universities do enough advertising year-round with their billboards, their sporting events, and their admission recruitment materials, all in addition to offering a pretty solid education to over 36,000 students, which ought to stand on its own as enough reason for legislators like DiSanto to increase the state’s support of higher education. Spending money on more glitzy marketing only makes contrarians like DiSanto (and supporters of education like me) grumpier.
Related: The Regents did follow their meeting with this declaration of their budget priorities:
Dakota’s Promise, a needs-based financial aid program funded with 50 percent state general funds and matched privately by campus-based foundations. The budget request for slightly more than $1 million would have the state, along with private funds, fill the funding gap for a student after every other available source—from the student, student’s family, institution, and federal government—has been used.
To support all public university faculty, a salary competitiveness request equaling 1.5 percent, or $3.1 million, to supplement the state’s regular salary package.
A general fund maintenance and repair request of $3.9 million to keep building and facilities’ maintenance funding at the same level as last year, which equaled 1.76 percent of campus building replacement values.
An inflation increase for the public university system of $637,420, which is equal to 2.2 percent of its general-funded operating expense budget, excluding utilities [South Dakota Board of Regents, press release, 2018.08.10.].
That list of priorities does not include marketing. Remember that, Regents.
They should take that advertising contract straight off the top of the salary paid to the head of the Regents.
Grudzie … You can’t run for Governor with a silly nickname.
Higher education recruitment and admission procedures have always baffled me. Advertising a school only confuses the process.
The school has a product to sell. The student has the money to buy it. The admission process requires the student to prove his money is better than somebody else’s money.
Back in 1968 I was filling out an application for the University of Pennsylvania which was several pages long, one of the questions was along the line of “what do you believe you can offer UPenn?”
My answer: “$3000/year.”
I wasn’t accepted. UMass asked me “why do you want to attend UMass?”
My answer: “because it’s there.” Apparently that was the right answer.
Imagine if you had to answer similar questions if you were trying to purchase a car? It’s absolutely ridiculous.
If the school is not willing to accept any student who shows up, why are they advertising? If a prospective student can’t find the school on his own, why would they want him?
Ha ha. That’s a great story, Anne. It sort of demonstrates the difference between then and now, between the boomers and their kids and grandkids.
A male at the time might have answered, “It has a better climate than Vietnam.” I don’t recall being as snarkily real as you, but I sort of felt the same way. “Hey, I’m here, here’s my money. Where’s the course on Marxism?” I’m sure, though, I answered dutifully.
Back then most schools, except for the most elite, like UPenn, were wanting to fit as many of us boomers in as they could. They saw is as their job to take all. USD, Augie, etc., had just built massive new dorms to hold the inmates. Augie had the opportunity to cull some applicants, but almost anyone could get into the state schools with money in hand. When I transfered to UW-Madison it was very easy, although I needed a student loan to do it. Now you have to be either massively rich or massively smart to get in. They took whatever money you could hand them, and they gave you a great education, even in liberal arts if that’s what you wanted. They didn’t try to steer you to a welding class.
The Regents should go the same way the Vermont Supreme Court is going.
I got the same question on the application for USD. I said I would do my best to add to the liberal, anti-war culture at the University of South Dakota. (We did protest the widening of Hwy 50 and the slaughter of hundred year old trees. Billy Marcacelli was arrested for refusing to come down out of a giant cottonwood. :0))
Of the nine regents, only one, Joan Wink, has been directly involved in education, the others being engaged in business or government bureaucracy, purely political appointees. They were appointed under the false myth that schools should be run like businesses. With the country now being run by the quintessential CEO, we should understand the falseness of that notion, but after decades of people schooled under boards of education and regents who performed as corporate boards, few people possess the critical acumen to discern the falsehood.
The last college president I served under had a Ph.D. in higher education marketing, which I didn’t know existed until he came along. I never once heard him or any of his predecessors engage the faculty about the factors they were addressing in their classrooms. The policy for state institutions was open enrollment, which meant that if a person came up with the tuition, they would be in college. The faculty devised curricular measures to deal with underprepared students, but that resulted in reports from the
regents deploring how much higher education resources were devoted to remedial courses. The fact was that incapable students were admitted to subsidize the universities as business enterprises, but it was dangerous to state that out loud. Doing so would have a direct effect on promotion and tenure.
The regents spoke of the curricula and those who went through them as products. Most professors want to cover their subject matter, not engage in marketing campaigns. But as you can see from the above post, the regents are trying to change that. They have little conception of what true education is.
Did Daugaard’s kid switch from Lawrence & Schiller to Epicosity, or does Lawrence and Schiller own Epicosity? This sounds like another make-work no-bid favor to some GOP Party donor just like the L&S contracts that produced such lousy work. Who could forget the billboards telling people not to masturbate while driving, or the stupid ass slogan saying better to live in SD than die on Mars? These advertising agencies offer very little for the free taxpayer money they are getting, and there has to be some nepotistic reason government keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over and over and over again.
SD is run like a banana republic. So here’s the story: Find out whose relative works at Epicosity and we’ll know the only reason why the Board of Regents is doing this.
Mr. Lansing, ad the rightful Chair of the Constitution Party I have rewritten its bylaws to state that I can. 🐐
#goat #4Science
Is a marketing campaign like this substantially different from supposedly impoverished education professionals spending the excess wealth from their taxpayer-funded salaries to drive across the state and sit in the gallery above the state legislature during a vote to increase those salaries?
Government “education” has now indoctrinated two full generations of Americans into believing the Bible isn’t true, the earth is billions of years old, and human beings are conglomerations of molecules that came together by chance somewhere in the vast recesses of deep time.
Meanwhile, the economic weight of education spending is gradually suffocating some of South Dakota’s best small communities out of existence, and many of the most evil men and women in the state have found a comfortable home and power base under the warm shower of taxpayer dollars wasted in education’s name.
https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/origins/creation-101-radiometric-dating-and-the-age-of-the-earth/
@Grudzie … In that case, I’ll cast all the SoDak votes I control to you.
@Evans … Since you’re a member of the last two full generations and you don’t believe those things … you’re either wrong or misdirecting or lying.
I’d written:
Porter Lansing replies:
Despite having been raised in a strong Christian family and community, I believed those things when my aggressively atheistic high school science teacher was finished with me. After I left home for college, I was able to get the other side of the story from books I purchased at my own expense (as opposed to the anti-Christian textbooks the government purchases with our tax dollars and coerces our children to memorize).
Mr. Evans, the earth is billions of years old and was not created by an imaginary being from your dungeon dragon books.
Twice in one day I can trot out my #4Science t-shirt, if I can get somebody to help me get it on.
Fifteen million Mormon’s believe what you said, except they believe their Bible is also true.
+1 Agree with Rorschach
Epicosity looked entirely like a bro-dawg shop at its debut.
You are wrong about so many things Kurt. Where do I start?
First, schools are not suffocating small towns. Small towns are desperate NOT to lose their schools and will do whatever it takes to keep the school open. A school closing is often the death knoll for a small town. You don’t know small towns if you think they want to unburden themselves from schools because of the cost of keeping them open.
Second, It’s called public education, not “government education.” “Government education” is the new conservative 1984-style jargon conservatives are trying to use to demonize an institution where everybody rich and poor, bright and dull, enabled or disabled, are provided a free education without having someone’s version of religion foisted upon them. If public schools were teaching Islam or Judaism Kurt would be up in arms. But he really wants schools to force feed kids with a fringe version of Christianity. That’s not what public schools are for. If people want their kids to believe nonsense anti-science stuff like that people were riding dinosaurs 6,000 years ago they can find some kooky fringe school where a dumbass charges good money to dispense such BS.
Third, yes a public institution spending taxpayer money to lobby the legislature is entirely different than private citizens spending their own money to lobby the legislature. The former is highly inappropriate. The latter should be encouraged.
Try this on for size Mr. grudznick,
“In January 1968, the president of Emory University sent a letter to students’ parents (including mine) that apologized for increasing tuition by $150 a year (Figure 1). A year later, he wrote again to explain yet another price hike that would bring tuition to $1,980. These letters, found in my father’s meticulously maintained files, seem unbelievable to today’s students and their families. Emory’s tuition for the 2012–13 academic year is $42,980, and room and board adds another $12,000. Yet, in 1968 and 1969, the seemingly modest tuition increases were seen as threats to college affordability, and my fellow students and I scoured the then-limited financial aid
opportunities and scrambled to find jobs on or nearby campus to defray the increase. (Mine was typing for the sociology department.)” https://deltacostproject.org/sites/default/files/products/Delta-Cost-Not-Your-Moms-Crisis_0.pdf
This is why education should be at a small fee rather than causing generational debt.
Here’s a business idea for you Kurt. You could open a school to teach dumbass fringe Christian ideas to the kids of dumbass parents. You could set the cost really low so as not to upset your sensibilities and live on however much money you can take in, after expenses. You could even pay yourself minimum wage if it makes you feel like people are getting a better deal that way. Your satisfaction will come from knowing that while the education you’re providing isn’t worth much, people are getting what they are paying for.
Twice in one day I can trot out my #4Science t-shirt, if I can get somebody to help me get it on.
Is this gravy taters crying out for a Bill Clinton blue dress moment?
Perfect candle lit music for your evening’s pleasure, too.
Marvin Gaye croons Let’s Get it On. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18TLHhhHZCA
“Get it on, Governor Grudz” Give this state a haircut!! :0)
Biblical literalist have to believe that dead old white guys never made a mistake in translation and there’s been nothing new to learn about ancient Greek and Hebrew languages and culture since the 16th century.
I tend to disagree.
My older brother sweat the Harvard admissions process, believing it was the only way to get a Harvard degree.
My younger brother found out about the Harvard Extension program. You don’t apply for admission, you just show up, with money. You can take as many courses as you want, pay as you go, and when you have amassed sufficient credits, they award the degree.
This is how higher education should work. The only people who should be filling out these crazy admission forms are the people who want scholarships.
Interesting Anne. I learned something from you today.
Hiring a PR firm is insane so is the unnecessary spending on advertising. Students are bring bled dry by pumped-up college costs.
Who are the principles of Epicosity? Is this a shell company to hide the identity of the real company behind Epicosity? Just curious!!!
@Darrell – Here is Epicosity homepage. http://epicosity.com/
Epicosity Principles – http://epicosity.com/culture/our-team
I’m sure they’re all hard-working people (although their staff bio page makes me work too hard with all that swipe right, swipe right, swipe right instead of a nice, one-screen clickable list). Still, since we’re talking marketing and state contracts, let’s be sure to distinguish principals from principles.