SEO is hot business right now, there is no doubt about that. The value of a top placing in SERPs is consistently growing and companies are paying tens of thousands of dollars to top SEO firms monthly to keep them there. Whether it is worth this amount of money is always debatable, but the valuation still remains.When speaking to people about SEO, I fervently say that it definitely has a high value. Search results are usually the first place that people head when looking for a specific product. Being there exactly when the customer is looking for your product is incredibly more effective than shooting blindly at a demographic. Yes, this demographic you’re shooting at may need your product, but not right now. The people looking for your product have a much higher conversion rate when you deliver to them at that exact moment they need you. That’s where search comes in. If you aren’t on the first page of search results then your chances of getting found through search results exponentially diminishes. This always inherently leads to people asking where I went to school for this “witch magic”.The truth is, there really isn’t any accredited university, to my knowledge, that offers anything beyond a basic SEO course. Most of the best SEOs out there are people who put a considerable amount of time in research and practice to achieve their “expert” status. There are a few downfalls of this. Beyond the standards set by search engines, there really aren’t any professional guidelines for any firm to go by. This is why recommendations, testimonials, and knowing the standards search engines hold your site to are crucial when picking an SEO firm. There are a lot of black hat techniques out there. Someone is always gaming Google’s algorithm and Google is always fixing it to beat that game. There is a lack of accountability beyond search engines for unethical practices in this field. Universities do some of their best work when they teach students ethical practices in their field.One of the benefits of not having university devoted majors for this field is it is a field that experts are truly defined by results and not how much theory they know. Some may like this and others may not, but it certainly encapsulates the spirit of being good at what you do and constantly trying to be better. In other fields on occasion you’ll find intellectual snobs who have a shiny degree, but continually rely on that to persevere in their career instead of continuing their education.Regardless of the pros and the cons, academia just simply can not keep up with the quickly changing fields of marketing. Academia is, in its essence, based in heavy research and theory. These practices haven’t been around long enough to establish the kind of research and theory that normal academia requires in a subject of study. Even if they were able to establish a curriculum, it would be outdated within the year.The basics do remain fairly similar among different releases and implementations of search engine algorithms, but different aspects change in weight. For example, for about 6 months Google was no longer using PageRank or PR in their indexing algorithm because it was getting gamed by content farms. This changed in December when their new Panda algorithm came out with a new section for PR. The metrics are of course undisclosed. Stuff being taught in even an intermediate class about PR, or the lack there of, would be void within 6 months.The university I graduated from, just recently became the first school in Utah to offer social media and even then the curriculum for this class will have several rocky years before they solidify a class that can teach adaptation that is needed. To highlight my point about universities not knowing how to properly apply SEO to their curriculum or their business, I couldn’t find a link to follow to the announcement of their class. It would be impossible to know about unless you’re in the alumni newsletter.However, with the right attitude, a curriculum could absolutely be well implemented for both studies of SEO and social media. If the curriculum is focused on the concepts, current practices, the necessity of staying current, and the idea that it will always change then they may have a shot at creating an actual program. The most important concept to teach will be that the methods they’re learning now very well may not be applicable in 2 years. For the average academic professor this will be difficult. Deans will be forced to find professionals in the field who have a great deal of experience to come into a classroom setting and develop curriculum. Change and adaptation centric, this could pave the road for a whole new breed of SEOs and a whole new hiring standard. This could be good or bad. Regardless, the world of academia will have to adapt before any of these degrees will be taken seriously by a hiring manager.