I’m going to be vulnerable in this post. This is intentional; you haven’t stumbled across a mistakenly published diary entry. Our educational institutions serve humans with a myriad of feelings, challenges, and experiences. This is mine, and I hope it helps you understand others’.
A Personal Experience Validates the Value of Reddit
Late one night in August, I sat crying in the dark. Pulling up the Reddit app on my phone, I typed “stuck in an endless healthcare system loop” in the r/dementia subreddit. On the fourth day of struggling to help my mother get the care she needs—sleeping in a recliner in an assisted living facility—I needed someone else to listen and if not provide advice, validate my feelings. I felt the system failed us.
I didn’t get what I wanted. In fact, the only person who responded criticized me. Yet, my experience is detailed in that post, and archived for the world to see, along with hundreds of thousands of other posts and comments from caregivers and family members of people suffering with dementia. I truly hope someone with power to change the geriatric psychiatry system sees my post and the many others like it to better understand the excruciating experience they create for patients and families—and someday make it better.
This experience was top of mind when someone told me the following week that they believed Reddit and other social media sites are where people go to complain without seeking resolution, and therefore the data isn’t as valuable as a survey. While it’s the type of opinion I expect from someone without significant lived experience in the social media ecosystem, it’s wrong.
Reddit Is Immediate and Authentic
People go online to discuss healthcare, education, personal finance, career navigation, relationship advice, and innumerable other topics because they:
- Don’t know where to start when trying to solve a problem
- Feel alone and want to connect with others
- Perceive a barrier to get what they need
- Want peer or expert advice
- Feel the system has failed them
- Want to help others
Unless you catch someone at exactly the right moment in time and ask exactly the right question, they don’t share this in a survey. In fact, survey response rates are declining during the same time period that Reddit usage has grown to an all-time high.
Reddit’s Data Is Powerful for Market Research
The sample set from Reddit is vast, even if you’re not in it. 44 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 use Reddit—that’s nearly 15x as many as the 3% of people over 65 who do. Younger generations use Reddit and other online forums in ways nearly unimaginable to older generations.
Collecting organic, unprompted experiences from the always-on focus group of Reddit and other social media provides a larger, longitudinal, and ever-growing data set to center learner experiences and create user-centered strategies.
Campus Sonar is partnering with organizations to leverage this always-on focus group to understand:
- The lived experience of students advancing in a particular discipline, to inform philanthropy-backed interventions that increase persistence and success
- How individuals talk about DEI and higher education, to inform inclusive planning strategies amidst tense governance environments
- How student perspectives of education and creative careers inform a specialized college’s academic program development
- How students experience community college within a geographical region, to inform strategic advising programs
More institutions need to think this way.
We need to be more aware, nimble, and humble than ever as a concerted effort to devalue higher education plays out in our communities. Truly understanding the experience of learners and job seekers that they’re already sharing will help us remain relevant and serve the true needs of our stakeholders. On its own, your annual survey won’t.
