By Darren Johnson and Felicia Reich
Campus News
Today’s college graduates benefit from more than just remarkable Grade Point Averages and a trail of letters behind their name. Learning with real applications to the job, through projects and experience, delivers students from the comfort of the higher education institution to a sustaining career. Hiring cycles often include rounds of on-sites, special projects and project samples, and tests to determine a job seeker’s readiness for the role. Colleges and universities, as evidenced by the changing demands of modern job recruitment standards and the modern job market, in order to meet their existential objective of producing job-secure graduates, must adapt their business model.
Education-technology company Modern Campus aims to bridge the connection between institutions of higher education to the quickly evolving terms of career readiness, by creating a landscape for which students can gain marketable job skills, explore interests, take advantage of campus resources, prepare for graduation, and implement a sustainable career trajectory, as direct outputs. Modern Campus’s recent acquisition, Presence, is just one of the many software in Modern Campus’s suite of the over half a dozen institutional solutions they’ve acquired in recent years. Presence highlights opportunities for students to engage with their university’s extracurricular offerings in order to bolster their education ROI, and thusly, their employment prospects. Reuben Pressman, founder of Presence and now Chief Product Officer at Modern Campus, shared details on the other services included in the Modern Campus selection of products aimed to increase learning effectiveness, components which, when used together, have compounding impacts on Modern Campus’s mission of solving campus problems beyond those of the classroom. Modern Campus shines in “tying these key and critical paths together in a way that continuously increases the efficiency of the institution, way more than any one of the software would do on their own.”
If you’re a college student in the US, due to the company’s rapid adoption of several well known higher education companies and subsequent growth into more than 2,000 institutions, chances are a Modern Campus product has come across your screen, even if you hadn’t recognized it. How Modern Campus is viewed in the eyes of students is due soon to change, as the company implements a more cohesive brand identity for its collection of education companies.
“I think for the same efficiencies that all of these verticals and products have come together for administrators under Modern Campus, I think there’s also a benefit for students to know and understand that they’re a Modern Campus student and that there’s an ecosystem behind their institution helping their success,” explained Pressman of the company’s shift to present as a unified resource to students.
A second rebrand in the company’s history, once OMNIUpdate, Modern Campus joined with student lifecycle management system Destiny One in 2019 in preparation for their expansion into their current company makeup as high performers in learner-to-earner development.
Of the companies Modern Campus acquired to secure this position include several digital solutions, in the form of well established software with proven success on campuses, those addressing course enrollment and registration, financial aid and payment processing, academic advising and career pathways, student involvement and service learning, campus maps and virtual tours, and more.
Presence, the company Reuben had started while an undergraduate at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus, which was then acquired by Modern Campus, engages students in their campus’s extracurricular opportunities. Unless provoked, Reuben found, student’s won’t join extracurriculars, viable and robust ways to build marketable skills and lasting and reciprocal relationships with peers and the surrounding community, engaging with them only at an average of five to ten percent. “We just wanted to get students involved,” said Reuben.
For an organization built on acquisitions and mergers, Modern Campus maintains a company culture much inline with its integrity to its central ethos of student success, he said. Despite having undergone its massive expansion in recent years,
“I don’t think of Modern Campus as this giant company,” Pressman said. “I don’t think of it as overly corporate, like you would a company this size that has more organically grown to this, because it’s been through a lot of add-ons.” To date, Modern Campus hosts seven smaller companies in their product offering that have “come together with similar missions underlying the particular reason we have built these particular software lines.”
While job security proves the most tangible and measurable definition of a worthwhile college experience, the holistic development of not only the student, but also the whole person themself delivers the most profound, if not intended, result of higher education.
“For most people, [college] can be viewed as a safety net,” Pressman explained of the pursuit for more than a degree. “You have the room and flexibility to try things and get involved in everything,” he said. “Use the network and resources of the institution and your professors. Just take advantage of the magnet and the storage of knowledge that an institution is.”
And, “I don’t think enough students recognize that until it’s too late to really get into it.”
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