Ah, the Ivory Tower. Where you can forget about the dreaded real world and lose yourself in a kind of scholarship that doesn’t often touch the ground. From its height, the landscape of business is but a swath of rolling green. But from its turret, if you squint, you just might make out the advertising department across campus, where the next generation of art directors and copywriters prepare to enter the field as professionals. By necessity, portfolio schools and advertising departments are built closer to the ground. “One of the things that differentiates advertising education from other disciplines is that we’re creative sociologists,” says Mikio Osaki, chair of the advertising department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. “We have to adapt, understand, and work with sociological and ethnological constructs, so the curriculum requires constant revisions according to market trends.”

Even in steady waters, that’s a formidable task. But the advertising industry has undergone one of the most dramatic sea changes in decades, which can be summed up in an admittedly under-nuanced but more or less accurate statement: Advertising doesn’t work. Not like it used to, at any rate. The public’s media habits have shifted away from traditional venues, while the cult-like status of ad-zapping gear like TiVo underscores a growing resistance to advertising in general.

As agencies invent new ways to more e.ectively reach consumers beyond the 30- second commercial or print ad, educators have retooled their curricular models to better prepare students for an industry in flux.