Sounding distant, his feed occasionally breaking up as though a signal hadn't been dialed in, the Parthenon Group's Rob Lytle profiled a study with findings that were suddenly news.

The first notice came via email on Tuesday noting a webinar to be hosted by career education giant Corinthian Colleges. In less than two days, with help from modern technology and an efficient public relations campaign, Lytle's telephone presentation from Europe became a can't-miss event for the higher education realm, and possibly anyone willing to keep an open mind.

In college, I was once asked to figure the half-life of a nuclear bomb, which seemed like a waste of brain power in my opinion. The process involves taking derivatives, which requires division ... which to a word person like me involves boredom. Why would the mid-point for radioactivity lingering in the environment possibly be important if there would be no one around to write about it? The question seemed pointless and the answer, which pinpointed a time several hundred years in the future, held no meaning for me.

Judging by the naming conventions alone, it was intended to sound unassuming, if not boring, even for the usual Wednesday morning Congressional hearing. The meeting title was “the House Higher Education, Lifelong Learning, and Competitiveness Subcommittee”, just the unexceptional-sounding moniker that encourages something more like sleep and something less like government interaction that we’ve come to expect in Washington. Few, if any average citizens are going to weather traffic, parking, building security, or the exquisitely polished tile floors in government hallways for such a drab title on the placard next to the meeting doors.

Media has gotten social. I don’t think that was its intent, but Media has gotten social anyway.

(Since this blog is primarily read by career college executives, I’ll clarify my terminology from the outset: Media in this blog post does not refer to television, radio or print advertising placement. Rather, for our purposes here, we’ll be discussing media as collected communication mediums.)

Even during a golden era career colleges still manage to attract negative publicity. "For-profit schools," as the traditional media has dubbed them, are boasting their highest enrollment numbers ever and setting new revenue records. University of Phoenix, for example, set its first billion dollar quarter according to numbers released last month.

While traditional colleges, universities and community colleges are in the news for the challenges they are facing, you'd think some positive press might be directed toward the career college sector. More media attention has been focused on career training-oriented and online schools, but the majority of the attention has been negative.

In the virtual world, it’s hard to see where the boundary lines have been drawn between various industries and competitors fighting for the same customers within those realms. Those boundaries are even easier to miss when you’re a well-meaning presidential administration hoping to make yet another big impact on the American people.

This might be an amateurish way to demonstrate how career schools and traditional colleges are going opposite directions, but for a quick blog post, I don’t think we have to be all scientific: in the last month, our staff has received an abundance of notices about career college real estate purchases and campus expansions while getting nada from traditional colleges.

I am a journalist. I never thought I’d be so fortunate to say so. Since journalism was invented (this is an educated guess, based on the fact that reporters never change), the running joke in our field has been that the pay stinks, the hours are worse, but we wouldn’t give up our work for the world. If newspapers and magazines suddenly disappeared – a fate that once only seemed like fantasy – we’d find a way to keep telling stories even if it meant writing in our own private journals. And, with the field shrinking, that moment has arrived for many life-long journalists.

Letting go of emotion is easier than letting go of people.