Online education: You get what you pay for
by Brian Fogerty
In a June appearance on "The Daily Show," Governor Tim Pawlenty outlined his vision of higher education of the future: "Do you really think in 20 years somebody’s going to put on their backpack, drive a half-hour to the University of Minnesota from the suburbs, haul their keister across campus and sit and listen to some boring person drone on about Econ 101 or Spanish 101? … Can’t I just pull that down from my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it and from wherever I feel like, and instead of paying thousands of dollars can I pay $199 for i-College?"
Sounds like nirvana, appealing both to the technology obsession of the college crowd and to everyone’s desire for immediate results, cheaply obtained. But the lure of quick and easy education is no more realistic than the promise of quick weight loss without dieting or exercise. And, by the way, it won’t be available for $199.
Still, Pawlenty may have market forces on his side. Pressures to reduce operating costs have led to increased online offerings from institutions of all types, but especially from for-profit corporations that aggressively market quick degrees, often including sizable online components. And as reported this month in the journal Academe, the established nonprofit colleges — public and private — are being forced into competition with the fast-degree industry. Their response has been to adopt a corporate-style business model: On the one hand, cut costs by increasing class sizes and hiring more part-time faculty; on the other, grow and diversify in order to weather ups and downs in the supply of new students.
The problem is that the first option reduces quality, while the second incurs new marketing and administrative costs.
Meanwhile, the New York Times recently reported further escalation in the frenzied competition to get into the 100 top schools in the country. These institutions are becoming so selective that prospective students and their parents have taken to planning their high school careers around pleasing admissions officers. The top schools don’t need to advertise; they don’t need to grow, and they don’t need to compromise the quality of their programs.
In short, America’s top tier of universities is becoming more selective and more prestigious while the rest struggle to hang on.
The great strength of America’s higher-education system has been the diversity of institutions and programs. For much of the last century, the quality and prestige of America’s universities and colleges was distributed along a fairly smooth continuum, from the Harvards and Stanfords on down. The great bulk of America’s college graduates earned degrees from colleges somewhere around the upper-middle of this continuum — solid institutions with learned and dedicated faculty, offering rigorous curricula.
It was these schools — great state universities, smaller state colleges, and myriad religious and secular private colleges, large and small — that granted America’s middle class access to knowledge and ideas that had once been the reserve of the elite. And it was these schools that powered the movement of generations of blue-collar Americans into a large, educated and productive middle class.
The rush to market cheap and easy education threatens to gut that upper-middle range of institutions and create a two-tiered system of higher education. Many of America’s quality, nonelite colleges and universities will be pressured by competition to offer more and more prepackaged curricula, "managed" by de-skilled and part-time faculty, to appease consumer demand for cheaper and faster diplomas.
A few students will still go to the elite schools — enjoying real interaction with real professors — while the rest are consigned to the discount bin.