I’m off to Brussels on Thursday to attend Euroblog 2008 – a summit that Edelman is co-hosting with Euprera for 100 or so leading PR, marketing and communications academics from across Europe. Our message is simple: we need academia to embrace the need to change.

We all know that every kid going to every college in the world belongs to Facebook or a comparable, locally-relevant social network. We all know that their mobile phone is attached to their hips (when it isn’t embedded in the palm of their hands). We all know they’re not reading papers or magazines. And so on.

What we don’t know is why the post-secondary education that they’re investing 3-4 years (and in most cases, a whole lot of money) in doesn’t challenge and teach them how to think about the implications of all this from a different – yes, commercial – perspective.

You’d think it’d be a GenYer’s version of Nirvana. Think about it: getting paid to blog and play on Facebook all day long. Where do I sign up? Unfortunately, most colleges and most academicians aren’t thinking this way. Facebook, to them, is where students post pics of themselves doing things that they'd rather not their parents see.

Our message to those attending Euroblog 2008 is simple: Good morning, Academia. Wake the heck up. Give your head a shake. Please.

We don’t want to hire kids who know how to do things that were best of class practices in 1995 (remember the VNR?); we want kids who are defining what best of class practices will be tomorrow. Oh yeah, and we’re willing to pay a lot more for them than we are the kids who still think a career in PR is about spin and stunts.

The question I pose to academia in general is a simple one: Do you want to be known for attracting, teaching and graduating kids that get it (and get more as a result), or for continuing to do all of the above with kids that don’t. The difference, to your students, and to everyone in the business of hiring them once they graduate, is mission critical.

Track the conversations in real time:

http://twitter.com/steverubel
http://twitter.com/dweinberger
http://twitter.com/marshallmanson
http://twitter.com/luebue
http://twitter.com/amandamooney (Friday only)
http://twitter.com/rickmurray (Friday and Saturday).

Note to readers: I made minor edits to this post eight hours after I first posted it to make it more readable. None were material.