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Intelligence
One Day University: Follow-up

Intelligence

One Day University: Follow-up

Mar 27, 2007By Michael Stoner

Schragis said he was inspired in part by a professor of his own, a memorable history teacher at Tufts University. One Day U, meanwhile, has “taken off quickly” and was in seven US cities when we spoke, drawing 300 to 400 people per event. “We generally sell out,” said Schragis (referring to attendance, not philosophy).

There’s a nostalgia for college, the concept of college, being on a campus. It doesn’t matter what the subjects are. These professors are the most interesting teachers. So we asked, “What if you ran a seminar with no practical value beyond education for its own sake?” But the hook is, you go to ten or twelve schools and find the one or two professors the students say are the most interesting, the best teachers on campus. Nevermind their age, their subject, tenure. Just focus on evaluations. 

Schragis told me “it doesn’t matter what school they come from,” but his company’s homepage only mentions “Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, The University of Pennsylvania, Cornell….” Otherwise known as the Ivy League. If it really “doesn’t matter” what school the speakers are from, One Day U might want to mention some public universities, for example.

Wherever they are from, Schragis just promises that the speakers “will be interesting and entertaining. I don’t care if they get through their slides – it has to be fun.”

The program started out at higher end hotel/conference center venues. Now they are on college campuses, with lunch in a dining hall. Schragis envisions expanding to 12 cities in the northeastern US, and California after that.

I asked whether there was a potential conflict if he recruited a top speaker “out from under” an alumni education program on a campus. He is not worried:

I am skeptical that it would cause any problem. A professor will do this program because he wants to, not because it’s a better gig than doing it for free for the alumni office. We’re talking apples and oranges, because this is a different product from yours, and a different [i.e., multi-school] audience.

In the end, he says, “we’re helping the schools by showing off their professors. And we know we’re doing it right, because someone is already copying us.”

Schragis has hit on something so simple it should have been obvious a while ago, but those of us dedicated to advancing our single institution are thinking inside a box. One Day U has no such limitation and can continue expanding for quite a while yet. As for being copied, we probably think they’re copying us, but to hear Steven Schragis tell it, One Day U doesn’t know it.

Click here to see the original posting about One Day University.

Note: This post is by Andy Shaindlin, executive director of the alumni association at Caltech and author of Alumni Futures, who will be our guest blogger until mid-April.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?