Earn as you learn with ImmersionUniversity.com, and graduate with no debt

ImmersionUniversity.com addresses three major issues in American society and in many other countries around the world:

PROBLEM 1: Student debt & unacceptable job opportunities. The overriding issue is that millions of students are graduating from America’s colleges and universities without appropriate or adequate skills to actually get what they consider to be an acceptable job. Complicating the situation, as of 2019 approximately 45 million students collectively owe $1.5 trillion in student loans that, by law, cannot be forgiven by a bankruptcy (https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/02/25/student-loan-debt-statistics-2019/#127eb465133f). Many of the university graduates are frustrated if not downright angry. Of course, there are lots of possible jobs, such as real estate, that they could fill with some additional training … and at additional expense. Some of the recent graduates resist such jobs because they have been encouraged by parents and/or educators to “change the world” and to find “meaning” in their employment. Because of this and the lack of patience and an appreciation for delayed gratification, author Simon Sinek says recent graduates of American universities tend to make terrible employees (https://youtu.be/7MR0ZqyhSAA). Immersion University wants to help university graduates to secure additional training at no cost and additional opportunities that provide them with a sense of purpose and meaning. Entrepreneurial Journalism, Modern Marketing, and Entrepreneurial Christian Discipleship are three areas of Immersion University’s current emphasis.

PROBLEM 2: The death of ‘meaningful’ job opportunities in communications. Before the internet, there were over 11,000 weekly and daily newspapers in America, but that number had shrunk to below 10,000 before 2004. Since 2004, with growth of online media and marketing, the situation has become much more dire. The industry has lost more than two-thirds of its advertising revenue, has failed to transition into viable digital media, has laid off nearly half of all journalists, and is still declining. More and more newspapers, which have financed most journalistic efforts in America for decades, are in jeopardy. According to Professor Penny Abernathy, who is tracking the demise of America’s newspapers, about 70 daily newspapers such as the Seattle P-I have already closed, along with over 2,000 non-daily newspapers (https://247wallst.com/media/2019/07/23/over-2000-american-newspapers-have-closed-in-past-15-years/). Other newspaperss are reducing staff while decreasing services. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, is reducing its days of publication, previously from 7 to 5 and now to 3, with plans eventually to eliminate all printed newspapers in favor of a fully digital product. Debt and union contracts make that kind of transition difficult if not impossible for most newspapers. Some newspapers like the Salt Lake Tribune are trying to survive as non-profit corporations, but the prestigious Philadelphia Inquirer has announced to employees that without a miraculous turnaround, it will soon give up on that experiment, as well, and close its doors, leaving the nation’s sixth-largest city without a daily newspaper. McClatchy, once the largest newspaper chain in America, has filed for bankruptcy. Relatively unnoticed has been the demise of the thousands of weekly newspapers, leaving about 200 counties in America without a single newspaper. The only major newspapers that claim to be making a profit are the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. There are no data to give hope that many of America’s other newspapers will ultimately survive. But why did this happen? The internet, of course, but why could the strong, profitable newspapers of America that existed in 2004 not fight off the new media that were just beginning to “steal” the newspapers’ advertising? They hired Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, the guru of disruptive innovation, to try to help them, but ultimately they failed to implement the key principles that can save an existing company from disruptive forces. These general principles and specific recommendations provided in 2006 included:

• Match whatever services the competitors provide, even if that means competing against yourself. It is better to lose some profit by advertisers moving from printed to online ad campaigns within your company than to lose that revenue entirely to the new competitors. The unwillingness to implement this principle has doomed many strong companies facing what initially were much weaker competitors. Christensen provides examples of Sony overcoming RCA in the electronics market and Toyota overcoming Ford and GM in the automobile industry. The challengers offered much inferior products initially, which caused the stronger companies to let them have customers at the cheaper, unprofitable end of the market. But the inferior products became better and better, and the challengers became strong enough to compete at every level of the market.
• Collaborate with other media if that’s required in order to offer comparable services. If America’s newspapers had started their own joint search engine and their own joint social medium, they initially enjoyed a major advantage over their new competitors since the newspapers would have been able to reach out to most Americans through their established publications and services more easily than their competitors could. The newspapers would have been able to link from every newspaper website to a jointly owned social medium and to a jointly owned search engine. But they did not because to do so would have hurt their profit margins.
• The established media needed to make their new products and services – in this case their websites – significantly BETTER than their established products, even if it took awhile to build traffic. In so doing, they needed to consider new services and products that they could not offer in their printed newspaper. They needed to use more video – for news, for talk shows, for entertainment, and for advertising. They could offer ebooks, webinars, multimedia blogs, social sites, and classified advertising. Once they saw the impact of Craig’s List, they should have made their online classified ads free, too, and salvaged whatever display advertising they could by maintaining that readership that eventually abandoned their classified advertising pages and moved to Craig’s List and similar sites. Newspapers had long been the preferred medium for all of these products, but a website makes those products much easier and less expensive to incorporate. However, not wanting to lose profits, newspapers would not compete directly with such new challengers, thus losing much more than if they had acceptable that inevitability immediately and taken on their competition while the newspapers were still in a monopolistic position in their respective regions.
• As the newspapers built their web presence, they needed to offer the same sorts of advertising that their online competitors offered: links to businesses’ own pages, pay-per-click ads, native ads (made to look like the organic content around them), video ads, social ads, search ads, etc., but they did not.

Dr. Kenneth Harvey, president of ImmersionUniversity.com, was a successful big city editor at age 23 and a successful newspaper and book publisher at age 25. After he sold his own newspapers and became a university professor in 2008, he began intensive studies of the rapidly changing media environment and how traditional media could yet survive the onslaught of news media challengers. He studied Dr. Christensen’s teachings and the changing nature of marketing that for decades had made traditional media profitable. He concluded that not only newspapers but also most magazines, cable networks, and local TV stations will also die if they do not implement these principles. He has also developed a strategy that will help traditional media become the aggressor – the new disruptive force. Only some of his proprietary strategies have been discussed in nearly 20 book chapters and journal articles over the past few years, or shared on this website, but they will be taught to Immersion University’s Mastery of Entrepreneurial Journalism and Mastery of Modern Marketing students so that they can either help traditional news media survive or prepare themselves to take the place of those failed media.

Broadcast, cable and online media largely depend on newspapers to ferret out most of the news. Without newspapers, who will do the reporting? Immersion University can help save traditional media or establish the foundation for new media to replace them.

PROBLEM 3: Effective communication in a global economy involving 7,000 different world languages. There are over 7,000 languages around the world, making it difficult to achieve communication, commerce, and cooperation in our global society. Billions of people are trying to learn English and other major languages to give themselves an advantage in the global economy. This is a challenge to educators. Just imagine teaching a language course with about students who native speak about a dozen different languages. Such a situation is not just difficult for you as a teacher but also for your students. Let’s consider the example of the small community of Guymon, Oklahoma, with fewer than 12,000 residents. Thirty-seven different languages are spoken there, so teaching English as a foreign language is a challenge there, just as it is across America and, increasingly, in Europe, as well. That is the challenge we face. Language teachers are given classes in which no one speaks the target language yet, and the teacher does not speak all the students’ native languages. So, have fun explaining American grammar to someone whose home country does not even use the same alphabet, let alone the same grammar principles. But English is not the only target language taught in America. About 10,000 students are learning Mandarin just in Chicago. There are 1.5 billion foreign learners of English around the world. Some 97% of all European Union grade-schoolers are learning English. And 300 million Chinese are actively studying English. In India, 10% of the population speaks some English, and that’s 125 million people, but only 2% are academically fluent while the national goal is to achieve 100%. The want to have 500 million of their people fluent in English by 2023. But, again, this is not just about English. Europeans study more than two foreign languages, on average. Indeed, 92% of them are actively studying a foreign language. So, you can imagine a German university with a classroom in which students natively speak several different languages now trying to learn Russian together. Thus is the challenge of a language teacher.

But wait! Maybe technology can help! There is Rosetta Stone, but it teaches only 31 of the world’s 7000 languages – all in one instructional language. It’s very expensive, and it offers no classroom curriculum. There is Pimsleur, which teaches 51 languages, again in one instructional language, and it is mostly audio. Now there is the free DuoLingo. It’s developing instruction for about 40 languages in English and a few in other languages, but it’s not a comprehensive curriculum. Indeed, all the top language programs combined teach fewer than 1% of the world languages.

There is also a related challenge. With the global economy comes increasing dependence on the Top 100 languages that will lead to the gradual disappearance of thousands of languages and related cultures. Can the languages and cultures be saved at the same time that world citizens become more multilingual? Immersion University is helping develop a revolutionary language acquisition system that will facilitate the learning of new languages and the preservation of old ones.

IMMERSION UNIVERSITY SOLUTIONS: 

Free work-study programs 

Immersion University has launched four work-study programs that will require a $1,000 refundable deposit but will ultimately cost students $0, nothing, nada. Students can study online from home, and during their first trimester of the 2-year program they will begin learning the skills and strategies that will allow them to make much more money than their degree will cost. If during that first trimester they change their mind and opt out of the program, the full $1000 will be refunded. Each program varies slightly, and you can read more details about each program elsewhere on this website.

Mastery of Entrepreneurial Journalism
Diploma in Modern Marketing
Mastery of Entrepreneurial Language Instruction
Seminary for Proactive Christian Ministry